Logistical Responsibilities
Fortunately, most students are excellent at taking responsibility for their own logistics. Nonetheless we state these responsibilities here so that they are clear to everyone.
Submissions
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You are responsible for submitting your work through CMS. Email submissions, whether late or on time, will be deleted without response, regardless of whether CMS appeared to be online or not. If CMS did truly go down for an extended period, the professor would find out the next morning, and the entire class would get an extension.
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You are responsible for verifying that you have submitted the intended versions of your files. Requests to substitute another version (e.g., “I accidentally submitted the wrong files”) will be denied.
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You are responsible for ensuring that the final submission you make in CMS is the one you wish to have graded. Requests to have the course staff grade earlier versions will be denied.
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You are responsible for uploading your submission before the deadline. The deadline for an assignment is not the time by which you must finish writing a solution; rather, the deadline is the time by which you must successfully upload your solution files to CMS and confirm that CMS has recorded the correct versions of those files. CMS might lag near the deadline as many students attempt to upload their submissions at the last minute, perhaps even causing your submission to incur a late day. Requests to have a late day removed because CMS lagged near the deadline will be denied. We recommend that you upload your files at least one hour before the deadline. File system timestamps on your local hard drive or in a Github repository are never acceptable as evidence of existence of a file prior to the deadline, because you are under complete control of that timestamp.
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You are responsible for using the CMS grace period wisely. That grace period will be 20 minutes, unless otherwise specified. Do not (re)submit after the deadline unless you are comfortable with the fact that you might incur a late day. The only purpose of the grace period is for you to resolve any last-minute upload issues—not to continue working past the deadline. The grace period applies only to the original deadline, not to any late day deadlines.
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You are responsible for using late days wisely. The CMS accounting of late/slip days is final. Once a late day is used, it remains used. The course staff will not adjust your late day totals, not even if your reason is that you accidentally submitted only 1 minute late. Be aware that every member of a team incurs late days if a submission is late.
Exams
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You are responsible for clearing your schedule at the beginning of the semester to take exams. The Registrar announces the exams well before the beginning of classes. If you cannot commit to attending both the Prelim and the Final, you should drop this class immediately. Makeup exams will be offered only in those cases where required by university policy.
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You are responsible for bringing your Cornell ID card to exams. Without it, you will not be permitted to take the exam, and you will receive a score of zero.
Attendance
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You are responsible for your iClicker. If you forgot your iClicker or the batteries are dead, stay and enjoy the lecture, but you won’t get any attendance points.
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You are responsible for attending the discussion section for which you are registered. It’s where the rest of your team will be! It’s also the only way we can fairly allocate teaching resources, including seats and TAs. If you attend a different section, you won’t get any attendance points.
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You are responsible for being present and participating at all class meetings. Tracking excused absences is infeasible for the course staff. Instead, we will ignore at least four absences—which is equivalent to one week’s worth of the class—in determining your final attendance score. Use those for holidays, travel, interviews, or even catching up on sleep.
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You are responsible for arriving on time to all class meetings. As the saying goes, “Early is on time. On time is late.”