About this Policy |
This policy webpage is for sections CU and CG, taught by Prof. Talia Ringer.
It is based highly on Prof. Elsa Gunter's policy webpage for the other sections, but it is
not identical. Please be sure to check the policy webpage for your particular section,
as it is the one you will be held to!
|
Objectives |
Students taking this course can expect to be able to:
-
Program in a functional programming language
-
Understand the evaluation of programs in a functional programming laguage
-
Write a type checker / type inferencer given a formal
type system
-
Write a lexer and a parser using recursive-descent
parsing or a parser-generator
-
Write a syntax-directed translator from abstract syntax
to intermediate representations
-
Recognize and use major methods of specification of
dynamic semantics
-
Write an interpreter based on a formal operational
semantics of the language
|
Class and Exam Attendance |
-
Attendance in CS 421 is expected, and the student
accepts that work done in the class period or a
proctored examination may only be made up because of
a reason outlined in the
student code
in Section 1-501 d-f, or because of illness
immediately affecting the day of absence, with
notification being given to the instructor before
the class or examination, or as soon as possible afterwards if the
illness is serious enough to have reasonably
prevented earlier contact.
-
In-class quizzes may be rescheduled for two weeks
(14 days)
after the original date of the quiz, if the absence
has been excused.
All other work missed as a result of an excused absence
must be made up with three (3) business days of the
missed class for in-class events unless a letter of
absence from the Student Assistance Center is
provided and indicates a reason for absence of a
greater period of time. In the case of a prolonged
absence, as documented in an absence letter, work
must be made up within three (3) business days of
the end of documented need for absence.
-
When a quiz or exam is held in the Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF), students
are required to register for the event before the
testing period opens. Failure to do so will not
automatically grant the right to a make-up.
-
Reasons that do not count as a conflict, but as the
student's personal choice not requiring
consideration include:
-
Travel, except as part of a University sponsored
event.
-
Family visits, whether the student travels to
their family or their family travels to them.
-
Appointments that could reasonably be
scheduled/rescheduled not to conflict with the
class period.
-
Reasons listed in 1-501.d.6.(i)-(iii), and for
other reasons which do not satisfy the standard
of significant and compelling, as determined by
the course instructor.
-
Requests for personal accommodation may be
considered, but they will be handled in as uniform
manner as the circumstances allow. Requests must be
made at least one week in advance of the date of the
desired absence, unless clearly not possible by the
circumstances of the reason for the request.
|
Contacting the Course Staff |
-
For email
and
Piazza
please allow about 24 or
so hours for a response, except on weekends (see
below).
-
The staff do not work on the weekends. If you send
or post something late Friday or over the weekend then you
should not expect a reply before Monday.
-
Please never call any staff at home.
|
Quiz and Exam Policies |
-
Midterms: This course uses the Grainger College of Engineering’s
Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF) for its midterm exams.
-
Quizzes and final: The quizzes and final exam will be in PraireLearn through
PrairieTest in class using the student's computer.
-
CBTF policies: The policies of the CBTF are the policies of this
course, and academic integrity infractions related to
the CBTF are infractions in this course. This
includes examinations given in the CBTF and those
given in other setting such as the classroom.
-
Accommodations:
If you have accommodations identified by the
Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services (DRES)
(http://www.disability.illinois.edu/)
for exams, please submit your Letter of Accommodations
(LOA) through the CBTF website
(
https://cbtf.illinois.edu/students/dres
)
as soon as possible. It can take up to five days for
your LOA to be processed and if you make a reservation
before your LOA has been processed, your reservation
will not include your testing accommodations and you
will be required to reschedule. This must be done each
semester you use the CBTF.
-
Issues during exams: If you have any issue during an exam, inform the
proctor immediately. Work with the proctor to resolve
the issue at the time before logging off. If you do
not inform a proctor of a problem during the test then
you forfeit all rights to addressing the problem you
experienced during your exam.
-
CBTF orientation: Please take the CBTF Orientation
(
https://go.illinois.edu/student-orientation
)
(10 minutes) and review all instructions on the CBTF
website
(
https://cbtf.illinois.edu/students
)
before your first exam.
|
Doing and Submitting Coding
Questions on Assignments, Quizzes
and Exams |
-
All work submitted for credit this semester is
submitted through PrairieLearn unless otherwise specified. Please go to
prairielearn.com
and enroll in CS 421, if you have not already done
so.
There are two kinds of assignments in
this course: machine problems (MPs), and web
assignments (WAs).
Six of the MPs will be submitted for credit in
their entirety in PrairieLearn as MPs. On the other five,
credit will be received by taking an in-class quiz on
them instead. The quiz will be a selection of
problems from the given MP.
The questions on the MPs are submitted as text
files, one for each problem, with the file usually
named after the code being implemented. WAs are
calculational exercises, also submitted in
PrairieLearn. Both types of questions may appear
on midterms and the final exam.
For each problem in an MP or coding problem on an
examination, you will be given in PrairieLearn a
separate VSCode window, containing a directory
(listed to the left), an editor (VSCode) with a
window for opening the file for you to complete
with the answer to the problem. That file
typically will already contain a bit of starter
code sufficient for you to begin testing your
work. VSCode also has the ability for you to
start a terminal window, which will open placing
you in a directory (as listed on the left) with
all the files you need to complete and test the
assignment, and with full access to the compiler
for OCaml, the programming language we will be
using this semester.
-
Before submitting a coding question on a
examination or an MP assignment,
you must make sure that your MP
compiles with the student grading script
supplied with the assignment. You can do this by
typing make in the terminal window
and making sure that your are given a grade report
with a list of tests run and whether they were
passed, with the points earned for the student
test suite.
If your question fails to compile with the
student grading script, your question submission
will receive no credit. There will be no
partial credit for coding questions that fail to
compile.
Note that some of the grading scripts do not fully support OCaml features that are not explicitly covered in class.
If the grading script does not assign you credit when you run it locally,
but you believe your solution is correct, please check whether you are using
any features of OCaml not introduced in class, like type annotations or the function keyword.
Please then try to run the script again on your a version of your code without those features.
If even after that, this persists, and you believe there may be a bug in the grading script, please let us know
before submitting your assignment.
-
You may do multiple commits of either the MPs or
the WAs. Your best score will be your final score.
Work submitted before the late deadline will not
be subject to the late penalty, but work submitted
after will.
Questions on quizzes and exams typically will only
be allowed one submission. However, for coding
questions, you will still be given the full VSCode
environment to help you develop your answer. You
may build and run the student grader as many times
as you wish.
|
Extensions |
-
Each MP/WA will normally have an automatic 48-hour extension
with a penalty on that MP/WA that it is capped at 80% the
total value of the assignment. If we cannot give such an
extension for a particular MP/WA, for example due to
scheduling constraints, we will announce that when the MP/WA
is handed out.
During the automatic extension, staff is not obliged
to answer questions for that MP/WA. You are on your own.
Extensions without a point penalty for the first 48 hours
and any extension beyond the 48 hours will only be granted
under unusual circumstances such as a medical or family
emergency. A signed note from a responsible party, or
similar evidence, will be required. If you do need such an
extension for some legitimate reason, please do your best to let us
know as soon as possible, preferably before the normal MP/WA
deadline.
|
Regrade Policy |
All grading is done automatically in PrairieLearn via
algorithms that are fairly generic and in no way specialized
to your code. A regrade for you will likely mean a regrade
for the entire class. Requesting a regrade requires an
explanation of why you believe your answer was incorrectly
graded.
In order to have your regrade considered, you must provide the following:
- your netid;
-
what assignment or exam question was graded incorrectly;
and
-
what evidence you have that your answer was incorrectly
graded.
You must also
submit your regrade request for a particular assignment
within one week of receiving grades for that assignment
.
It must be submitted directly to the course instructor,
not to the TAs. Late regrade requests will not be
accepted or read.
Some good reasons to ask for a regrade:
-
The grading was inconsistent with the description of how
to do the problem given in class. Details need to be
provided.
-
The grading was inconsistent with the problem
statement. You must indicate what you believe the
inconsistency to be.
Some bad reasons to ask for a regrade:
-
Part of your answer "matched" the answer given in the solution.
-
You wrote the right answer in VSCode. The answer
submitted is the answer that counts, not work done in VSCode,
-
You expended a lot of effort answering the problem. Though effort is appreciated,
we are measuring mastery, not effort.
- You wrote something down.
|
Collaboration |
You are allowed to collaborate on the machine problems (MPs) and
the web assignments (WAs) of this
course, in order to figure out how to solve the problem, resolve things
you don't understand, and help each other track down errors or bugs.
Nevertheless, you must each
write and test your code separately
and submit your own solution.
Similarly, you must write up your own WA separately from others.
If your collaboration extended beyond understanding for what the
problem was asking, then you should note on your assignment with whom
you collaborated. As always, you are subject to
the rules for plagiarism. Whether you pass
this course or not will depend heavily on whether you pass the exams---and
those are non-collaborative.
We allow you to collaborate for several reasons:
- substantial research done indicates that students learn
more when they are allowed to work together;
- our own ability to respond to student questions is increased
because your peers are able to give help.
However, you have to collaborate thoughtfully in order to get
the most out of it. If you ask a friend to describe the
solution completely to you and then write it down, you will get
the credit but you will be much less likely to pass the exam, because you will not have learned
the methods/techniques/concepts.
-
If you verbatim copy, or copy with name changes, from a friend's
solution or other source, wholly or substantially, if you
cite, this is still violation of course policy and you will
receive a zero on the assignment if it is determined such
copying took place.
-
If you verbatim copy, or copy with only name
changes, from a friend's solution or other source,
wholly or substantially, if you did not cite, or
did not cite truthfully, that will be considered
cheating.
-
If you work as a group, each writing part and sharing it
with the others, that is also considered cheating, unless your
cite all members from whom you copied. Again, it will be a
course violation of course policy if you copy verbatim or with
only name changes, even if you cite and you will risk losing
all credit for the parts so copied.
-
If you copied your answer from a source on the internet,
that is considered cheating, unless you both cite your source,
and clearly indicate what was copied. If you cite, but copy
verbatim or with only name changes, again that is a course
policy violation, and if determined, will result in the loss
of credit for those parts so copied.
-
As of now, there are not good tools to tell if code was generated by ChatGPT (or any other language model).
Note, however, that if you use ChatGPT to solve simple problems on early MPs and WAs,
you will likely find yourself struggling greatly with later MPs and WAs
for which ChatGPT cannot provide a suitable answer. Note also that you will not
have ChatGPT access for quizzes and exams, so you will likely struggle on quizzes and exams as well.
MPs and WAs are ultimately there to help you get a handle on the material so that you
can do well on those quizzes and exams, so use of ChatGPT is strongly discouraged, except
for experimental purposes after you have already submitted final versions of those assignments.
The penalties for being discovered cheating are described in the
next section, below. If you offer your solution for others to
copy, you should protect yourself from being accused of
cheating by reporting this as well. Then, if some of those to
whom you have lent your work fail to cite you, you will be
protected from cheating accusations (unless they also claim
they lent the same problem to you).
If you copy your solutions from friends or other sources, you
must cite your source, and the degree and extent of copying.
Also, you must do your writing without direct copying.
Think of MPs and WAs as being part of the
practice for the exam. Many of the problems will be used as a
basis for the exam problems themselves. In fact, when it comes
time to study, we will likely advise you to redo your MPs and
WAs. So it is in your best interest to understand the MPs and WAs.
|
Policy on Cheating |
We will be looking for cheating on both assignments
and exams. The penalty for being caught cheating a
first time---either sharing your solution or
copying anyone or anything else's solution on
an exam, or copying anyone else's solution on an
assignment without citation---is that
you will receive a negative score for the unit
cheated on equal to the value of the unit
.
An assignment (MP or WA) is one unit. A
numbered problem on a test, including all its parts,
is one unit. The penalty if you are caught cheating
a second time, after being informed of the first
time, is a grade of F for the class. You should
take all reasonable precautions to prevent others
from cheating and report any suspected cheating.
All policies of the CBTF are the policies of this course, and
academic integrity infractions related to the CBTF are
infractions in this course. In particular:
-
Utilizing a cellphone, smartwatch, or any other electronic
device during an examination.
-
Having available during the exam or bringing into the CBTF
external papers, index cards, scratch paper, Help Sheets,
or any materials containing information related to the
exam.
-
Accessing files, apps, or internet resources other than a
browser and PrairieLearn through PrairieTest during an
examination.
-
Exiting the laboratory premises while in possession of used or unused
scratch paper supplied by the CBTF.
-
Initiating the examination before receiving authorization
from the proctor.
-
Continuing to work on the exam even after the designated
end time has been announced.
-
Engaging in any other activities that contravene the
guidelines outlined for Academic Integrity.
|
Grading |
All grading is done automatically in PrairieLearn, and you will
receive your results for each problem when you press the Save
& Grade button. You can see the scores of all past
assessments in the PrairieLearn gradebook.
It should be noted, however, that the value for WAs and for MPs submitted
as MPs, not quizzes, is
the number of points assigned; they are not all valued
equally. The score tells you the percentage of the points you
received, but you will need to refer back to the assignment
itself to view how many points it was worth. There seems to
be no way to make PrairieLearn report points rather than
scores in the gradebrook. The contribution of the MPs and WAs
is the number points earned cumulatively for all MPs and WAs
divided by the total points possible, times the percentage of
the course the MPs and WAs combined are worth (20% for 3
credit students, and 15% for 4 credit students).
Each Midterm will have 90 points and the Final will
have 210 points. (All exam points and equal to each
other, as all MP and WA points are equal to each
other, but MP and WA points are distinct from exam
points.)
Note that, relative to Prof. Elsa Gunter's sections,
Sections CU and CG weigh MPs and WAs twice as much,
and correspondingly weigh the final exam less.
Note also that there may be additional creative extra credit exercises
in this section only worth an additional 1% each.
Please do not ask course staff for Prof. Elsa Gunter's section
for help with those exercises, and note that you will only
receive credit for those exercises if you are in Sections CU and CG.
Below is a table giving the percentage each major
category of work in the class contributes to the final
grade.
Grading Breakdown |
Work |
Weight (3 Credits) |
Weight (4 Credits) |
MPS and WAs (combined)
|
20% |
15% |
Quizzes | 10% | 7.5% |
Midterm 1 | 15% | 11.25% |
Midterm 2 | 15% | 11.25% |
Midterm 3 | 15% | 11.25% |
Final Exam | 25% | 18.75% |
Project | NA | 25% |
Creative Extra Credit | +1% each | +1% each |
Grading Scale |
Grade |
If your overall score is at least |
A+ | 97% |
A | 93% |
A- | 90% |
B+ | 87% |
B | 83% |
B- | 80% |
C+ | 77% |
C | 73% |
C- | 70% |
D+ | 67% |
D | 63% |
D- | 60% |
|
Mental Health Assisance |
Significant stress, mood changes, excessive worry,
substance/alcohol misuse or interferences in eating or sleep can
have an impact on academic performance, social development, and
emotional wellbeing. The University of Illinois offers a variety
of confidential services including individual and group
counseling, crisis intervention, psychiatric services, and
specialized screenings which are covered through the Student
Health Fee. If you or someone you know experiences any of the
above mental health concerns, it is strongly encouraged to
contact or visit any of the University’s resources provided
below. Getting help is a smart and courageous thing to do for
yourself and for those who care about you.
- Counseling Center (217) 333-3704
- McKinley Health Center (217) 333-2700
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800) 273-8255
- Rosecrance Crisis Line (217) 359-4141 (available 24/7, 365
days a year)
If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
|
Students with Disabilities |
To obtain disability-related academic adjustments and/or auxiliary
aids, students with disabilities must contact the course instructor as
soon as possible and provide the instructor with a Letter of Academic
Accommodations from Disability Resources and Educational Services
(DRES). To ensure that disability-related concerns are properly
addressed from the beginning, students with disabilities who require
assistance to participate in this class should apply for services with
DRES and see the instructor as soon as possible. If you need
accommodations for any sort of disability, please speak to me after
class, or make an appointment to see me or see me during my office
hours. DRES provides students with academic accommodations, access,
and support services.
To contact DRES, you may visit 1207 S. Oak St.,
Champaign, call 217-333-1970, e-mail
disability@illinois.edu
or visit the DRES website at
http://www.disability.illinois.edu/.
Here is the direct link to apply for services at DRES:
https://www.disability.illinois.edu/applying-services
.
If you believe you may need accommodations through DRES, but do not feel comfortable getting started yourself,
you may reach out to me (Prof. Talia Ringer) and I am happy to help you get started with that process.
I was not diagnosed with ADHD until college, and forgot to submit my letter of accomodations on time
in the past, so I strongly empathize with the system being imperfect here.
Please note that many mental health concerns may also qualify you for accommodations through DRES, as may
sleep disorders, various forms of neurodiversity (like ADHD and autism), test anxiety, and learning disabilities.
This is ultimately up to DRES, but DRES is a really wonderful resource worth using if you believe it may be relevant for any reason.
It is about using the tools you need to help you succeed, however your brain and body work---that is beautiful and I hope you will use it if it is relevant to you.
|
CS Code of Conduct |
All students and staff are responsible for upholding the CS Code of Conduct,
both in class and on any class-affiliated discussion media (including unofficial media like Discord servers that use the course or department name).
You may raise concerns or seek advice from CS CARES if you witness a potential violation of the code,
or would just like somebody to talk to about relevant issues.
|
Religious Observances |
Illinois law requires the University to reasonably accommodate its
students' religious beliefs, observances, and practices in regard to
admissions, class attendance, and the scheduling of examinations and
work requirements. Students should complete the
Request for Accommodation for Religious Observances
form should any instructors
require an absence letter in order to manage the absence. In order to
best facilitate planning and communication between students and
faculty, students should make requests for absence letters as early as
possible in the semester in which the request applies.
|
Textbooks |
There is no required textbook for this course. Please see
the resources page for recommended readings.
|
|
|