Grading Policy

Grade Components

Homeworks 20% (4x5%)
Project 40%
Midterm exam 20%
Final exam 20%

The course will be graded on a curve, with a mean of B (10% A, 15% A-, 15% B+, 20% B, 15% B-, 15% C+, 10% C). A+ is reserved for the best student in the class. The curve can shift up for an especially excellent class, as indicated but strong classroom interaction and outstanding project implementations. Graduate students and reentry students are not included in establishing the curve (to be fairer to undergraduates), but they will receive grades based on where they would fall on the curve. This is EECS Department policy.

Regrades

Any requests for grade changes or regrading must be made within one week of when the work was returned. To ask for a regrade, attach to your work a page that specifies:  

Without this page, your work will not be regraded. Even if you ask for only one problem to be regraded, your entire work will be regraded. Thus, you are not guaranteed that your score will necessary increase; your score may decrease, as well.

Exams

There will be one midterm and one final. If you have a conflict with any of the exams, let us know as soon as possible, and we will schedule a makeup. All exams will be closed book with a single 8.5" by 11" (both sides) crib sheet. They will cover material from lecture, sections, the readings, and the project. In particular, you are likely to do poorly on the exams and in the course if you do not do your share of the homeworks and projects.

Homework Assignments

T.B.A.

Programming Projects

T.B.A.

Late Policy

The policy is simple: there are no slip dates. If assignments are late, they are increasingly penalized as follows: within 24 hours, you lose 10%; within 48 hours, you lose 20%; within 72 hours, you lose 40%. More than three days late, you can no longer hand-in the assignment. Note that the penalty scheme applies to checkpoint deadlines as well as project deadlines.

Cheating

It's OK to ask someone about the concepts, algorithms, or approaches needed to do the project assignments. We encourage you to do so; both giving and taking advice will help you to learn. However, what you turn in must be your own, or for projects, your group's own work; copying other people's code, solution sets, or from any other sources is strictly prohibited. The project assignments must be the work of the students turning them in. We will punish transgressors severely.

The fine print:

We will use an automated system for detecting cheating: it performs a pairwise comparison of all homework assignments with all others, and reports any suspicious similarities. The TAs and/or instructor will check any such similarities. If two assignments are determined to be obviously very similar (i.e., we believe that they were done together or one was copied from the other), then the course grade for all the students involved in the incident will be reduced by one letter grade for the first offense, and to an F for the second offense. ("All" means both the copy-er and the copy-ee). The letter grade for that assignment will also be reduced to 0. The reduction in grade will be taken without discussion or warning; the first notice you will receive may be a letter indicating the penalty. In addition, for every instance, a letter to the Office of Student Conduct will be attached to your permanent record, and a copy will be placed in the CS division office. More serious cases of cheating, such as copying someone else’s work without their knowledge, cheating on exams, etc. will probably result in the person cheating receiving an F, and having a letter placed in their permanent file in the Office of Student Conduct and in the CS division office. Note that you are responsible for not leaving copies of your assignments lying around and for protecting your files. You must set up your files and directories so that they are protected from anyone other than members of your group reading them.