Grades

For three-credit students, the cumulative score for the semester is a weighted sum of component scores, with the following weights:

• 33%: Quizzes

• 33%: Machine problems

• 9%: Exam 1

• 9%: Exam 2

• 16%: Final exam

For four-credit students, the cumulative score for the semester is a weighted sum of component scores, with the following weights:

• 25%: Quizzes

• 25%: Machine problems

• 7%: Exam 1

• 7%: Exam 2

• 11%: Final exam

• 25%: Final project

In addition to these things, extra credit is available for some of the machine problems. Extra credit will also be given (up to 1%) for students who answer a lot of questions on CampusWire.

Late Policy

Every assignment (every quiz, every MP, every component of the 4-credit project) can be submitted late, with a five percent penalty: If you submit late, your score will be multiplied by 0.95. The late penalty is not waived for illness, or for any other reason unless required by university-wide policies or by the decision of a university executive officer. The late penalty is mild on purpose, so that it is possible to recover from an illness and still submit the homework for most of the available points.

WARNING: Gradescope does not show the late penalty, but it will be

applied to MPs as well as quizzes!

Late penalties are not applied prior to February 5. Any assignment due in January can be submitted up through February 4 without penalty.

Academic Integrity

• You may not share code with other students.

• You may copy code from any source you find on the web, as long as your code contains comments giving the source URL.

• Please feel free to share, with your fellow students, verbal descriptions of solution ideas, block diagrams, limited bits of pseudocode, and pointers to web resources.

• For purposes of this course, we’re treating GenAI the same way we would treat any human being who is not a student in the course. You may not ask GenAI to write code for you. If it writes code for you, you can look at what it’s done, try to understand it, and then try to use the same ideas, but you may not cut and paste. You can, however, ask it to give you ideas about how to solve the problem in the form of English-language feedback, pseudocode, etc., but please be careful to specify this constraint in order to discourage it from just writing the assignment for you.

Grade Cutoffs

Grade cutoffs are approximately as follows, where $\mu$ is the class average, $\sigma$ is the standard deviation. These thresholds are not guaranteed, but they rarely change by much.

$$\begin{array}{r}\begin{array}{rl}& A+:min(0.99,\mu +1.5\sigma ),A:min(0.94,\mu +0.5\sigma ),A-:min(0.90,\mu +0.25\sigma )\\ & B+:min(0.85,\mu ),B:min(0.80,\mu -0.75\sigma ),B-:min(0.75,\mu -\sigma )\\ & C+:min(0.70,\mu -1.25\sigma ),C:min(0.65,\mu -2\sigma ),C-:min(0.60,\mu -2.25\sigma )\\ & D+:min(0.55,\mu -2.5\sigma ),D:min(0.50,\mu -2.75\sigma ),D-:min(0.45,\mu -3\sigma )\end{array}\end{array}$$