CS 372H: Policies and Grading

Exams

• Ad-hoc quizzes: There may be some short quizzes, to encourage students to keep up with the lectures, labs, and reading. These will be announced one lecture prior to the quiz, along with some guidance on their topic. They will be designed to be easy if you've been keeping up.
• Midterm: There will be an in-class midterm on Thursday, March 11. Please mark your calendars now. If you have a conflict with the midterm, tell the instructor during the first two weeks of class, and we will schedule a makeup for a time before the exam is given to the rest of the class.
• Final: There will be a final exam. It will be in the time and place scheduled by the university. No rescheduling will be permitted except as required by university policy. Final exam schedules are usually posted during the last few weeks of the semester.

Grading

• 40%: labs
• 40%: final exam
• 5%-0%: quizzes
• 15%-20%: midterm exam

Turn-in policy, slack days, lateness, etc.

Each student gets a total of 72 late hours to use throughout the semester. It is up to you how to divide these hours among the various lab assignments. After your late hours are exhausted, each additional day late will incur a full letter grade penalty.

Exemptions of the lateness rules will be allowed in three cases:

1. Illness, which has to be documented by a doctor and approved by the university.
2. Death in the immediate family.
3. Accommodation for students with disabilities as prescribed by the university.

You are required to turn in every lab assignment, late or otherwise. If your lateness results in your getting 0 points on the assignment, you will get a D for that assignment. If, by the end of the semester, you have not turned in all of the assignments, then you will receive an F on the entire lab portion (i.e., 40%) of your final grade. (That is, failing to turn in any one lab assignment will cause 40% of your grade to be an F.)

Code of conduct

Please read the UTCS Code of Conduct. It outlines what is expected of you and what you can expect from classes in the CS department.

Cooperation, collaboration, source material, and cheating

Cooperation and collaboration

We encourage you to discuss the problem sets and programming assignments with your colleagues. We welcome discussions of possible interpretations of questions, approaches to solutions, and points of confusion.

However, you must do the work on your own. What does "on your own" mean? You should not discuss actual code, in any form. (For example, you should not discuss code on the whiteboard.) You should not help each other debug. Here are three further guidelines to keep you on the right side of the line:

1. Other than the TA and instructor, it is never okay to look at the written work of another person or show another person your written work until after all grading on an assignment is completed. This includes looking at paper print-outs, sketching solutions on a white board or napkin, or looking at a screen to help debugging. It should go without saying that copying other people's code or solution sets is strictly prohibited.
2. Second, after discussing a problem with another student (or the TA!), go watch TV for a half hour before going back to work on the assignment. If you can't remember what the person said after a half hour, you didn't really understand it.
3. Third, everyone in the class is expected to take appropriate measures for protecting their work. For example, you should protect your files and printouts from unauthorized access.

Source material

You are welcome to use existing public libraries in your programming assignments (such as public classes for queues, trees, etc.) You may also look at operating systems code for public domain software such as Linux. Such activities qualify under approved collaboration practices, and you are welcome to take advantage of them.

What you may not do is look at any course material relating to any project or lab similar to this course's assignments. For example, you may not look at the work done by a student in past years' courses, and you may not look at similar course projects at other universities. If you are unsure about whether a particular source of external information is permitted, contact the instructor before looking at it.

Acknowledging collaborations

• You must write down the names of people with whom you discussed the assignment and what you discussed with them. If student A gets an idea from student B, both students must write down that fact and also what the idea was.
• You must further acknowledge any other contributions (for example, ideas from Web sites or other sources).
• You should remember that the ad-hoc quizzes may cover labs.

Cheating

Note that the above guidelines are necessarily generalizations and cannot account for all circumstances. Intellectual dishonesty can end your career, and it is your responsibility to stay on the right side of the line. If you are not sure about something, ask.

Students who violate University rules on scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and/or dismissal from the University. Because such dishonesty harms the individual, all students, and the integrity of the University, policies on scholastic dishonesty will be strictly enforced.

Accommodations for students with disabilities

Last updated: Mon Mar 01 15:52:33 -0600 2010 [validate xhtml]