Integrity is a crucial part of your character and is essential for a successful career. We expect you to demonstrate integrity in this class and elsewhere.

The Paul G Allen School has an Academic Misconduct policy, and the University of Washington an Academic Misconduct and Community Standards and Student Conduct Page policy. Please acquaint yourself with those pages, and in particular how academic misconduct will be reported to the University. Knowingly violating any of these principles of academic conduct, privacy or copyright may result in University disciplinary action under the Student Code of Conduct.

Your academic conduct in this course is evaluated in at least the four areas described in detail below.

• Honesty and Respect in Communications
• Collaboration Policies
• Chat GPT
• Privacy and Fair Use
• Appropriateness

Honesty and Respect in Communications

Individuals are expected to be honest and forthcoming in communications with TAs and the instructor.

In addition, individuals are expected to show respect for the intellectual contributions of others through citation. The essence of academic life revolves around respect not only for the ideas of others, but also their rights to those ideas. It is therefore essential that we take the utmost care that the ideas (and the expressions of those ideas) of others always be handled appropriately, and, where necessary, cited. This is an issue of Citational Justice, and a core value of this course. It is also in line with the disability justice values of the course.

When ideas or materials of others are used (particularly in your creative projects), they must be cited. The citation format is not that important - as long as the source material can be located and the citation verified, it’s OK. In any situation, if you have a question, please feel free to ask. Here are some examples of how you might use (and cite) different types of content:

• Media you have created or generated yourself (i.e. pictures you have created or taken yourself, text you have written yourself) do generally not require citation. However if you have published them (on a blog, in an article etc), they may belong to the publisher and require citation.
• Images that are in the public domain (something from Wikipedia), or with a creative commons license that allows for reuse without explicit permission of the owner, require citation based on their license. Instructions on how to search for images that are fair use are here. Creative Commons Kiwi is a really informative video on Creative Commons licensing; and here are best practices for citing Creative Commons works.
• If you are writing some text (a paper, analysis, etc), you can use quotes as long as you give attribution to the sources of the quote. You can not write an entire document out of the quotes of others, or include copied text with no citations. The citation format is not that important - as long as the source material can be located and the citation verified (a url in a comment is generally fine), it’s OK.
• If you are writing code, clearly indicate (e.g. with comments) which portions of your code are completely original and which are used or modified from external sources, if any code is used that builds off of/is inspired by external sources (e.g. adaption of an example exercise, online tutorial you find). Note that solely changing identifier names or rearranging other source material is not considered your original work - see the examples of appropriate use below for details.

Some examples of appropriate use:

• A student finds a blog post explaining why and how to address WCAG guidelines. They rewrite much of it in their own words, but for a few sections that are particularly clear, they copy the information, put it in quotations, and name the source and provide a link to it right next to the quote.
• A student closely follows a tutorial to understand a new concept in Android Development (e.g. animations). The student cites the tutorial they used in the file header then substantially modifies the tutorial code to include what is specified for the creative portion of the assignment, documenting which portions of the code are their own so TAs know which portions to grade (and to determine whether the material cited as being learned from the tutorial is sufficiently adapted to be considered the student’s own work).
• A student is having difficulty generating audio from text for an accessibility feature of an app they are building. They look for a solution and find an app very similar to the one they intend to build. They fork it, and modify it for their final project, and documents this with a comment that includes where it was found. When grading the app, the instructional staff may weight features that were provided by the original source less than features that the student added themselves.

Students with questions about any specific situation should ask the instructor for clarification.

Collaboration Policies

In this class, are encouraged to discuss class material, including assignments, lecture material and readings with your classmates. Even better if this takes place on Ed where other students can benefit and we can guide you as to what is supportive and what crosses the line to too much sharing.

Some assignments are individual. Even when as assignment is individual, you may discuss homework assignments with other students (i.e. provide advice, brainstorm) as long your writing and/or implementation is entirely your own, and you document what you do. You may also look at other sources online to learn how to achieve new things, but we expect you to document this, and it may impact the credit you get for your work. You should never copy (plagiarize) from another person in this school (past or present) or from material that you find online directly and submit it as your own work.

To facilitate this, and to be very clear

• You may not use code or writing directly from any external sources (including copying lecture/lab material directly into an assignment) without appropriately crediting the source as described above in Honesty and Respect in Communications
• You must credit a classmate when their advice had a significant intellectual impact on what you did

Chat GPT

It is hard to find someone who has not heard about ChatGPT and related tools, and these tools are undeniably useful for generating ideas, providing suggestions, and more. However, we recommend that you use generative AI in moderation. Generative AI can help you to summarize text, improve grammar, write code, collect relevant resources to read, and generate ideas. It can also lead you to misinformation and is generally less powerful than the hype might lead you to believe, as eloquently described by UW faculty member Emily Bender in her Seattle Times OpEd. AI can be biased (including disability bias), flat out wrong, is built on writing by other people that it might plagiarize and probably doesn’t know much about this course or how to do well in it. If you are interested in learning more about generative AI’s limitations, here is a helpful repository.

In addition to the abovementioned concerns, if you start to rely solely on generative AI, you may limit your own development in critical thinking and writing, and if the results are that your writing is narrower and shallower in scope this may impact your grade.

In this class, we will ask you to follow these ethical guidelines when using generative AI such as ChatGPT. NOTE this policy most likely will evolve over the quarter, since this is such a new situation. I will announce modifications and expect you to abide by them.

1. You may use generative AI for assignments and exams unless I specify that it may not be used. If guidelines are provided you should additionally follow those guidelines.
2. Unlike blog posts and research articles, you do not need to attribute artifacts/quote text or label code produced by generative AI when you use it. However, you must do the following or you will face academic consequences including but not limited to failing an assignment or an exam.
   • You must cite the AI program you used in the artifact you hand in
   • If it copies text from other sources and you don’t put that text in quotes and provide proper attribution, you will be held accountable for that.
   • If it provides ideas closely based on other sources and you don’t cite those sources, you will be held accountable for that.
   • You must still comply with the academic integrity policies of the institution. This includes refraining from using generative AI to plagiarize or cheat. For example, you may not use AI to create fake data (accessibility reviews, interview data, user data, etc.) and pass that off as based on real people.
3. You will be held to the same standards when you use generative AI as for any assignment, regardless of whether you or the AI created something, including:
   • If you turn in artifacts that are not accessible, you will be graded accordingly
   • If you turn in artifacts that contain false or incomplete claims, you will be graded accordingly
   • If you turn in code that does not compile or is incomplete, you will be graded accordingly
   • You will be graded based on the critical thinking and writing skills, accuracy, and accessibility of the things that you produce.

Breaking the rules above, or generally using AI tools in ways that are nefarious or unacknowledged, is academic misconduct and may be subject to the misconduct policies detailed here.

Also please note that using such tools has consequences unrelated to your schoolwork. For example, generative AI models use an enormous amount of water and energy: ``ChatGPT needs to “drink” a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, depending on when and where ChatGPT is deployed.’’ In addition, you are probably donating your data to the companies that deployed them. Please take reasonable steps to avoid making our assignments easier in future iterations of the course (e.g., once the tool provides a correct answer, don’t give it positive feedback).

To summarize, you may use generative AI unless otherwise specified. However, you must use it ethically, check its work, and ensure that you do not cheat or plagiarize when using it. Further, you will most likely not receive a high grade if you rely on it to the exclusion of your own critical thinking, writing and accessibility skills.

Privacy and Fair Use

To support an academic environment of rigorous discussion and open expression of personal thoughts and feelings, we, as members of the academic community, must be committed to the inviolate right of privacy of our student and instructor colleagues. As a result, we must forego sharing personally identifiable information about any member of our community including information about the ideas they express, their families, lifestyles and their political and social affiliations. If you have any questions regarding whether a disclosure you wish to make regarding anyone in this course or in the university community violates that person’s privacy interests, please feel free to ask the instructor for guidance.

In addition, out of respect for each other, and in accordance with federal guidelines such as FERPA, we will not share each other’s discussion posts or assignments without permission. As instructors, we will ask you before sharing an assignment with a community sponser, for example. Similarly, you should not share your fellow classmates’ work without permission, and credit. We also ask that you not share the ideas ideas presented in this class without credit. While the class website is public, we ask that you do not take things out of context.

In addition, any tangible medium such as digital and physical documents are protected by copyright law as embodied in title 17 of the United States Code. These expressions include the work product of both: (1) your student colleagues (e.g., any assignments published here in the course environment or statements committed to text in a discussion forum); and, (2) your instructor (e.g., the syllabus, assignments, reading lists, and lectures).

Within the constraints of fair use, you may copy these copyrighted expressions for your personal intellectual use in support of your education here in the UW. Such fair use by you does not include further distribution by any means of copying, performance or presentation beyond the circle of your close acquaintances, student colleagues in this class and your family. If you have any questions regarding whether a use to which you wish to put one of these expressions violates the creator’s copyright interests, please feel free to ask the instructor for guidance.

Appropriateness

Recall that one of our course policies is to engender an inclusive environment. As such it is important that you are thoughtful about what you say or write. Please make sure that images and text you are using are school appropriate and follow the guidelines of expected behavior. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask the TA or your instructor. Inappropriate work submitted may be ineligible for credit on that assignment.