Grading
- Homeworks: 15%
- Labs: 20%
- Midterm exam: 30%
- Final exam: 35%
The following grading scale will be used:
- A: [90,100]
- B: [80,90)
- C: [70,80)
- D: [60, 70) - this grade may not be assigned to graduate students
- E: [0,70)
All scores posted on the Blackboard will be percentages, between 0 and 100. For example,
let's assume that a homework is worth 123 points and your get 97 points: what will be posted
on the Blackboard is (97/123)*100 which will be rounded up -- using the
round-half-up rule -- to 79. The same applies for exams, labs, etc.
Class participation will help settle borderline grades. While class attendance is not taken,
your instructor believes that regular class attendance is important and expects students to actively
participate in class. Questions and comments are always welcome.
There is no curving of grades in this class.
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Late Work
All work that you turn in must be submitted on the Blackboard before
midnight (Central Time) the day the work is due.
I understand that from time to time you'll get overwhelmed with work, or that you may have personal
problems that will make you less productive than you'd like. That's why each student in this class
has a credit of two (2) days of late work.
You can use this credit as you see fit, for good reason or no reason at all, all at once or
in pieces -- though there is no fractional credit, i.e. you cannot request 0.3 days of credit.
The only thing we ask for is that in your Blackboard submission (in the COMMENT field) you
indicate how much of your credit you want to use.
Also, once you spend "late work credit" you cannot get it back and try to claim it for other
piece of work.
After you've used your "late work credit", or if you don't want to use it, there is a 5% per
calendar day penalty for late work.
The way this works is that the late penalty is taken from the top, and then the TA applies other
penalties that result from grading the work.
Let's say you're N days late on an assignment that's worth X points; also, let's also assume
that the TA finds errors in your submission that accumulate to a total of Y points. Then, your mark
for the said work is going to be (X - N*0.05*X) - Y.
For example, let's assume we're talking about HW-1 where you can earn a maximum of 70 points (X=70), and that you're
three days late (N=3). Let's also assume that the TA finds errors in your submission that are worth 11 points.
Then your mark on this assignment will be (70 - 3*0.05*70) - 11 = 48.5, which will be
rounded up -- using the round-half-up rule -- to 49.
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Academic Honesty
All the work you submit must be individual, including, but not limited to, those cases
when your instructor has approved pair-programming for you; in these cases the only thing that
may be identical with somebody else's is code.
Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. IIT has a strict academic honesty policy; here are
the top points:
-
The misrepresentation of any work submitted for credit as the product of a
student’s sole independent effort, such as using the ideas of others without
attribution and other forms of plagiarism.
-
The use of any unauthorized assistance in taking quizzes, tests or examinations.
-
The acquisition, without permission, of tests, answer sheets, problem solutions
or other academic material when such material has been withheld from distribution by the
instructor.
-
Deliberate harmful obstruction of the studies, research or academic work of any member of
the IIT community.
-
Making material misrepresentation in any submission to or through any office of the
university to a potential employer, professional society, meeting or organization.
-
The intentional assistance of others in the violation of the standards for academic honest.
You can read the entire policy at
https://web.iit.edu/student-affairs/handbook/fine-print/code-academic-honesty.
You should read it until you fully understand it.
A good way to test whether you understand it is to try to explain it to somebody else.
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Exams
Exams are open-book(s), open-notes, and comprehensive. You may bring with you any notes you want,
however you may not share them with anybody else during the exam.
During the exam the use of communication devices such as phones, laptops, etc. is not allowed.
You may bring with you a basic calculator. This may sound like a blast from the past, but we tried
being permissive with the use of computers and phones and ended up having more trouble than we
thought it would be worth.
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Labs
All code you write will need to be checked in into a software repository that you control and
share with your instructor and the class TA. Your TA will check out the code from your
repository for grading and (s)he will establish the tagging rules.
For purposes of this class you'll use Git in a Bitbucket account. The
account with Bitbucket is free and you can control who has access to it.
Share with your instructor (bistriceanu@iit.edu) and with your TA (vmuruga1 at hawk.iit.edu).
You may want to read about software revision control before anything else.
This article on Wikipedia is a good start.
A good Git Reference can be found at gitref.org.
Very good Git cheat-sheets
can be found here
and here.
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Communications
The first person you should contact for any questions related to assignments is your TA.
Please be descriptive in the subject line when you email your TA or instructor such that
processing doesn't get delayed. At the very minimum you should indicate the class and the term,
followed by a brief description of what is it that you want to communicate.
Examples of good subject lines for your email:
- cs402, Fall 2017 - question about Hw1, part (i)
- cs402, Fall 2017 - When will the grades be posted on the Blackboard?
- cs402, Fall 2017 - Do we have lab next week?
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