INFO 1100: Assignments

Assignments

The assignments in this course are designed to help you develop and assess programming skills. Your work for the class will consist of the following components: readings from the course textbook and in-class handouts; near-weekly homeworks that let you practice and develop your programming skills; and a mid-term and final exam. Of all these assignments, the homeworks are most critical because they are where you will really be learning the course material.

Homework assignments are posted to, and can be submitted at, our Course Management System. If you do not have an account for this class, please contact the professor to be added.

Grading formula

• Homeworks: 50% (lowest completed homework dropped (grade D or higher))
• Midterm: 25%
• Final: 25%

Grading is not just a matter of numbers, but also of judgment. The instructor reserves the right to adjust grades by up to half a letter grade based on knowledge of your performance not summed up in this tidy formula.

Due dates

Homeworks are generally due on Sundays at 11:00pm, via submission to our Course Management System. Late assignments accrue a half-letter-grade penalty for every 24 hours they are late, starting directly after the deadline (i.e. submitting at midnight on the due date would make a one-day penalty). All students may submit up to 2 homeworks in the semester up to 2 days late without a penalty - please save these for emergencies such as sickness, as additional extension requests will only be granted in extraordinary circumstances.

Regrade requests

If you believe that there may have been an error in grading your assignment, you may request a regrade in the 7 days after an assignment has been graded by contacting the professor in person or by email, explaining the nature of the mistake. The professor reserves the right to lower the grade as well as to raise it.

Academic Integrity

Academic integrity is taken seriously in this course. Please be aware of the specific requirements of academic integrity at Cornell.

You may be wondering what 'academic integrity' means in the context of programming. In this course, you may consult with other students for conceptual and debugging help while working on your code, but unless otherwise specified on the assignment the final code you submit should be written, tested, and documented by you. This means that, with the exception of code developed in in-class exercises, if 2 students submit code that is substantially the same we will consider this a likely academic violation. All assignments will be automatically scanned for similarity.

It is a usual practice for real-world programmers to find and adapt publically available code written by others in their own projects, and you may also do this in this class. If you use 'found code' from on-line sources you must bring that code up to the standards expected in this course. You must also identify which code is 'found' and document its source with a comment in your code, just as you would for an academic citation in a written paper. Unless otherwise specified for a particular assignment, found code may not take up more than 10% of the code that you submit (counting by correctly formatted lines).