I finished the Responsive Web Design Certification on freecodecamp and was about to claim my certificaton. Then i read something about “plagiarism”. Now I am worried about my usage of Chrome DevTools to help me out in the projects when i got stuck.
For example: First I tried it all by myself until it was no longer possible. After that i created another file by going step by step through the source code of the project using chrome dev tools. In the end, the code is almost exactly the same as in the source code of Chrome DevTools, because that is my final solution, after I have worked through everything and finally understood it.
Is this approach a problem in terms of the certificate? Have I cheated now?
Thank you for your help. I will not request my certificate until I am sure that this procedure was correct!
As somebody who has gotten their certification without the use of outside extensions/looking up solutions online, I’m not 100% sure if it’s considered plagiarism. The course does grant achievement-based progress, but the code that you have written must be completely yours, be it code-formatting choices, or design-wise on the whole website.
fCC does state in its plagiarism statement: Before we issue our verified certification to a camper, he or she must accept our Academic Honesty Pledge, which reads: "I understand that plagiarism means copying someone else's work and presenting the work as if it were my own, without clearly attributing the original author.
If you used Chrome Dev Tools to see snippets of code and put it together for a possible solution, without clearly attributing the fCC mods/workers who put the time and effort into coding the example, then it is considered plagiarism, unless you put quotes in your code saying what is yours and what is not.