【CMT120】Fundamentals of Programming

COMSC: Guidance on Referencing in Code.

Cardiff University has in place an unfair practice procedure that covers what will happen if a student acts

in a way “that might obtain for him/herself or for another, an unpermitted advantage or a higher mark

or grade than his/her abilities would otherwise secure”. The guidance in this document, designed to

help students avoid this, should be read in conjunction with:

 The information on Unfair Practice available on the Student Intranet:

https://intranet.cardiff.ac.uk/students/study/exams-and-assessment/sitting-your

exams/cheating-and-unfair-practice

 The Cardiff University regulations on unfair practices:

https://intranet.cardiff.ac.uk/intranet/students/documents/exams-and-assessment/1.11-

Unfair-Practice-Procedure.pdf

Why would you copy code in an assignment?

A lot of large-scale software development involves the reuse of smaller chunks of code, which is then

adapted to work in conjunction with other small pieces of code. Sometimes this reused code is within a

library module and sometimes that code is found on a tutorial web site like MDN or a Q&A site like Stack

Overflow.

Depending on the assignment you are set, you may feel that you should reuse code from some of these

sites in order to: hasten the development of your application, experiment with unused technology, or to

fix a problem that you are struggling with.

Whether or not you should reuse code will depend on the assignment set. You will not gain any marks

for writing the copied code (because you didn’t) but you will gain marks for integrating it into your

solution therefore you must consider the aim and the marking criteria of the assignment.

As a simple example to illustrate the point:

Your Java assignment is to write a java programme to perform a bubble sort on an array of

numbers.

You copy (and reference) a code snippet from Stack Overflow that performs a bubble sort on an

array of numbers carefully putting the algorithm into the method signature required.

This has missed the point of the exercise, you gain no marks for the production of the algorithm

and the integration is very minimal so will probably get no marks for that.

However, if:

Your Commercial Applications assignment is to create a website that will collect student grade

data, store it, and be able to export that formatted data in a JSON file sorted by grade.

You copy (and reference) a code snippet from Stack Overflow that performs a bubble sort on an

array of numbers carefully putting the algorithm into a method signature, then integrate this

method into your project.