In many of your lab. reports, and some of your homeworks and examinations, you will be allowed to work with another student in order to develop your assigned work. This is in the spirit of scientific collaboration. However, you are not allowed to hand in the same document as your partner, neither are parts of a docment allowed to be the same between two students. Only jointely collected data can be the same. If you work jointly, then you should write up the work separately. Further, when you write documents you are expected to use many different textbooks and journals, but you are not allowed to plagarise words or figures from such sources. Use your own words, and draw simplified versions of the figures for your reports. You are not allowed to change numbers in your laboratory notebook at any time. Any alterations will be assumed to be "fudged" data, and appropriate penalties will be imposed.
Plagarism and illigitimate alterations to scientific data are classed as serious academic misconduct. An important part of the University's guidelines on academic misconduct is reproduced here as a reminder: