Class Policies

Late Policy

Homework (lab) assignments are generally due on Wednesday at 3:00 PM. A penalty comes in for assignments submitted after the TAs have started grading.

Generally, an assignment submitted up to one week late can receive a 10% deduction; up to two weeks late can be a 20% deduction; any later can be a 30% deduction. These deductions are flat point amounts, not a percentage of credit earned, e.g. an assignment scoring 80/100 but submitted two weeks late would receive an adjusted score of 60.

Extensions may be given at the discretion of the head TA or sometimes Prof. Barr.

NOTE: Students whose work is far below the passing line will be STRONGLY encouraged to DROP the course before Drop Day. A sufficient amount of good work submitted along the way, before Drop Day, is an additional requirement for passing the course. That way, the TAs will not have to grade a great deal of late work near the end of the quarter.

If you are ill, or end up having external problems that interfere with completing SEVERAL assignments on time, please contact the Undergraduate Deans to receive more formal extensions.

For ONE assignment, please contact the TAs.

Grading Policy

There will be about 8-9 assignments including Assignment 0. Generally, each assignment is worth 100 points, with the point distribution specified within each assignment. Some assignments also have extra credit sections. In addition, you may gain even more extra credit for any additional work you submit if it is impressive enough.

Please make sure to tell us if there are any unusual behaviors or unfixed bugs with your submitted solution. This will help save a lot of TA grading time!

There will be no midterm or final; your grade at the end of the term will be based on your overall performance on the assignments.

Assignments are graded on the following criteria:

• Does your program behave as it is supposed to for the given test files?
• If your program does not behave correctly, then how close is it to behaving correctly?
• Is your code written in a readable format?
• Is your code at least broken up into separate functions for flexibility?
• Do you have clear and readable comments for any non-trivial parts of your code?

Try to be strategic in your debugging!! We recommend using debugging tools such as Valgrind and GDB in addition to good old-fashioned print statements!

You may gain back minor point deductions for style if you clean up your code within a week.

Collaboration and External Resources Policies

(Based loosely on CS124 and CS191 policies)

Each student is expected to submit work that is entirely that student's own work. This means you should not share code or solutions with each other.

Collaboration Policy

We encourage students to collaborate with each other to better understand the course material and debug solutions. However, keep in mind that the 50-foot rule applies! When you help another student with their code, make sure your own solution is at least ''50 feet'' away. In other words, put away your own code when helping others; help them with your brain, not your code! See this document from CS191 for a more complete description of the 50-foot rule.

To facilitate collaboration, a Piazza page is set up. Please ask questions!

External Resources Policy

Please do not look at solutions to past years' CS171 assignments. On the other hand, referring to external documents and question/answer forums is acceptable and even encouraged. However, all code you submit should still be entirely written by you for CS171 (you cannot re-use code written for other classes). If you refer to external documents and resources, focus on understanding what is going on, and then implement it in your own solution.

Do not copy code from external projects.