Academic Integrity
In line with MIT’s academic-integrity policies, below are our expectations regarding collaboration, AI tools, and public sharing.
For simplicity, this policy is written to be as identical as possible to (our prerequisite) 6.101’s academic-integrity policy.
Problem sets
Problem sets are intended to be primarily individual efforts. In order to get as much as possible from them, you are encouraged to discuss high-level approaches, style tips, Dafny features, etc., with staff and with other students, but the work you submit must be your own. When you submit an assignment under your name, you are certifying that the details are entirely your own work and that you played at least a substantial role in the conception stage.
In every place that this policy contemplates “code,” it means the entire contents of the files you turn in: implementation code, proof annotations, comments, etc.
| Activity | OK? | Details |
|---|
Help from this semester’s 6.S057 staff | YES | Encouraged; there are many ways to get help from staff members. You may make use of any help our staff give you (one-on-one, by email, or material on the course web site). |
Help from other people (including current and former students, tutors through MIT programs, etc.) | MAYBE | Encouraged for high-level discussion only. Forbidden for code-level communication. Discussions of high-level strategies can be helpful while working through an assignment, but these discussions must not involve step-by-step, mechanical instructions in either written or spoken form. Literal Dafny code is the most obvious example of a form of communication that is not allowed between students, but any step-by-step proof or implementation descriptions are disallowed. A consequence is that, within a group of people collaborating or helping each other, no one may be looking at any code they wrote for 6.S057. |
Consulting any code that you didn’t write yourself | NO | Forbidden, with two exceptions: (1) referencing (and using with attribution) code distributed by the 6.S057 staff during this semester is allowed, as is (2) referencing (and using with attribution) code snippets from the official Dafny documentation. This prohibition applies both to code written by other people and to code produced by advanced code-completion tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) or other AI-based tools (e.g., ChatGPT); this restriction applies to code that is shared with you directly and to code published on the web (e.g., code on Stack Overflow). |
Collaboration with chatbots and other AI tools | MAYBE | Discouraged for most purposes. Forbidden for code-level work. Pedagogically, we believe that the value of the problem sets lives in reading, understanding, and solving them yourself. AI writing lines of proof for you may be a good way to generate a proof, if a proof is the outcome you want. You are — that is, your learning is — the desired outcome of this class, so having an AI produce something in your stead is useless. This policy means you cannot use AI tools to write proofs or to improve proofs you have written. You cannot consult proofs provided to you by an AI tool, and since these tools are engineered to respond with detailed solutions even when a prompt does not request it, it is your responsibility to prevent such interactions. As with help from other people, your use of AI tools must not involve step-by-step, algorithmic instructions either in code or at a code level. And as with an over-eager pset partner who wants to show you their clever solution to the assignment, it is your responsibility to shut down such conversations and write your own solution. Note that many code editors are set up to use AI out-of-the-box; if your editor does this, it is your responsibility to disable those features. |
Sharing code that you have written | NO | Forbidden in any form, including through public code forges like GitLab or GitHub. |
Exams
You are not allowed to communicate with anyone but the in-person staff proctors about the exam during or even after you complete the exam, until the exam grades have been released (because some students will potentially be taking a makeup exam at a different time).