I’m on the last challenge for Responsive Web Design and I read the Academic Honesty Policy. What I’ve done for the challenges is do as much as I can with the HTML and CSS. And when I can’t duplicate the sample exactly, I take a look at the code for the sample. I’ve been learning by doing that. And I make little changes here and there like changing pixels to EMs or colors.
What would be considered plagiarism? How can I check my code vs FCC’s to make sure it’s not a copy? I understand that I need to learn all of this, but I’m weak on CSS properties such as position and transition. I also did a change in the flex-direction for the contact section of the Portfolio Page when I noticed FCC used the Wrap property. Since I knew that was better, I hanged my CSS to match that. Is that plagiarism?
Hey!
Looking at and learning from others people’s code in an honest attempt to make your own code better is not cheating and i don’t think it would or should be against freecodecamp’s policy unless someone is copy pasting significant portions of freecodecamp’s or someone else’s code.
With that being said, you should not “compare” your code with someone else’s code until you’re confident about the stuff that you wrote and are checking only to make sure you’re not wrong.
If you want to learn more about positioning and transitions or want to learn about web dev in depth then i would highly recommend you check out mdn. it’s a great resource because they have a whole web development path which takes you from a beginner to a “comfortable” level.
But I asking about freeCodeCamp’s policy, and in particular, the 2nd to last paragraph:
In the situations where we discover instances of unambiguous plagiarism, we will replace the person in question’s certification with a message that “Upon review, this account has been flagged for academic dishonesty.”
“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.”
Did you copy code and then make small tweaks? Or did you just look at the code and then write your own?
If you copied code, then I suggest re-doing those pieces of code. If you end up writing something extremely similar, that’s totally normal, but now that you’ve gone through the exercise of writing a working solution you should be able to do it again without looking at the example code.
I can’t remember - maybe a little bit of both but mostly looking at it when I got stuck. And only the CSS. I don’t think I made changes to the HTML unless I put the ID or CLASS on the wrong element, like a child instead of a parent. And it wasn’t a lot of CSS.
And some of the CSS I “copied” is generic. For example, two of the Web Design projects required a sticky header. I did that on my website with position: sticky, but that failed the test. When I looked at FCC CSS I saw it was position: fixed with top: 0. I’m pretty certain that everyone would use top: 0 for that which is what I mean by generic.
I’m going to go through all 5 projects and compare my code with FCC’s. Especially for the Landing Page which I did duplicate the page copy and icons because I never built a landing page before.
One more thing. Were we supposed to make EVERYTHING unique? I duplicated the Survey Form as well: the dropdown lists, radio buttons, etc. The page copy, not the code.
Yes, rather than trying to duplicate the sample projects your projects should be unique.
The instructions say to make yours “functionally similar” and to “give it your own personal style”.
