Course Policies

Last updated: Thu, 31 Mar 2022 09:36:41 -0400

This page describes the policies of the course. Please read it carefully.

1 Academic Honesty

Students are expected to follow the UMB Academic Honesty Policy, as described in Appendix B of the Student Code of Conduct document.

In particular, this means that all submitted work must be completely yours, i.e., written from scratch, in your own words.

See the Collaboration Policy and Distribution of Course Materials Policy for additional information.

Violations

Note that the department and the Dean of Students (DoS) Office may also impose additional penalties on top of the above.

See list of Academic Honesty Violations and Collaboration Policy for more details.

2 Collaboration Policy

All submitted work be must your own, i.e., written from scratch, in your own words.

Discussing homework with other students, however, is allowed and encouraged.

Consulting other reference sources to learn course materials is also allowed, with the exception of "tutoring" sites like Chegg or Course Hero. (We will be monitoring these sites for infractions.)

All discussion or external sources, however, must be disclosed. See README.

README

Collaboration Violations

Submitting work that is not your own is an academic honesty violation.

Note that taking someone else’s answer and doing any of the following is still considered "not your own words":

• changing variable names or replacing words with synonyms,

• changing a sentence’s grammar,

• rearranging order of sentences or paragraphs,

• cutting words or sentences,

• any other isomorphic obfuscations.

In our experience, none of these are ever an issue for students who submit their own work. But if you are unsure, ask a member of the course staff.

Regret Policy

(Adapted from Harvard CS50’s policy)

The course staff understands that many academic honesty violations occur in a moment of panic right before a deadline.

Thus we will allow the following "regret" policy:

If you commit an academic honesty violation that you later regret, you may notify the course staff at any time before the homework in question has been graded and returned.

In exchange for your honesty, you will receive zero points for the problem in question and the matter will be considered closed. No additional penalties will be imposed and no further action will be taken (except in the cases where this policy is abused).

3 Distribution of Course Materials

Course materials may not be distributed without permission from the instructor.

This means you may not post homework questions to mailing lists or websites like Stack Overflow, Chegg, Course Hero, etc.

Infractions will be considered academic honesty violations.

4 Grading

Grades will be computed at the end of the semester according to the following criteria:

Grade Components

Letter Grades

The course staff reserves the right to adjust these as needed at the end of the semester, including further splitting the grades into plus/minus brackets.

5 Homework Submission Policy

Homework is submitted to Gradescope, under the appropriate assignment label. Also, each page must be assigned to the correct problem.

Homework solutions may be resubmitted as many times as needed, up to the deadline.

In addition to your solution files, each homework submission must include a README file with the following information:

• Time spent (in hours) on the assignment,

• the names of other students you worked with,

• and any other books or websites you used.

See the Collaboration Policy for more details.

Note: Only homework submitted to Gradescope will count in this course. Do not email hw submissions to the course staff. It will be ignored and will not count.

6 Late Policy

Homework is due (typically) Sundays at 11:59 EST.

In general, late homework is not accepted, for many reasons:

• It is disruptive to the course. For example, we may discuss or present solutions in lecture right after a homework is due. Having to rearrange a course because of a late assignment is unfair to other students in the class.

• It takes up staff resources. Having to deal with late homework means less time for office hours, discussion boards, etc.

• Finally, because homework is assigned continually, a late submission will cause work to overlap with subsequent assignments, making it difficult to catch up.

Of course, unforeseen things will happen. Therefore, we’ve adopted the following rules:

Over the course of the semester, you can use up to three late days. These can be allocated however you want (all to one assignment, one to each assignment, etc.).

We strongly prefer you not use more than one per assignment, because it disrupts grading; nevertheless, if you do need to take more than a day on an assignment, you can.

Don’t ask for permission; don’t tell us your reason: any time you miss the submission deadline, we will assume you are using a late day. Each part of a day that you are late counts as a full day. However, if you take more than one day, you must inform us (post a private message on the forum) so we know to expect something from you.

No exceptions allowed unless you have a Dean’s Note indicating family/health emergency.

Note: The course has enough homeworks that missing one is probably not going to affect your course grade too much (and the lowest grade is dropped anyways). It is far worse to fall behind. Therefore, if you miss a deadline, you may be best off catching up with the content (through class or talking to course staff) and moving on.

7 Lecture Policy

Lectures meet in-person. See also Lecture.

Attendance is not taken, though overall partipation, of which lecture is a part, is a factor in final grades. See also Grading.

There will usually be a short quiz at the end of lectures. See Quizzes for more info.

Lecture may be recorded, but let the course staff know if you are not comfortable with this.

8 Quizzes

Each lecture will usually be accompanied by a very short quiz (one or two questions), administered on Gradescope.

Though they are graded and worth a small fraction of the final grade (see Grading), their primary intent is to help students pay attention in lecture and to make sure everyone is caught up on at least the most basic course topics.

All quizzes are open book but you will only have a few minutes to complete it.