A variety of situations might cause you to miss an examlet or other work. When the problem is minor (e.g. short virus), it's usually straightforward to make up.

Major problems

The rules on this page apply to minor problems, such as a brief illness. If you are experiencing major problems, contact your instructor promptly to work out a suitable plan.

Examples of larger problems would be:

• Extended illness
• Serious injury
• Serious family problems

Depending on the circumstances, we may ask you to provide documentation (e.g. a doctor's note). You should typically be working with DRES, your advisor, and/or the Dean of Students office. In particular, the Dean of Students office can help you inform instructors when you can't reasonably do so yourself (e.g. you're in the hospital), and provide confirmation of problems where you might not wish to tell us all the details.

Missed checkpoints (PTC) and homework 

Pre-Tutorial Checkpoints and Homework can both be turned in late on PrairieLearn for a grade penalty: up to 2 days late you are capped at 80% credit, and after that you are capped at 50%. In special circumstances you may contact the instructors to request the penalty be removed, but in most situations we will not grant this: you have many days to work on the homework and checkpoint, so if you start it on the last day you are gambling that nothing bad will happen on that last day (e.g. "my computer broke at 10pm before it was due" is not a valid excuse).

Note that we will drop one homework grade and one checkpoint grade.

Missed tutorial

Tutorial attendance is not required this semester and tutorials are not recorded. 

In case you missed a tutorial, you are encouraged to solve the tutorial questions by yourself and visit office hours in case you have any questions.  

Missed examlets

Do not miss a CBTF reservation without cancelling it through PrairieTest first! As long as you cancel in advance and there are other timeslots open, you can simply pick a new time online. If no new times are available online, check back a few times to see if anyone else has cancelled at the last minute, and if the 3-day window ends before you find a slot then see next paragraph. If you forget to cancel, then it will be impossible to reserve a replacement timeslot (whether or not I've provided an extension) until you show up to the CBTF in person to get the reservation you missed removed from your account.

If you miss an examlet entirely (i.e. the whole 4 day period allocated to that examlet on CBTF), fill out this form to request a makeup, and we will follow up by email (this may take us a while but nothing bad will happen if it does, so please do not ask us for the status of your request unless it has been more than say 3 days). Makeups without a compelling reason and documentation (e.g. illness with a doctor's note) will come with a 15% reduction on that examlet's grade (i.e. multiply your score by 0.85). Penalties will not show up on PrairieLearn, but they will get factored in to your grade reports.

Acts of God

We occasionally have outages in campus networks, power, or CS departmental servers. Weather sometimes disrupts operations and occasionally even shuts campus. Zoom can go down. And so forth. We will extend deadlines or make other arrangements as appropriate when there are long or awkwardly timed outages. However, we expect that you will download critical documents (e.g. exam study materials) in a timely manner and that you realize that support is very limited at night.