The grading for the course will tentatively consist of:
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.
You will be guaranteed a passing grade in the course if you meet all of the following conditions at the end of the semester:
If you do not meet these conditions, you will not necessarily fail the course; however, there is no guarantee that you will pass. Professor Gandhi or the TAs will not be able to answer questions like “do I have a passing grade?” or “what score do I need on the final exam to pass?” at any point throughout the course. It is very unlikely that we will further deviate from the above criteria.
The following applies to all homeworks, both written and programming, unless otherwise specified. Each student can submit three 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.
In the case of extreme circumstances, please do not hesitate to contact us at cis121@seas.upenn.edu!
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.
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…
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.