Course Administration and Policies

• Subscribe to the class discussion group. (access code: col333)
• Some programming assignments are done individually; others may be done individually or in teams of 2. No team can be repeated in a second assignment. You may discuss the subject matter with other students in the class, but all solutions, code, writeups must be your own. In your writeup mention names of any students (outside your team) with whom you discussed the projects. You are expected to maintain the utmost level of academic integrity in the course.
• Programming assignments may be handed in up to a week late, at a penalty of 10% of the maximum grade per day.
• Programming assignments will be auto-graded. If the submission does not conform to assignment guidelines, or for any reason (even if small) does not run on our auto-grading servers, there will be a TA demo with a 20% penalty.
• If at the time of auto-grading some small logical bugs are found, then the student may be allowed to fix the bug and resubmit at the penalty of 50%. This will be permissible on special request based on the amount of change to the code and will be under the discretion of the instructor.

Cheating Vs. Collaborating Guidelines

As adapted from Dan Weld's guidelines.

Collaboration is a very good thing. On the other hand, cheating is considered a very serious offense. Please don't do it! Concern about cheating creates an unpleasant environment for everyone. If you cheat, you get a zero in the assignment, and additionally you risk losing your position as a student in the department and the institute. The department's policy on cheating is to report any cases to the disciplinary committee. What follows afterwards is not fun.

So how do you draw the line between collaboration and cheating? Here's a reasonable set of ground rules. Failure to understand and follow these rules will constitute cheating, and will be dealt with as per institute guidelines.

• The Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi Rule: This rule says that you are free to meet with fellow students(s) and discuss assignments with them. Writing on a board or shared piece of paper is acceptable during the meeting; however, you should not take any written (electronic or otherwise) record away from the meeting. This applies when the assignment is supposed to be an individual effort or whenever two teams discuss common problems they are each encountering (inter-group collaboration). After the meeting, engage in a half hour of mind-numbing activity (like watching an episode of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi), before starting to work on the assignment. This will assure that you are able to reconstruct what you learned from the meeting, by yourself, using your own brain.
• The Right to Information Rule: To assure that all collaboration is on the level, you must always write the name(s) of your collaborators on your assignment. This also applies when two groups collaborate.