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Guide to Ethical Behavior

Interaction

All experiments will be conducted with a lab partner. Naturally, interaction is both necessary and encouraged. In addition, feel free to discuss all aspects of your experiments and reports with other students, your Professor and Teaching Fellow as much as seems helpful. Discussion exposes gaps in understanding and flaws in reasoning that you might otherwise overlook.

The writing of the laboratory reports is however is an individual exercise. All parts of a laboratory report should be the work of the person who is to receive credit for it.

Do not
submit as your own work a report or part of a report that has been written by someone else.
submit a report or part of a report for which you have received credit at any other time or place.

 

Referencing Work

Do
give credit for ideas or expressions obtained from published sources by proper citation of the source. Technically, any use of the work of others without giving proper credit is an instance of plagiarism.
give credit for assistance. For example if someone suggests a form of statistical analysis of which you were unaware, it is necessary to give credit to this person in a footnote. Be brief, but mention the type, extent, and source of help received. (It is not necessary to mention assistance given by instructors in this course, since they know about their aid.)

 

Data

Do not change your data, no matter how nonsensical or incomplete your results may appear. Missing scores cannot be invented, aberrant values should not be left out, numbers cannot be rounded first one way and then another to make the data "look better". Objectivity in recording and reporting of data is the keystone of all scientific work. Many important advances in human knowledge have come from some investigator's stubborn refusal to close his/her eyes to "incorrect results". Results are always right. The interpretation of the results is however open to question.