Course Policy

Grading Policy

Late Assignments

Homeworks are due at 11:59PM US Eastern Time unless otherwise noted on the assignment.

You are permitted a budget of SIX late days per semester at no grade penalty. At most TWO late days may be used per assignment. If you have used up these six late days, your score will be reduced by 25% off of the total (not your score) per late day. Except in extraordinary circumstances, no late homework will be accepted beyond the late date.

Academic Integrity

All students are expected to be familiar with, and to comply with, the University Policy on Cheating and Plagiarism.

Any work submitted as a homework assignment or examination must be entirely your own and may not be derived from the work of others, whether a published or unpublished source, the worldwide web, another student, other textbooks, materials from another course (including prior semesters of this course), or any other person or program. You may not copy, examine, or alter anyone else's homework assignment or computer program, or use a computer program to transcribe or otherwise modify or copy anyone else's files.

To facilitate cooperative learning, it is permissible to discuss a homework assignment with other students, provided that the following whiteboard policy is respected. A discussion may take place at the whiteboard (or using scrap paper, etc.), but no one is allowed to take notes or record the discussion of what is written on the board, and you must allow four hours to lapse after any discussion before working on the assignment. The fact that you can recreate the solution from memory is taken as proof that you actually understood it.

We may sometimes run automatic code comparison programs (such as MOSS). These programs are very good at detecting similarity between code, even code that has been purposefully obfuscated. Such programs can compare a submitted assignment against all other submitted assignments, against all known previous solutions of a problem, etc. The signal-to-noise ratio of such comparisons is usually very distinctive, making it very clear what code is a student's original creative work and what code is merely transcribed from some other source.