Grading
- Homeworks: 20%
- Labs: 20%
- Midterm exam: 25%
- 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; if your
weighted average score is in this range, then you'll be assigned a failing
grade (E)
- 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 you 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
may 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 170 points (X=170), 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 (170 - 3*0.05*170) - 11 = 133.5,
which will be rounded up -- using the round-half-up rule -- to 134.
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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 violation of the standards
for academic honesty.
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.
Just to be sure there is no mis-understanding, the fact that you have notes
on your laptop is not a good enough reason to be allowed to use your laptop
during the exam.
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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 / Lab Instructor.
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 (TBA).
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; always CC your instructor on your email communications.
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, Spring 2019 - question about Hw1, part (i)
- cs402, Spring 2019 - When will the grades be posted on the Blackboard?
- cs402, Spring 2019 - Do we have lab next week?
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