Academic Integrity

You are expected to abide by the university academic integrity standards, which means (among other things) that you should never copy anyone else's homework nor let anyone copy your homework. This is particularly important for your final project, especially if you refer to the scientific literature in your project. You must also never plagiarize, which means (among other things) that any text that you copy from another document must be properly attributed (with quotation marks around the copied material, and citation to the document from which you have copied the material). Even paraphrasing can count as plagiarism. Here are some external websites that will help you learn what plagiarism is, and how to avoid it.

University of Pennsylvania, Plagiarism - What it is and how to avoid it
Academic Integrity at MIT
A wikipedia page about rogeting, a type of Plagiarism

All violations of academic integrity standards will be reported to the appropriate university offices. Serious violations will result in a failing grade for the course.

Please see the UIUC academic integrity page.

The academic integrity code is applied to the homework assignments, as follows.

You are encouraged to work with other students on the homework, but if you do this, this is what you should do. First, indicate on the homework who you worked with.
Second, do not look at the other homework solutions when you write your own solutions; this includes not looking at someone else's write-up of a critique of some literature.
Third, and more generally, you must write your homework solutions entirely on your own, using your own language. Please do not under any circumstances copy homework solutions from anyone else, or let anyone copy from you.

Similarly, the academic integrity code is applied to your final project by the expectation that you will not copy text from any paper, and you will give appropriate credit to all material that you use from prior publications, websites, etc.

It is particularly important to think about ethics in the context of your research. I have written up some scenarios challenging research integrity, but also see the interesting article in WIRED on The Young Billionaire Behind the War on Bad Science and the Retraction Watch website.