Academic Dishonesty
Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2018 11:58 pm
Hello everyone! So I'm currently looking into applying to law school in fall 2019, meaning I'd prepare and take the LSAT and all that during this upcoming academic year. I just graduated from college with a degree in computer science, and I was wondering if it was even worth applying given the following:
Every computer science class has its own policies regarding student collaboration, and the class I was taking freshman year had it such that you were allowed to collaborate on the written portion of the problem sets but not the coding portion. A specific question asked us to implement pseudocode discussed in class, and a friend and I made the mistake of discussing the lecture slides in detail (we were allowed to discuss lecture material, but not in detail) which resulted in our code being similar. Even though it was not my intention to violate the collaboration policy, I completely understand how that violated the policy and take full responsibility. Towards the end of the course, the professor called me and about 30 other people (yes, 30) to discuss alleged violations of the collaboration policy. Usually what ends up happening is that the professor reports you to the honor committee where your case is handled, with the mildest penalty being a reprimand (record entry in your file, and whatever else the professor decides to do). However, the professor did not report me (or my friend) to the committee and told us that our only penalty would be a 0 on that portion of the assignment (did not affect my final grade since that part was about 3% of the overall grade). He also warned us not to do it again or we would be absolutely reported to the committee.
My university prelaw handbook says that we have to report any incident at the level of Reprimand or above, but I'm not sure how that plays out in this case since I was not reported to the committee and so did not receive a penalty from the institution. There is no record of the incident on my file, and I'm not exactly sure whether or not I should disclose this or how it would affect my chances at top schools. This also makes me wonder whether it's worth it to go through the application process if I'm just going to be rejected because of this (I completely understand why though, not victimizing myself). However, I did learn from this incident and became super cautious with what I did and did not discuss to make sure this doesn't happen again. To be honest, it did make me a better student in CS because I made such an effort at making sure that I understood the concepts myself (since I could not rely on anyone else for explanations).
Here are my stats:
GPA: 3.9
LSAT: haven't taken it yet, took a diagnostic and got a 167 though.
Other: received an internationally competitive fellowship to study history at the University of Cambridge next year, heavily involved in refugee work all throughout college, don't know if this counts as a + but I learned 4 languages to the advanced level in the last 4 years.
Any input would be much appreciated, thank you!
Every computer science class has its own policies regarding student collaboration, and the class I was taking freshman year had it such that you were allowed to collaborate on the written portion of the problem sets but not the coding portion. A specific question asked us to implement pseudocode discussed in class, and a friend and I made the mistake of discussing the lecture slides in detail (we were allowed to discuss lecture material, but not in detail) which resulted in our code being similar. Even though it was not my intention to violate the collaboration policy, I completely understand how that violated the policy and take full responsibility. Towards the end of the course, the professor called me and about 30 other people (yes, 30) to discuss alleged violations of the collaboration policy. Usually what ends up happening is that the professor reports you to the honor committee where your case is handled, with the mildest penalty being a reprimand (record entry in your file, and whatever else the professor decides to do). However, the professor did not report me (or my friend) to the committee and told us that our only penalty would be a 0 on that portion of the assignment (did not affect my final grade since that part was about 3% of the overall grade). He also warned us not to do it again or we would be absolutely reported to the committee.
My university prelaw handbook says that we have to report any incident at the level of Reprimand or above, but I'm not sure how that plays out in this case since I was not reported to the committee and so did not receive a penalty from the institution. There is no record of the incident on my file, and I'm not exactly sure whether or not I should disclose this or how it would affect my chances at top schools. This also makes me wonder whether it's worth it to go through the application process if I'm just going to be rejected because of this (I completely understand why though, not victimizing myself). However, I did learn from this incident and became super cautious with what I did and did not discuss to make sure this doesn't happen again. To be honest, it did make me a better student in CS because I made such an effort at making sure that I understood the concepts myself (since I could not rely on anyone else for explanations).
Here are my stats:
GPA: 3.9
LSAT: haven't taken it yet, took a diagnostic and got a 167 though.
Other: received an internationally competitive fellowship to study history at the University of Cambridge next year, heavily involved in refugee work all throughout college, don't know if this counts as a + but I learned 4 languages to the advanced level in the last 4 years.
Any input would be much appreciated, thank you!