Homework resources and collaboration policy

• Homeworks are due at the begining of class
• Important Note:
  As we often reuse problem set questions from previous years, covered by papers and webpages, we expect the students not to copy, refer to, or look at the solutions in preparing their answers. Since this is a graduate class, we expect students to want to learn and not google for answers. The purpose of problem sets in this class is to help you think about the material, not just give us the right answers. Therefore, please restrict attention to the books mentioned on the webpage when solving problems on the problem set. If you do happen to use other material, it must be acknowledged clearly with a citation on the submitted solution.
• Homeworks will be done individually: each student must hand in their own answers. It is acceptable, however, for students to collaborate in figuring out answers and helping each other solve the problems. We will be assuming that, as participants in a graduate course, you will be taking the responsibility to make sure you personally understand the solution to any work arising from such collaboration. You also must indicate on each homework with whom you collaborated.
• The project may be completed by teams of two students.
• Code of Student Behavior

Late policy

• Every component of the Project must be handed in on time; no late components will be accepted.
  For the assignments:
• You will be allowed 3 total late days without penalty for the entire semester. For instance, you may be late by 1 day on three different homeworks or late by 3 days on one homework. Once those days are used, you will be penalized according to the policy below:
• Homework is worth full credit at the beginning of class on the due date.
• It is worth half credit for the next 48 hours.
• It is worth zero credit after that.
• You must turn in all 3 of the homeworks, even if for zero credit, in order to pass the course.

Homework-regrading policy

If you feel that we have made an error in grading your homework, please turn in your homework with a written explanation and we will consider your request. Please note that regrading of a homework may cause your grade to go up or down.

General Comments on the Assignments

Please read these carefully. Not following these overall guidelines may result in penalties for the assignments.

• Many assignments will includes both written questions and coding questions. Here, your submission should contain two parts: (1) A hard-copy part with your answers to the written questions and a high-level description of each of the coding questions. (2) The code itself, which must be submitted using ??ASTEP??, before the time specified in the assignment. For more information about ASTEP, see here.

• For the written questions:
  • Make sure your name is clearly printed on your hardcopy submission. For the sake of your privacy, do not include your student ID.
  • if you hand-write, instead of type, the written part of your assignment, you must make sure that your writing is legible.
  • you should be clear and concise ('more' does not imply 'better') and explain your answers.
  • prominently display the question number and letter.
• For the coding questions:
  • It is up to you to convince the grader that your code works; not vice versa. This means you should include documentation, describing what the code does, and how it should work. It should also include traces that illustrate this behaviour.
  • You should follow standard 'good' coding practices: meaningful names, proper indentation, appropriate comments, etc.
  • Use the exact command-line arguments (if any), directory names and file names as described in the assignment specification so that we can run scripts to compile and test your programs automatically.
  • In general, the question will specify the language for your code (which will typically be C or C++).
  • Each coding question should be done in its own subdirectory. Typing 'make' in the subdirectory should compile the program. The name of the executable should be the same as the name of the subdirectory.