A course I used to teach -- cs50 -- has seen some on-campus news (and editorial) coverage recently in the wake of a leak that 60 students in the course were reported to the Administrative Board on suspicions of academic dishonesty. I don't have any relationship with the course since 2016 and I don't have any particularly relevant inside information as a former Teaching Fellow. As a relatively junior member of the course staff, I wasn't asked to work on any cases of academic dishonesty; the revelations that I could give have already been shared with the press.

But there's one thing that's come up in the ensuing commentary that I would like to put a finer point on.

(1)

The Crimson's Editorial Board has called for the course to lay out a more explicit collaboration policy:

The course has an open-ended and amorphous honor policy, under the banner of being "reasonable." We understand that the collaborative nature of computer science requires students to work together, and may thus make promulgating strict rules about plagiarism more difficult...

Though the course staff have undoubtedly given this matter some thought, we urge them to more explicitly delineate what is allowed and what is unacceptable. That many of the accused students allege that they were unaware of having done anything wrong may suggest