CS 525 Course Details

CS 525 - Grading Policy - Fall 2006

The breakdown between the various assignments is as follows:

Value	Breakdown	Item
30%	(several)	Presentations as Proponent Team: including powerpoints prepared, oral presentation, excercises prepared, understanding illustrated, final material submitted (as team; due within one week of your presentation! )
10%	(several)	Performance as Rebuttal Team: including material prepared, oral discussion in class, understanding illustrated, questions prepared, final material submitted (as team; due within one week of your presentation! )
10%	(several)	Audience : Written Critiques Class Participation
25%	(one)	Final Exam
25%	(one)	Course Project
100%		TOTAL

Final Exam

There will be one single exam, to be held in class. In some sense, you will be preparing your own exam throughout the duration of the class. That is, as proponents you will be preparing excercises for the class, and as rebuttal team and audience you will be preparing questions and answers on the material. The material to be covered on the exam will simply be put together as a subset of problems drawn directly from those excercies, questions and tutorials prepared by you.

Projects

All projects should be done in teams (of 2). Each stage of the project will be graded, and the sum of all stages corresponds to the total project score. By default, one score is assigned to the team as a whole. If this happens to be unjust in your particular project context, you must communicate this concern to the instructor as early on as you can, to have time to rectify any concerns.

Homeworks

There will be no additional homeworks beyond the tutorials and critiques, explained earlier.

Grading Philosophy

Final grades will reflect the extent to which you have demonstrated understanding of the material, completed the assigned tasks, and participated actively in class. The base level grade will be a "B" which indicates that the basic objectives for the course have been met. That is, if you do everything I expect of you (at a satisfactory level), you should expect to receive a "B" for the course. A grade of "A" will indicate significant achievement beyond the basic objectives and a grade of "C" will indicate that not all basic objectives were met, but work was satisfactory for credit. A "D" grade will be given if the student's performance in the course is unacceptable for graduate credit. A grade of "F" indicates that the student did not perform work suitable for receiving graduate credit and is usually associated with academic dishonesty.

Policy on Academic Honesty

Don't Cheat!! Unless explicitly noted, all work is to be done on an individual basis. Any violation of the WPI's guidelines for academic honesty will result in a grade of "F" for the course. Make no mistake, your entire career depends on your integrity and your career starts here while you are a graduate student.

Consider the following concrete example. The homework assigned during the course may take several weeks. I encourage students to discuss with each other the issues, problems, and challenges of these projects. However, all collaboration should cease once students start writing their solutions (assuming individual solutions are required to be turned in for the assignment. . When I receive almost identical written solutions for the same problem, both assignments will receive a failing grade. I advise all students to avoid this situation.

You may wonder when a particular activity breaks the honesty principles set forward in this course. The following situations carry strong penalties:

You submit software that you have not written -- this is plagiarism. This includes code that you have downloaded over the Internet and turned in as your own. I expect every student to be able to explain in detail any code submitted as an assignment. If I suspect, or have evidence, that a student has plagiarized, I will meet with the student to verify the infraction, and the student will receive zero credit for the assignment.

If you give all, or even just part, of your software to a fellow student to show how a particular assignment is coded, you are helping a fellow student commit plagiarism. If I find that student X can’t understand the code submitted for an assignment, and student X says that he coded his solution after reading the code provided by student Y, and I meet with both students to confirm the situation, then both student X and student Y receive zero credit for the assignment. This is a very subtle problem, because you will most likely not be caught. You must understand that in this situation, student Y has not helped student X; student Y has reduced the education of student X.

So, what are the valid ways for students to interact?

If student Y has completed an assignment, and student X is having difficulties, student Y can answer general programming questions asked by student X without directly showing how to solve the assignment. In such a situation, if student Y wishes to help, the goal should be to help student X solve the assignment on his own.

end of grading policy