Course Administration

Website

The course website is http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/.

Announcements and Discussion Forum

We will be using Piazza for announcements and class discussion. Piazza is a web-based discussion forum for communication with classmates and the course staff. You can sign up at http://www.piazza.com/cornell/spring2014/cs3110.

You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with all announcements made on Piazza.

The staff continuously monitor the forum and will respond to questions in a timely manner. This is the most efficient method of getting help and has the added advantage that others can benefit from your question.

If you know the answer to a question, feel free to post a reply yourself, but avoid giving away any hints on the homework or posting any part of a solution. This will be considered a violation of Academic Integrity. Generally, rough algorithms or non-solution-specific code fragments are ok if you need them to illustrate a point.

Email Policy

Refrain from emailing the course staff directly. For confidential matters, post a private question to Piazza. This is the most effective way for the course staff to manage such a large course.

If you do happen to send course-related email to the instructor, understand that it will be answered only during specific times set aside during the week for this purpose. Do not expect an instantaneous response. Do not send email about problem sets; such email will be ignored.

CMS

We are using the course management system CMS. Everyone who preregistered for the course is entered, but if you did not preregister, you are probably missing. Please login to http://cms.csuglab.cornell.edu/ and check whether you exist. There will be a list of courses you are registered for, and CS 3110 should be one of them. If not, please send your full name and Cornell netID to the Course Administrator so that you can be registered.

You can check your grades and submit homework in CMS. There is a help page with instructions.

Materials

Text

There is no official textbook for the course. However, here are some useful resources:

• OCaml Reference Manual
• Introduction to Objective Caml, by Jason Hickey, to be published by Cambridge University Press
• Other OCaml Resources

The last link contains many other resources on the Web for OCaml, including other tutorials, free compilers, libraries, etc.

If you want to buy a book, Real World OCaml (Yaron Minsky, Anil Madhavapeddy, and Jason Hickey, O'Reilly, 2013, ISBN 978-1-449-32391-2) is a good choice. Two of the three authors are Cornellians.

Handouts

All handouts will be available either on the course web site or in CMS in pdf, html, or plain text format. Check often for new postings.

i>clickers

You are required to have an i>clicker and to bring it to class every day. You can buy an i>clicker at The Cornell Store. Or you can use i>clicker GO, an app that runs on iOS and Android. Cornell CIT provides technical support for i>clicker. You will need to register your i>clicker with CIT.

Use of someone else's i>clicker, either because you forgot yours or because they cannot be there and asked you to click theirs, is a violation of the Code of Academic Integrity and will be prosecuted.

You will never be graded on whether the answers you submit by i>clicker are correct; it is part of your participation grade.

Lectures and Sections

In the table below, LEC=lecture, DIS=recitation section, MW=Monday & Wednesday, TR=Tuesday & Thursday.

Time and Place

ID	SECTION	DAY & TIME	ROOM	INSTRUCTOR
11258	LEC 001	TR 10:10AM - 11:00AM	Olin 155	Clarkson
11259	DIS 201	MW 02:30PM - 03:20PM	Hollister 306	Recto & Yang
11260	DIS 202	MW 3:35PM - 4:25PM	Hollister 306	Nguyen & Pei
11261	DIS 203	MW 7:30PM - 8:20PM	Hollister 306	Beightol & Hanggi
13144	DIS 204	MW 10:10AM - 11:00AM	Hollister 306	Cao
13145	DIS 205	TR 1:25PM - 2:15PM	Hollister 306	Jette
13146	DIS 206	TR 3:35PM - 4:25PM	Hollister 306	Kelly
13250	DIS 207	MW 2:30PM - 3:20PM	Snee 1150	Weymouth
13251	DIS 208	MW 2:30PM - 3:20PM	Thurston 203	Biddanda
13252	DIS 209	MW 3:35PM - 4:25PM	Phillips 203	Khan
13253	DIS 210	MW 3:35PM - 4:25PM	Hollister 110	Acharya
13254	DIS 211	MW 7:30PM - 8:20PM	Hollister 110	Genova

Attendance

Attendance at lecture and section is mandatory. Section will cover new material not covered in lecture and provide an opportunity for questions on recent material, assignments, and exams. You must register for a section, but you may attend any section. However, we prefer that you select one and stay with it.

Occasionally section instructors temporarily move their section to a computer lab. Pay attention to announcements to keep track of any room changes.

Notes

Lecture and section notes will be available on the lecture notes page.

Programming Assignments

There will be six problem sets (and an initial, optional Problem Set 0). Each problem set will involve a programming assignment and may include written exercises and optional karma problems. Posted due dates are subject to change. Assignments are due at 11:59pm on the due date.

You should start assignments early. The best use of your time is to think about the problems before typing anything at the computer.

Karma Problems

Assignments may include optional problems called karma problems. These problems exist to provide an extra challenge for those who are up to it. Karma problems will be graded, but will not affect your score—they mostly just give good karma. Students who do karma problems will be noticed, and doing them may be taken into account when assigning final grades. For example, karma might make a difference if you are right on the line between a B+ and an A–. However, spending your time on regular problems is almost always a more effective way to improve your overall score. Tackle karma problems only after you are sure you have the rest of the assignment well in hand.

Joint Work

All assignments will be done in pairs. You will submit a single joint assignment with both names on it. You must form a group in CMS to do this.

Under no circumstances may you collaborate on the homework with anyone except your partner or misrepresent the authorship of your submitted work. Please see the section on Academic Integrity below.

Submission

You must submit your work online via CMS. Follow the online instructions for submitting files.

You may upload as many times as you wish, and only the latest version will be graded. Note however that if you upload both before and after the deadline, the one after the deadline will be taken, and you will be subject to a late penalty.

If you are working with a partner, you should coordinate with your partner well in advance of the due date and time. You must register the partnership in CMS for each problem set. One of the partners must invite the other, and the other must accept the invitation. See the CMS online help for details. Only one of the partners need submit the files.

Please be careful to submit the correct versions of your files. We will view the excuse "I accidentally submitted the wrong version" with extreme skepticism—we have heard it countless times.

Please include the names and netIds (not your Cornell student id!) of you and your partner in all submitted files.

Late Policy

Submit your assignments on time. CMS tends to lag right near the deadline because too many students wait until the last minute to submit, so make sure to finalize your submission approximately 15 minutes before the deadline.

Additionally, make certain that your code compiles. We use an automated test harness to thoroughly grade submissions. Code which does not compile cannot go through the harness and will receive an automatic zero. However, to avoid over-penalizing students for small typographical or cross-platform errors, the course staff will notify students if their submission did not compile and grant a 48 hour window to correct the error with a small (2-3 line) fix. If, after applying the fix, your code runs smoothly through the harness, it will receive no point deductions and be graded as if it were submitted correctly and on time.

Late submissions will not be accepted. If you submit after submissions close on CMS, you will receive no credit for the assignment. The size of this course hinders our ability to deal with abberations in the grading schedule. In order to provide timely feedback, the course staff needs to receive submissions when they are due. That said, we understand that the responsiblities of a full courseload may become overbearing. Hence each student will be granted two late passes for assignments. Using a late pass grants an automatic 48 hour extension to submit the assignment. (On partner assignments, both partners must relinquish a late pass in order to receive an extension). The no-compile grace period does not apply to assignments submitted with a late pass: late-pass submissions that do not compile will receive minimal credit.

Extensions will be granted only in exceptional circumstances, such as documented illness, and are handled exclusively by the instructor.

Exams

There will be two preliminary exams and a final exam. Exams will cover material presented in class and in recitation. Practice exams from previous semesters will be posted on CMS prior to the exam.

The exam schedule can be found here. Makeup prelim exams are offered for students with conflicts. The makeup for a prelim is held on the same day as the prelim itself, but at 5:15–7:15 pm 5:30–7:00 pm [updated 10/01/14]. All students with conflicts must notify the Course Administrator within the first two weeks of the course, so that we can reserve sufficiently large rooms.

No other makeup exams will be offered, including no makeup for the final exam. Creation of alternative exams has become impractical in this course.

• If you cannot attend a prelim because of health or family crises, or similar life events, you may ask the Course Administrator for permission to be excused from the exam. If you miss an exam, and we excused you, we modify the grading formula to compute your grade with just the two other exams.
• If you cannot attend a prelim because of a job interview, sporting event, or similar extra-curricular conflicts, you must ask the Course Administrator how to proceed. We will most likely arrange for you to take the exam in a remote location, such as your hotel room.

In either case, you must ask us for permission: don't just skip exams and assume you can be excused retroactively. If you miss an exam and we didn't excuse you, you get a zero for the missing score.

Grading

The breakdown for the overall course grade is as follows:

• Problem sets: 40%
• Preliminary exams: 30%
• Final exam: 25%
• Participation: 3%
• Meet your professor: 1%
• Course evaluation: 1%

Problems sets are weighted equally. Problem set grading is normally done the weekend after the due date, and assignments returned the following week in section. Graders' comments will be posted on CMS.

Preliminary exams are also weighted equally.

Participation includes participation on Piazza and class participation through i>clicker. To get full credit for class participation on a given day, you must answer 75% of i>clicker questions during that class. (It doesn't matter whether your answer is correct.)

Meet your professor means coming to the instructor's office hours at least one time during the semester, introducing yourself, identifying that this is your "meet your professor" visit, and chatting for awhile. You can chat about academic goals, the course, or anything else that seems interesting to you!

Course evaluation means submitting a response to the online course evaluation conducted each semester by the university. Your responses are anonymous, of course, but the university does give the instructor a list of the names of students who complete the evaluation.

Regrades

For all graded work, you may request a regrade if you feel we have made an error in the grading or simply to request a clarification. There is a deadline for regrade requests, normally one week after grades have been posted.

Regrades for problem sets are done using CMS. Follow the online instructions.

For exams, attach a cover sheet to your exam with a description of the problem and submit it to the Course Administrator in person so that your request can be logged.

Academic Integrity

Absolute integrity is expected of every Cornell student in all academic undertakings. The instructor will prosecute violations aggressively. The course staff uses automated tools to detect plagiarism. You have been warned.

You are responsible for understanding every word of these policies:

• Cornell University Code of Academic Integrity
• Computer Science Department Code of Academic Integrity

The protocol for prosecution of violations is described here: Explanation of AI Proceedings.

Under no circumstances may you hand in work done with or by someone else under your own name or share code with anyone else except your partner. (You would be amazed at how easy it is to tell when code has been shared.) You may discuss general questions regarding the OCaml language or the requirements of the assignment with others, but it must never go down to the level of program design or coding.

All exams are closed book. You may not give nor receive assistance from anyone else during an exam.

You may not give away any hints or post any code that might be part of a solution on Piazza. Rough algorithms or non-solution-specific code fragments are ok if you need them to illustrate a point.

If you are unsure about what is permissible and what is not, please ask.

Special Needs

We provide appropriate academic accommodations for students with special needs and/or disabilities. Requests for academic accommodations are to be made during the first three weeks of the semester and must be accompanied by official documentation. Please register with Student Disability Services in 420 CCC to document your eligibility.