CompSci 142
/ CSE 142 Winter 2018 | News | Course Reference | Schedule
| Project Guide
This webpage was adapted from Alex
Thornton’s CS 141
CompSci 142 / CSE 142 Winter 2018
Project Guide
The
projects
Introduction
This
quarter, you'll work on six projects. All of them will involve Java
programming. It is not necessarily the case that the assignments will increase
in size or difficulty throughout the quarter; they will be centered around topics that are covered in lecture, which vary in
difficulty (and, I should note, different people will find different aspects of
this course to be more difficult than others).
Evaluation
of your work
Each
of your projects will be graded using a somewhat different scale, though all
will bear the same weight on your final course grade. Some projects are broken
into parts, while others are single programs. When you write code, it is
naturally your primary goal to write a program that works correctly; however,
writing a correctly-working program is not your sole objective. Each of your
programs will be evaluated for style and quality of approach, in addition to
correctness. Some projects will limit what features of a particular programming
language you're permitted to use, and your score will suffer if you stray away
from the features.
We
reserve the right to assign zero points to any program that cannot be compiled
and/or executed.
Late
work
Things
happen and ten-week quarters can be unforgiving. It's not unreasonable to
expect that you may find it difficult to finish one of the assignments on time,
even if you're on top of things most of the time. I get emails often from
students, saying things like If I just had
one more day to work on this, I'd get it done! On the other hand, being
consistently behind is a recipe for struggle in this course; we'll be moving
quickly, and it will be progressively harder to catch up the farther behind you
get.
The
best balance between these two realities is that everyone is allowed to have a
tough time with a project once this quarter — maybe you underestimated the
difficulty of a project, maybe you have three midterms and a paper due the same
day, maybe you have a sudden outside commitment that can't be avoided. For this
reason, I've developed a late work policy:
Each student is permitted to submit one project up to 48 hours late, with no questions asked about why and no prior notification required.
We'll
be tracking this throughout the quarter and, of course, will not grant the
extension to anyone more than once. But this should accommodate the unforeseen
issues that might otherwise prevent you from finishing a project on time.
Other
than this, late work is not accepted in this course. However, partially
complete work can certainly earn partial credit, so if you haven't completed a
project and have already used your one-time extension, it's best to submit what
you have before the deadline rather than submitting nothing.
Out-of-the-ordinary
circumstances sometimes warrant exceptions to this policy; if you are faced
with a problem that is preventing you from getting your work done on time,
either on a single project or chronically, please contact me and we can talk
about how best to approach the problem.
Re-evaluation
of your work
The
TA will be managing the grading all of the projects this quarter. If you believe
you've been graded unfairly, you should first contact your TA to discuss the
issue. If, after that conversation, you're still feeling that your score does
not fairly represent your work, contact me and I'll be glad to arbitrate.
Understand, however, that my overruling a TA's judgment is relatively rare.
Submitting
your assignments
When
you complete each project, you must submit it to us electronically. For each
project, you will find an assignment dropbox in the
EEE course website. Please name your submission last_first_projectx.zip, where
last and first are your last and first name, and x is the id of the project.
Understand that we will only accept projects submitted using the procedure
described there; we do not accept printed copies of your projects, nor
do we accept them via email under any circumstances.
You
are responsible for submitting the version of your project that you want
graded. We will grade the most recent submission that you made before the
deadline. Accidentally submitting the wrong version will not be considered
grounds for a regrade.
Academic
honesty
The
policy
As
CompSci 142 or CSE 142 students, you are expected to
know and follow the academic honesty policies of both the Bren School of ICS and
the University as a whole. Please take a few minutes to read the policies,
which can be found at this
link.
All
of your project work is expected to be completed solely by you. Worker
in larger groups and/or sharing of code or solutions between students is not
permitted. Note that "high-level discussion of course material for better
understanding" is permitted and encouraged, but when it comes time to sit
down and write code or other graded artifacts, that is expected to be done by
you and you alone. All submissions are compared to one another using an
automated plagiarism detection system. This system is extraordinarily good at
finding similarities between submissions, even when there are superficial
differences. (Note that we also compare your submissions to those submitted
during previous quarters whenever one of these assignments was given during a
previous quarter, so it is an exceedingly bad idea to turn in, or even refer
to, code or solutions written by a friend of yours who took the course
already.)
Since
all of your work is expected to be completed solely by you (and your partner,
on paired assignments), you will be held responsible even if you plagiarize
only a small portion of someone else's work.
Academic
honesty is a two-way street. Providing your code to other students for them to
turn in as their own is not permitted any more than turning in someone else's
code. Resist the temptation to give code to your friends "for
reference." Based on my experience, I can say that your
"friends" may very well betray you and turn it in, anyway, and then
you'll have a lot to answer for.
Naturally,
the Midterm and Final Exam are also expected to be individual efforts.
Dishonest behavior during an exam will not be tolerated.
Violators
of academic honesty policies are subject to the penalties described in the Bren
School of ICS policy. They are also subject to an immediate course grade of F,
and you will not be allowed to drop the course to avoid the grade. Also be
aware that a single documented case of academic dishonesty may preclude you
from switching into computing majors, registering for computing minors, joining
the ICS Honors Program, and graduating from a computing major with honors.
·
Adapted from a similar document from CS 141 Winter 2013 by Alex
Thornton,