Policy

CS332: Guidelines

Lateness

This course is a capstone, which should prepare you for what life will be like in graduate school or industry. Therefore, unlike previous courses I have taught, this course will have one simple rule: NO LATENESS, NO EXCUSES. All work must be turned in by midnight of the due date. If it is even one second late, you will get a zero on the assignment. I don’t care why it is late, or what else may be going on in your life. I don’t care that it took you a few minutes to copy the assignment to the turnin folder; one second is as good as never. And I won’t even look at, let alone grade, anything turned in late.

Textbook Readings

You must do the readings for this course, ideally before the material is covered in class. For studying, and for understanding the problem sets, the class notes alone will not be sufficient. I strongly encourage you to come to office hours as much as you can, but if I discover that you are asking me about material that you failed to read, I will ask you to leave. Do the readings, come to class, and then come to office hours with questions.

Attendance and Help

Don’t come to class if you don’t want to. However, don’t expect me to help you with anything I cover in a class that you missed. Again, I don’t care why you missed the class, so don’t even bother me with that information. Make this class a priority above doctors’ appointments, social life, and any other thing you care about, because it will be very easy to fall behind and fail. Also, I will not speak to you about an assignment the day it is due. E-mail sent to me about assignments during that day will be deleted without further attention. If you don’t submit an assignment on time, I will not discuss it with you any further.

Neatness / Legibility

Your submitted written work (including exams) should be neat and legible. I will assign a zero to a solution that I have difficulty reading.

Code

All code in an assignment must compile. I will stop grading your assignment at the first point where your code fails to compile. This may include a situation where your code works perfectly, but you used a class or method name that did not exactly match the specification I gave you. I expect well-written, well-documented code. I may look at your code and give you a zero if it lacks indentation or is otherwise messy and difficult to follow. This goes for code written in other languages (MIPS, ML) as well as Java.

Using the Web to find answers

Honor violation.

Collaboration

I encourage you to work together, share ideas, and discuss possible solutions. However, you are individually responsible for writing up and submitting your answers, and for acknowledging with whom you worked. You should not be handing in identical files. In order to avoid this problem, my official policy is that you are not allowed to look at anyone else’s code. I will treat violation of this policy as an honor violation. Be prepared to explain to me anything you put in an assignment.

Submission procedure

All written work and programs should be copied to your directory in /home/turnin/cs332. For example, to submit MyProg.java, Alice Smith would type

% cp MyProg.java /home/turnin/cs332/smitha

at the Unix prompt.