Plagiarism means taking material written by another and offering it as one's own. The copied matter may range from a few lines of code to an entire assignment copied from another student or from a book or journal. Very few students are dishonest, trying to get credit without any mental effort. Once in a while one is playing the ancient game of putting-something-over-on-the-instructor, in part at least to see if it can be done. More often, students who plagiarize may be so scared or so befogged in what is a difficult or puzzling assignment that they resort to the only way they see of getting a desired grade. And sometimes students do not understand what rights they have in using the materials of others or in receiving help.

Occasionally students think that they are justified in plagiarizing. For instance, it is said that plagiarism, if it hurts anyone, only hurts the plagiarist, or it is purely a matter of individual judgement whether to copy or purchase an assignment. Or it is held that plagiarism is corrupt only within a system of evaluation involving grades, and this system is itself bad. Students who hold either of these views are seriously mistaken. The overall effect of widespread plagiarism is that standards for A and B assignments tend to become higher, due to the inordinate circulation of first class work. The effect is that students who struggle to develop their code in an assignment get a lower mark than they might otherwise receive were it not for the existence of fellow-students whose main abilities reside in paying money or copying texts. So long as some method of evaluating student performance in computer science courses exists (and there seems no prospects of its abolition) then plagiarism is a form of misrepresentation or fraud: the false claim that work presented for evaluation is one's own.

Students who are afraid or puzzled should go at once to their instructor and discuss the situation frankly, the reason for the difficulties, the present faults in their work, and ways to overcome them. Serious effort intelligently directed will generally bring improvement. And students who are moving in the right direction, even if moving slowly, are doing something important.

As a student programmer you should read and digest the material, get a clear understanding of the concepts involved and be able to talk about them before you start programming. Students are not programming when they are merely copying.

In either of these cases appropriate penalties will be applied. If students are uncertain about how to write an assignment for a computer science course, they should consult their instructor in the course.