Collaboration and other homework policies

Collaboration policy

You are welcome to work together with your classmates provided

1. you list all people and sources who aided you, or whom you aided and
2. you write-up the solutions independently, in your own language.

If you seek help from mathematicians/math students outside the course, you should be seeking general advice, not specific solutions, and must disclose this help. I am, of course, glad to provide help!

I do not intend for you to need to consult other sources, printed or online. If you do consult such, you should be looking for better/other expositions of the material, not solutions to specific problems. Math problems are often called "exercises"; note that you cannot get stronger by watching someone else exercise!

You MAY NOT ask AI systems such as Chat GPT to solve problems for you, and you may not use it to write your solutions; both of these are skills which you are meant to develop for yourself. I suppose that you may ask AI systems to explain concepts to you, but I would strongly discourage it; not only are AI systems not reliably accurate, but they are very good at aping the patterns of correct writers, so it is harder to determine whether they are right than with human sources.

You MAY NOT post homework problems to internet fora seeking solutions. Although I know of cases where such fora are valuable, and I participate in some, I feel that they have a major tendency to be too explicit in their help. You may post questions asking for clarifications and alternate perspectives on concepts and results we have covered. Here are more of my thoughts Links to an external site. on this issue.

Other policies

Homework is due on Wednesdays at 11:59 PM via Gradescope Links to an external site.. Note that this isn't a promise that I will be awake to answer questions at 11:58 PM! I'm just using the 11:59 PM time because it seems to have become standard.

Please indicate on Gradescope which pages correspond to which problems. If your submission is a single page (for example, because you use tablet software which outputs one very large page), please label that this page corresponds to all problems; this will make Gradescope work much better than if you omit the page assignment step.

I am very open to giving one time extensions on assignments because stuff came up. I think that our class is small enough that we don't need a formal process; just send me an e-mail if you need an extension. I am more concerned when a student gets systematically behind. You should be making the time to basically keep up with the assignments each week. If you can't, let's talk.