15-212: Principles of Programming Spring 2008

Have a great summer!

What's Current?

• Wednesday, May 14: Sample solution for the final exam

Class material

Course information

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Teaching Staff

Explanation: All email addresses listed above should be interpreted as follows:
            @A  ---  @andrew.cmu.edu
            @C  ---  @cs.cmu.edu
They are not clickable in order to (vainly try to) reduce spam.

Do Your Own Work

We encourage you to discuss methods and problems amongst yourselves. Learning from each other is potentially very beneficial. You should feel free to discuss at a high-level the basic ideas involved in functional programming, basic approaches to an assignment, nuances of SML, and so forth.

However, please do not write code together. Coding, specs, and written answers to assignments must all be "in your own words."

Read pages 6 and 7 in the course syllabus and read 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or examination must be entirely your own and may not be derived from the work of others, whether a published or unpublished source, the worldwide web, another student, other textbooks, materials from another course (including prior semesters of this course), or any other person or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.

Penalties:

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.

If we run MOSS (or any similar program) and detect similarity between your code and any other source beyond the similarity expected due to code we have given you, you will receive a penalty as follows:

1. For the first such incident, the penalty will be a net score of -50 (negative fifty points) for the assignment.
2. For the second such incident, the penalty will be a net score of -100 (negative one-hundred points) for the assignment.
3. For the third such incident, the penalty will be a failing grade in the course.

Advice:

Start early on assignments. One reason students copy from each other is that they do not take seriously the creative effort required to work through a problem set. Some students start the night before an assignment is due, discover that they are too tired to think properly or simply haven't mastered the skills to code properly in a new language, and in desperation resort to copying someone else's code. DO NOT PUT YOURSELF IN THAT POSITION.

For those of you who do start early, please be careful that no one copies your code. It is your responsibility to protect your programs, homework assignments, and examinations from illicit inspection or copying. You are expected to use the standard file system protection mechanisms to render your course materials unreadable to anyone other than yourself. Failure to do so may be regarded as evidence of improper collusion on homework assignments, subject to the penalties described above.

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Please note: all aspects of this set of webpages, including assignments, exams, schedules, handouts, reading, and code are subject to change. Thanks.

Michael Erdmann