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, and they will factor into your participation grade.
• Midterm: There will be an in-class midterm on Thursday, March 22. Please mark your calendars now. If you have a conflict with the midterm, tell the instructor during the first week 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

• 35%: labs
• 15%: midterm exam
• 40%: final exam
• 10%: participation and preparedness (this applies to discussion days; see below for what we expect)

Class participation and preparedness

• We expect students to do the assigned reading before class.
• The discussion leader will call on students randomly. The discussion leader will ask a question, give students a few seconds to think about it, choose a card from a shuffled set, and then call on the student whose name is written on the card.
• Students can also volunteer to speak or ask questions during a given discussion, but there is absolutely no requirement to do so. (We call it "participation and preparedness" because we're not grading based on how often you speak, and in fact the random calling ensures roughly equitable quantity.)
• We are evaluating participation and preparedness based on quality, not quantity. By "quality", we mean that you are contributing to the discussion, not detracting from it. Ways of contributing to the discussion include answering the discussion leader's questions, highlighting genuine confusions, shedding light on a paper, giving new points of view (that you substantiate with evidence), etc. Not that you would do this, but we'll just state that gaming the class discussion with irrelevant comments or bogus questions won't work (such behavior is pretty obvious).
• You will be evaluated based in part on attendance (on discussion days).
• On the other hand, if you have not prepared, please don't show up. If you do show up unprepared, and that fact comes out (as it often does -- remember, we are calling on students), you will not only be counted as not present but you will also do further harm to your grade. Why the harsh policy? Having disengaged people in the room detracts from the discussion, which is unfair to the rest of the class.
• The quizzes described above, if any, will factor into the participation and preparedness part of the grade.

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

The course permits two kinds of limited slacking:

1. You can skip at most ONE discussion day during the semester, with no ill effects on the participation and preparedness part of your grade. You do not have to email us to let us know when you are exercising this option. Missed classes beyond one (or showing up without having done the assigned reading) will adversely affect the participation and preparedness part of your grade. However, the effect will be limited to that portion of your grade only (though there may be side-effects; for instance, the missed material might appear on an exam).
2. Each project team gets a total of 72 late hours to use throughout the semester. Late hours cannot be used on labs 1 and 2, which will be done individually. Beyond this requirement, your team decides how to divide the 72 hours among the various lab assignments. After your late hours are exhausted, each additional day late will incur a full letter grade penalty. The granularity of these hours is just that: hours. Labs that are late by, say, 10 minutes count as having exhausted a late hour.

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 of your final grade. (That is, failing to turn in any one lab assignment will cause 35% 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 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.

Collaboration

1. 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.
2. 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.
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. 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

Last updated: Wed Feb 01 16:24:57 -0600 2012 [validate xhtml]