For the students that take the class for three hours credit, the grade is composed of the following four components:
We reserve the right to lower your overall grade if at the end of the semester your performance in any of these four areas is below 20% of the maximal number of points that can be obtained.
For the students that take the class for four hours credit, 75% of their grade will be computed according to the above formula. The remaining 25% require the completion of a research project or extensive literature survey. Again, we reserve the right to lower your overall grade if we judge your project to be significantly below what we expect students to achieve.
After each lecture (except the first day of class, the review sessions and the midterm), we will post a graded quiz on the Compass website. There will be 25 such quizzes, and each will count as 1% of your grade. You will have 36 hours to complete each quiz. Since we will be discussing answers to some of the questions in the following class, we will not accept any late submissions for Compass quizzes.
We anticipate two machine problems (MPs) that will require programming in Java, and two written assignments. You will have three weeks to complete each MP, and two weeks for each written assignment. Your solutions (including source code and documentation) must be submitted via our Compass site. For written assignments, we will only accept PDFs. Scanned-in versions of handwritten solutions will not be accepted. Regrading requests must be made within one week after the graded homework is returned.
Late policy Assignments must be submitted to Compass by the time and date indicated on the assignment. Recognizing that students may face unusual circumstances and require some flexibility in the course of the semester, each student will have a total credit of 72 hours to use as s/he sees fit. Once these late hours are exhausted, any assignment turned in late will be penalized at the rate of 20% per late day (or fraction thereof). Under no circumstances will an assignment be accepted more than four days after its due date. Do let us know if there are extreme situations where this lenient policy is not satisfactory.
These will be closed book exams. The final exam will focus on material covered in the second half of the class. Regrading requests must be made immediately after grades are released. Previous exams can be found here. Note that these may be of limited benefit or use for this class, especially since these were given by other instructors.
You will be expected to complete either a programming-based research project or a literature survey. In both cases, we will expect you to produce a written report and an oral presentation to the teaching staff.
Unless specifically announced, you are expected to do each homework on your own (this includes any code that is not explicitly provided with the assignments). You may discuss concepts with your classmates, but there must be no interactions about solutions. You may consult the web but the work handed in must be entirely your own.
The penalty for cheating on any assignment is straightforward. On the first occurrence, you will receive a zero for the assignment and your course grade will be reduced by one full letter grade. A second occurrence will result in course failure.
If you are taking the course for 4 hours credit, your research project or literature survey must also be your own work. The report must be written in your own words. You must properly cite all sources that have been consulted, including papers, text books, websites and existing software.
More information on academic integrity and plagiarism can be found on the library's web site.