The course staff must critically examine close to ten thousand
pages of homework submissions this semester! We desperately
need your help to make sure homeworks are graded and returned
quickly. If you have any questions or concerns about these
policies, please don't hesitate to ask in lecture, during office
hours, or on Piazza.
I apologize in advance for the length of this document. Most
of this stuff is obvious to almost everybody, but after teaching
this class for many years, I've seen a lot of
strange things.
Homework Logistics: How to submit
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All homework solutions must be submitted electronically via
Gradescope. Submit one PDF file for each numbered
homework problem. Gradescope will not accept other file
formats such as plain text, HTML, LaTeX source, or Microsoft
Word (.doc or .docx).
- You must register with Gradescope using your university
email address. Do not use an alias or a non-university email
address on Gradescope, please.
- Homework solutions may be
submitted by groups of at most three students. We
strongly encourage (but will not require) every
student to work in a group with at least one other student.
Students are are responsible for forming their own homework
groups. Groups may be different for each numbered homework
problem.
-
For group solutions, exactly one member
of each group submits the solution to each problem. Even
if the groups are identical, the submitter may be
different for each numbered homework problem.
- Whoever submits any group solution must also
submit the names of the other group members via
Gradescope. Gradescope will then automatically apply
the grade for that submission to all group members.
If this information is not entered correctly, the
other group members' grades will be delayed or
possibly lost entirely.
- If you discover that your name was omitted from a
group homework submission,
please submit a regrade request.
- As error correction, each submitted homework solution should
include the following information in large friendly letters at
the top of the first page.
- The homework number
- The problem number
- Your name
- Your university email address
For group solutions, include the Gradescope name and
email address of every group member. If you are
typesetting your solutions with LaTeX, please use our solution
template.
- We will not accept
late homework for any reason. To offset this rather
draconian policy, we will count only the homework problems you
actually submit toward your final course grade. Specifically:
- If you submit more than 21 homework problems,
only your highest 21 problem scores count. (If
you submit everything, this this is equivalent to
dropping almost two complete homework sets.)
- If you submit fewer than 21 homework
problems, your exams will have (slightly) larger
weight in the final grade calculation.
- You must submit at least 16 homework problems to
pass the class.
We may forgive coursework
under extreme circumstances, such as
documented illness or injury. Forgiving homework
requires a serious long-term issue that prevents
submission of multiple homework sets; the regular
homework policies already allow missing a few
submissions without serious penalty. “Extreme
circumstances” for exams do not include
travel for job interviews. We will compute your
final course grade as if your forgiven work simply
do not exist; your other work will have more
weight. Please ask Jeff for details.
Please make it easy for the graders to figure out what you mean in the short time they have to grade your solution. If your solutions are difficult to read or understand, you will lose points.
Be Honest
- You are allowed to use any resource in the universe as long
as you explcitly state it in your solution (google, previous
semester solutions, etc), and you comply with the following.
- Write everything in your own words, and properly cite every outside source you use. We strongly encourge you to use any outside source at your disposal, provided you use your sources properly and give them proper credit. If you get an idea from an outside source, citing that source will not lower your grade. Failing to properly cite an outside source—thereby taking credit for ideas that are not your own—is plagiarism.
The only sources that you are not required to cite are the official course materials (lectures, lecture notes, homework and exam solutions from this semester)
and sources for prerequisite material (which we assume you
already know by heart).
- List everyone you worked with on each homework problem. Again, we strongly encourage you to work together, but you must give everyone proper credit. If you work in a group of 20 students, then all 20 names should appear on your homework solution. If someone was particularly helpful, describe their contribution. Be generous; if you're not sure whether someone should be included in your list of collaborators, include them. For discussions in class, in section, or in office hours, where collecting names is impractical, it's okay to write something like "discussions in class".
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Please see our academic integrity policy for more details.
Be Clear
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Write legibly.
If we can't read your solution, we can't give you credit for it. If you have sloppy handwriting, use LaTeX. Please don't submit your first draft. Writing legibly also helps you think more clearly.
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We strongly recommend typesetting your homework using LaTeX. (In particular, we recommend TeXShop for Mac OS X, TeX Live for Linux (already included in most distributions), and MiKTeX for Windows.) We will provide a LaTeX template for homework solutions.
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You are welcome to submit scans of hand-written homework solutions, but please write clearly using a black pen on plain white unlined paper, and please use a high-quality scanning app (or
an actual high-quality scanner). We recommend printing
your scanned document to check for readability before
submitting.
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Write sensibly.
You will lose points for poor spelling, grammar, punctuation, arithmetic, algebra, logic, and so on. This rule is especially important for students whose first language is not English. Writing sensibly also helps you think sensibly.
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Write carefully.
We can only grade what you actually write, not what you mean. We will not attempt to read your mind. If your answer is ambiguous, the graders are explicitly isntructed to choose an interpretation that makes it wrong. Writing carefully also helps you think carefully.
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Avoid the Three Deadly Sins. Yes, we are completely serious about these. We reserve the right to add more Deadly Sins later in the course.
- Write solutions, not examples.
Don't describe algorithms by showing the first two or three iterations and then writing "and so on". Similarly, don't try to prove something by demonstrating it for a few small examples and then writing “do the same thing for all $n$”. Any solution that includes phrases like “and so on”, “etc.”, “do this for all $n$”, or “repeat this process” automatically gets a score of zero. Those phrases indicate precisely where you should have used iteration, recursion, or induction but didn’t.
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Declare all your variables.
Whenever you use a new variable or non-standard symbol for the first time, you must specify both its type and its meaning, in English. Similarly, when you describe any algorithm, you must first describe in English precisely what the algorithm is supposed to do (not just how it works). Any solution that contains undeclared variables automatically gets a score of zero, unless it is otherwise perfect. This rule is especially important for dynamic programming problems.
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Never use weak induction! Always, always, always use a strong induction hypothesis, even in proofs that only apply the induction hypothesis at $n-1$. Why would you even want to tie $n-2$ hands behind your back? Any proof that uses a weak induction hypothesis automatically gets a score of zero, unless it is otherwise perfect. Basically, weak induction should die in a fire.
- State your assumptions.
If a problem statement is ambiguous, explicitly state
any additional assumptions that your solution
requires. (Please also ask for clarification in
class, in office hours, or on Piazza!) For example,
if the performance of your algorithm depends on how
the input is represented, tell us exactly what
representation you require.
- Don't submit code.
Describe your algorithms using clean, human-readable pseudocode. Your description should allow a bright student in CS 225 to easily implement your algorithm in their favorite language.
- Don't submit your first draft.
Revise, revise, revise. After you figure out the solution, then think about the right way to present it, and only then start writing what you plan to submit. Yes, even on exams; do your initial scratch work on the back of the page.
Be Concise
- Keep it short. Every homework problem can be answered completely in at most two typeset pages or five handwritten pages; most problems require considerably less. Yes, I am aware of the crushing irony.
- Omit irrelevant details. Don't write "red-black tree" when you mean "balanced binary tree" or "dictionary". Don't submit code; We want to see your ideas, not syntactic sugar. If your solution requires more than two typeset pages, you are providing too many irrelevant details.
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Don't regurgitate. Don't explain binary search;
just write "binary search". Don't write the pseudocode
for Dijkstra's algorithm; just write "Disjktra's
algorithm". If the solution appears on page 6 of Jeff's
notes, just write "See page 6 of Jeff's notes." If your
answer is similar to something we've seen in class, just
say so and (carefully!) describe your changes. You will
lose points for vomiting.
- Autmatic zero:
We will give an automatic zero to answers which we
consider to be too long, unclear, and repetitious. We
will also do it if we can not follow the logic of your
answer. We might even do it without reading them.
Content: What to write
- Answer the right question. No matter how clear and polished your solution is, it's worthless if it doesn't answer the question we asked. Make sure you understand the question before you start thinking about how to answer it. If something is unclear, ask for clarification! This is especially important on exams.
- Justify your answers. You must provide a brief justification for your solutions, as evidence that you understand why they are correct. Unless we explicitly say otherwise, we generally do not want a complete proof of correctness—because complete proofs would be too long, tedious, and unenlightening—but rather a high-level sketch of the major steps in the proof. Proofs/justifications are only required on exams if we specifically ask for them.
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By default, if a homework or exam problem asks you to describe an algorithm, you need to do several things to get full credit:
- If necessary, formally restate the problem in terms of combinatorial objects such as sets, sequences, lists, graphs, or trees. In other words, tell us what the problem is really asking for. This is often the hardest part of designing an algorithm.
- Give a concise pseudocode description of your algorithm. Don't regurgitate, and don't turn in code!
- Describe a correct algorithm.
- Justify the correctness of your algorithm. You usually won't have to do this on exams.
- Analyze your algorithm's running time. This may be as simple as saying "There are two nested loops from 1 to n, so the running time is O(n²)." Or it may require setting up and solving a recurrence, in which case you'll also have to justify your solution.
- Describe the fastest correct algorithm you can, even if the problem does not include the words "fast" or "efficient". Faster algorithms are worth more points; brute force is usually not worth much. We will not always tell you what time bound to shoot for; that's part of what you're trying to learn. However, if your algorithm is incorrect, you won't get any points, no matter how fast it is!
Some problems may deviate from these default requirements.
For example, we may ask you for an algorithm that uses a
particular approach, even though another approach may be
more efficient. (Answer the right question!)
No IDK points
In the past, we used to give IDK (I dont know) points. We will not
do this semester as it seems to discriminate against people that
know what they are doing, but are not sure about it. Naturally, if
you write IDK and save us time in grading, we might give you a
point for saving us time, if we feel generous.
IDK points make sense when one enforces an aggressive policies of
giving zero for solutions that are not very close to being
correct. Naturally, students hate such aggressive grading
policies.
Regrades
Regrades requests would be open for a week once grades are
released (except for final exam). Regrade requests are not
intended for arguing about point allocation, or whether or not the
grading scale is fair.
Unfortunately, certain students think that they can tire us into
giving them point that they did not earn, by keep asking for
unjustified regrade requests. As such, superfluous, argumentative
and repetitive regrade requests, after an appropriate warning,
would results in a zero on the relevant questions - please do not
waste our time.