Policies and grading for CS134a

Collaboration policy

Students are allowed and encouraged to work together and collaborate on all homework and lab assignments. However, your submission must be your own; you must write up your homework and lab work without referring to shared material. For example, suppose you work as part of a group to prove a long, complicated, theorem; and suppose you sketch the proof on the board. When you write up your own solution, you must not refer to the board--you must recover the proof from your own memory. You are allowed to discuss the problem as you do your write up.

Programming assignments are similar. You are allowed to design your algorithms together, you are even allowed to develop a working program together. However, the program that you submit must be your own, and you must write it without reference to shared material (or the program you wrote jointly).

You may use the WWW for reference material. For homeworks and labs, you may search for solutions on the web, except for CS134 course material from previous years. You may use the material you found to develop your understanding, but your submission must be your own.

Summary: For homeworks and labs, you may use any and all resources at your disposal, but your submission must be your own work.

Late policy, extensions

There are no extensions in CS134a. Instead, each written and lab assignment has extra credit that can be used to make up for late or missing assignments. In addition, although there are 9 homework assignments, your grade will be determined by the best 8 that you submitted.

Late penalties. The late penalty starts on the day after the assignment was due. The late penalty applies to both written and lab assignments.

• Up to 7 days late: 25% penalty
• Up to 14 days late: 50% penalty
• No credit will be given to assignments that are submitted more than 14 days late.

Exams

Exams will be open-book, open-notes. No collaboration is allowed on exams. You are not allowed to use online resources. Extensions are granted for exams only in extreme, rare, unusual, perhaps outlandish, circumstances. You must contact the course staff to receive an extension for an exam, and extensions are granted on a case-by-case basis.

Grading

There will be 9 homeworks, 5 labs, 1 midterm, and 1 final. Credit is weighted as follows:

Homework	25%
Labs	40%
Midterm	15%
Final	20%

Style grading

All written assignment, labs, and exams will include style grading. The basic rule of style is that any answer, proof, program, should be concise, containing no more and no less information than necessary. What does necessary mean in this context? It is an imprecise term, and we will be giving you guidelines. Why do we care about style? There are two main reasons. First, as you gain experience in the field, you will begin to work with others and it is important that they understand you. Second, we have more difficulty grading your work when we have to look through the hand waving.

For written assignments, the general rule is that a person versed in the topic (for instance, the TAs) should be able to understand your answer with a minimal amount of effort, and it should be clear that you understand the answer. If you don't understand, you might be tempted to increase your chances of baffling the TA by being verbose (also called "blowing smoke"). Don't! Your submission will be returned.

Handwritten submissions

If you choose to hand-write your submission, it must be written neatly in pencil or in black or blue pen on neat, untorn paper. Please do not submit on paper torn out of spiral noteboooks! Cross-outs/erasures for minor typos are acceptible, but should be avoided as much as possible. Submissions that are judged by the TAs to be messy will have style points deducted, and those that are deemed unreadable will be returned ungraded.

Style points

Submission	Style points	Correctness points
Written work	10%	90%
Exams	10%	90%
Lab assignments	20%	80%

Regrading

Style points can be recovered. If you are penalized on style, you may resubmit your assignment with style improvements within seven days from the time that your work is returned. In rare instances, your assignment may be returned without a grade if your style is impenetrable. If so, you will be asked to rework the assignment or problem in question.

You may also resubmit your work for a regrade if you believe that it was graded incorrectly. Your entire submission will be regraded, and your new score replaces the original, whether higher or lower.