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 10. 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.
Unless stated otherwise, all exams above will be closed book. The
midterm and the final exam will cover material from lectures, labs, readings,
and homeworks.
Grading
Your final grade will be determined by the following weights:
- 40%: labs
- 40%: final exam
- 5%-0%: quizzes
- 15%-20%: midterm exam
The exact weighting between the midterm and quizzes will depend on how
many quizzes we have. Don't worry about missing one or two quizzes;
we'll drop your lowest score or two (the vagueness is because we don't
yet know how many quizzes we're going to have).
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:
- Illness, which has to be documented by a doctor and approved by
the university.
- Death in the immediate family.
- Accommodation for students with disabilities as prescribed by the
university.
No extensions will be given for any other reason.
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.
Collaboration, source material, and cheating
You can discuss the labs in general terms only with your
classmates. Below are a few notes on this policy. If you have a project
partner, then you should read the "you" below as referring to your team,
since of course you should be discussing code with your project partner
(but no one else):
- You must do the work on your own. You should not discuss actual
code, in any form, with others. (For example, you should not discuss
code on the whiteboard.) You should not help others debug.
- You must write down the names of people with whom you discussed the
assignment and what you discussed with them. If student (or team) A gets
an idea from student (or team) B, both students (or teams) 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).
- There may be pop quizzes on the homework, just to make sure that
students are doing the homeworks.
Below is more detail. You are responsible for knowing these policies.
Collaboration
You must do the work on your own. What does "on your own" mean? Here
are some guidelines to keep you on the right side of the line:
- It is never okay to look at the
written
work of another person or show another person (other than the
instructor or TA) 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. Obviously,
copying other people's code or solution sets is
prohibited.
- Second, after discussing a problem with another student (or the
course staff!), go do something else (read a book, watch a
movie) for half an 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.
- 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. Consistent with normal
academic practice, you should cite
and give credit to any source that gave you code or an idea.
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.
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
The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate
academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For
more information, contact the Office of the Dean of Students at
512-471-6259, 512-471-6441 TTY.
Last updated: Mon Jan 10 02:19:17 -0600 2011
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