Collaboration Policy
Please Log In for full access to the web site.
Note that this link will take you to an external site (https://shimmer.mit.edu) to authenticate, and then you will be redirected back to this page.
NOTE: We have borrowed the collaboration policy statement from 6.036, which follows a similar structure.
We encourage students to discuss assignments in this subject with other students and with the teaching staff to better understand the concepts. However, it is good to keep in mind the limits that ensure everybody has a good individual learning experience.
This page is designed to give you a sense of what kind of interactions are conducive to learning, and which are not, when working on 6.302/6.320 coursework. The policies below are in place in order to help with our primary goal for the exercises, that you deepen your understanding of the course materials by working through them.
Regardless of the assignment, you should never just use results from other students, nor from the staff (from this year or from previous years), in preparing your solutions to online written or on-line prelab or homework problems. You should not take credit for computer code or graphics that were generated by other students unless you helped develop those materials.
In addition, students should never share their solutions (or staff solutions) with other students, including through public code repositories such as Github.
You are expected to give your best effort and work as far as you can on your own for every problem before asking for help or using other resources.
If you are still stuck on a problem, you may talk about the question with a staff member or a fellow student, but all exchanges of information should be general in nature. See the sample interactions below for examples of what is considered okay, and what is inappropriate.
After having received help on an exercise and reaching a solution, you should wait a day or so, and then try to work through the exercise again from scratch on your own.
You work with a partner during labs. You and your partner can equally share all results, code, and graphs that you develop as a team.
You should work through the entirety of the lab as a team to produce one result, and each partner should be prepared to discuss their results with a staff member during a lab checkoff. A "divide-and-conquer" approach, where each partner only works through a portion of the lab, is unacceptable.
Each partner should enter exercise and homework answers on their own account,but in lab, you work as a team. Each partner should have a copy of any results, code, and graphs that you developed as a team. If you can, you may share a single hardware kit, but please remember that you will each need working hardware to demonstrate in the final one-on-one interviews.
We want to teach feedback control, not police the occasional lapse in judgement. And since we have individual interviews at the end of each lab, we little reason examine issues of aggregious copying. So we offer the following senarios, borrowed from 6.036, because we believe that you will learn more from the on-line problems if you avoid some of the problematic sharing issues described below.
Scenario: Alyssa and Ben sit down to work on a homework set together...
After trying a question on his own, Ben asks Alyssa for help. Alyssa asks Ben a leading question that helps him discover a reasonable next step to take when solving the problem.
OKAY!
After trying a question on his own, Ben asks Alyssa for help. Alyssa talks Ben through some key ideas using a separate but related example problem. Ben then tries to apply these ideas to the problem he was stuck on.
OKAY!
Alyssa notices that Ben is struggling with a problem, so she gives him her answer and explains to him how she arrived at it.
NOT OKAY
After trying a question on his own, Ben asks Alyssa for help, and she explains that it is easy: you just take equation 3.12 from this book, insert equations 2.5 and 3.2, integrate, and you should get the right answer!
NOT OKAY
After trying a question on his own, Ben asks Alyssa for help. Alyssa describes in detail the steps she took to solve the problem.
NOT OKAY
Bob has access to a "bible" of 6.302 answers from previous terms, which he consults when he gets stuck.
NOT OKAY
After having made reasonable efforts individually, Alyssa and Ben talk in general terms about different approaches to doing a problem. They draw diagrams on a whiteboard. When Alyssa discovers a useful analysis trick, she mentions it to Ben. When Ben makes an observation about op-amps, he shares it with Alyssa.
OKAY!
In a tricky part of the homework, Alyssa and Ben look at each other's screens and compare them so that they can get their answers right.
NOT OKAY
After they have both solved a problem, Alyssa and Ben talk in detail about the approaches they took, and the relative merits/drawbacks of each.
OKAY!
Alyssa and Ben sit down to work on a homework set together. They decide to divide up the problems: Alyssa will work through the even-numbered problems, and Ben the odd-numbered ones. When they are done, they will discuss their work with each-other so that each has a complete solution.
NOT OKAY
Scenario: Louis had a very busy week, and he has made almost no progress on the week's problem set. Ben wants to help.
Ben works near Louis and answers his questions when they come up, after Louis has made a reasonable effort.
OKAY!
Ben opens his laptop and consults his own answers when helping Louis.
NOT OKAY
Ben has been helping Louis for a while, but he needs to get back to his own work. He gives his answers to Louis, after Louis promises only to look at it when he really has to.
NOT OKAY