This amendment was prompted by the following Piazza question:
I wanted to ask if it would be possible to relax the rules for academic dishonesty concerning collaboration over chat or email. Given the current situation it is impossible for most of us to collaborate face-to-face and due to poor internet connection sometimes a vide-call is infeasible, so I wanted to ask if it would be ok to henceforth also collaborate through chat.The main purpose of that “no-email/chat” rule was to restrict collaborations to “brainstorming and verbally discussing possible solution approaches”, and to prevent them from “[going] as far as one person telling others how to solve the problem”. As long as the written (e.g., email, chat) discussions are similarly restricted, then I agree that that we can relax that rule.
So here is the amendment:
You are hereby welcome to use email / chat to discuss homework problems, provided that you delete the email/chat log after the discussion, or at least refrain from referring back to them.
Why do I insist on this? It is an attempt to ensure that you understand any discussions about the homework problems well enough that you can reproduce them on your own.