Course:
CIS 121—Spring 2016
Instructor:
Rajiv Gandhi
Teaching Assistants:
Course staff
Discussion Forum:
Piazza
Lectures:
Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30am in Towne 100
Prerequisites:
CIS 120 and CIS 160
Textbook:
Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd edition by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein. The lectures and the reading will draw from the textbook. It is strongly recommended that you buy this textbook. It is available from the Penn Bookstore, as well as various online retailers.

The grading for the course will consist of:

• 35% for homework assignments and the final project
• 17.5% for each of two midterm exams (2/18 and 4/7)
• 25% for the final
• 5% for recitation attendance. Recitation attendance is mandatory.
Late submission policy:

The following applies to all homeworks, both written and programming, except for the final project, which does not have a late day policy. Each student has two free, no-strings-attached “late days” in case of extenuating circumstances. Homeworks can be submitted at most two days late provided that you have the requisite number of late days. If you are out of late days, then you will not be able to submit your homework. One “day” is defined as anytime between 1 second and 24 hours after the homework deadline. Late written homeworks can be turned in to Laura Fox in Levine 308. The final project does not have the same late policy; it has its own late policy, which will be announced with its release.

Collaboration policy for written homeworks:

You are allowed to discuss solutions to problems in groups of three, documenting who you discussed with at the top of your assignment. You are allowed to ask anyone for LaTeX help (for instance, “How do I center a stack of equations?”). You are not allowed to write up the solutions together. You must do that by yourself.

Collaboration policy for programming homeworks:

You are allowed to discuss low-level issues like the meaning of Java constructs, or how to use the computing environment. You are allowed to discuss high-level questions such as what the instructor/lab TA said, the content of the textbook or other general resources. You not allowed to…

• Discuss issues directly pertaining to the homework questions or their solutions.
• See another students homework solutions.
• Show your solutions to another student.
• This includes asking a classmate to debug your code and agreeing to debug a classmate’s code. If you do this during office hours, know that the TAs are required to report your names to the instructor.
• Share any code except the code that is being made available by us on the course website to be used specifically with your solutions
• Occasionally, a small snippet of code from the textbook may help your work. You can use such a snippet with attribution, i.e., provided you add a comment in which you make clear you copied it from the textbook.
• You may NOT use snippets of code from the Internet (e.g., StackOverflow.com and similar).
• You may NOT share test cases.
• Post your code where it may be accessible to others. This is largely a clarification of the previous rule. This means that you may NOT seek help from online forums, like StackOverflow or similar. You may NOT push your code to a public repository like GitHub (private repositories, however, are permitted). You may seek help from online forums for low-level issues as mentioned above. When in doubt, ask on Piazza.
• Look at other people’s information.
• If you find a terminal on which somebody else has logged in and forgot to log out, you must log them out.
• When somebody else is typing a password in front of you must look out the window, or at your shoes, or at the picture of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie that you carry on your keychain.
• Use any code downloaded from the Internet or sent to you by email, Facebook, text, Twitter, or even scribbled notes passed from hand to hand. :)
• Share the material that we post for this course with anybody who is not a registered student in this course or a staff member.
• If you find any such material already posted somewhere else you must inform the course staff immediately. Same if you are contacted by people who offer to solve your homework for money, or who knows what else. Use your common sense and ask any member of the staff if you are not sure about a resource you are considering.
• You may NOT share course materials without the prior approval of the course staff. You may NOT post course materials on sites such as CourseHero. This infringes upon the copyright of materials authored by the course staff.

Any violation of the collaboration policy will be dealt with severely.

Regrade policy for programming homeworks:

• Use of == instead of .equals
• Lack or addition of ! operators