The grading for the course will tentatively consist of:

• 40% - Homework Assignments
• 15% - Midterm 1 Exam
• 15% - Midterm 2 Exam
• 25% - Final Exam
• 5% - Recitation Attendance and Feedback/Surveys

The professor reserves the right to adjust grading policies. Any cheating or violations of the collaboration policy will result in severe penalties to your grade, and may be escalated further.

The following applies to all homeworks, both written and programming, unless otherwise specified. Each student can submit two assignments late. ‘Late’ means you may submit between 1 second and 48 hours after the homework deadline. These allowances are to accommodate things like mild sickness, holidays, interviews, computer crashes (see below), procrastination, etc. No additional late days will be granted for any of the above reasons. If you are out of late days, then your homework will receive a score of 0. Late homeworks can be turned in via Gradescope.

Although we believe that face-to-face instruction allows TAs to provide the highest quality help for students, we realize that this can be an unsettling time to go in-person for recitation and office hours. Considering this, we are providing an option for students who are unable to make it in-person to be exempt from in-person recitation and office hours. If this applies to you, please fill out this exemption form letting us know – it is completely confidential and will only be shared with Professor Arvind and Head TAs. Please note that once you let us know, you will only be able to attend virtual office hours and recitations for the rest of the semester.

We highly recommend using Overleaf for typing up written homeworks. This way if your computer crashes, you won’t lose all your hard work. For programming homeworks, we recommend backing up your computer regularly (Google, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. provide tools for automatically backing up your computer at scheduled intervals, or you can do this manually). You can also use GitHub, though make sure you only use private repos.

You are allowed to discuss ideas for solving homework problems in groups of three, documenting who you discussed with at the top of your assignment. These students must also list you as a collaborator. The composition of your team may change from one homework to another. You are not allowed to write up the solutions together.

• It is fine to discuss the topics covered in the homeworks, to discuss approaches to problems, and to sketch out general solutions. However, you MUST write up the homework answers and solutions individually. You are not permitted to share specific solutions, mathematical results, etc.
• Our suggestion is to discuss the problems together, but if you made any notes or worked out something on a white board with another person while you were discussing the homework, then erase or destroy those notes as soon as the discussion is over. You shouldn’t use those notes while writing up your answer, however tempted you may be to do so. This will force you to write up the solutions yourself and to make sure that you genuinely and fully understand them.

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

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. At no time – prior to submitting an assignment, after submitting an assignment, or after the course has ended – are you allowed to…

• Discuss issues directly pertaining to the homework questions or their solutions.
• See another student’s 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 in view of a TA, 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. Note that if you use a private repo, you must keep it private, even after the course ends). When in doubt, ask on Piazza.
• 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. 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.

Each written assignment and each midterm exam will have a regrade request deadline that will be posted typically one week after the assignment or exam has been returned with your score. Beyond that deadline, regrades can only be given by permission of the instructor. Regrade requests are meant for cases such as arithmetic mistakes in tabulating a final score, or for a grader not seeing that you continued your solution on the back of the page (as an example). In the interest of transparency, the course staff makes its best effort to indicate exactly where points are docked with the associated reasons. For the written assignments and for the midterms, solutions will be provided in class. Please consult these carefully before requesting a regrade. Please submit a regrade request via Gradescope by the regrade deadline.

Please note that we regrade the entire submission, so it’s possible for your score to go both up and down.

Regrade requests will only be accepted when they are a result of our mistake. For submissions which the autograder caught the error, we will not accept any regrade requests.