Critical programming skills cannot be learned by attending lecture. You should budget enough time to work on the projects as well. Use the following time table to plan ahead. Note that the projects are due on Wednesdays (when we don't have lectures). Projects are due by midnight (1 minute after 11:59pm) of the due date. You will use the submit command on UNIX to turn in your projects. While you may use any platform to develop your programs, your project must compile and run under the IRIX 6.2 operating system on the UMBC gl systems.
Projects will be graded on five criteria: correctness, design, style, documentation and efficiency. So, turning in a project that merely "works" is not sufficient to receive full credit.
If you turn in your project on time, you will receive a 5% bonus on your project grade. If you turn in your project up to 2 days (48 hours) late, then you forgo the 5% bonus. Projects will not be accepted beyond the 2 day grace period. Since each project is due on a Wednesday, the result is that no projects will be accepted after midnight on the Friday after the due date.
You may turn in incomplete projects for grading. A project that runs incorrectly will receive no more than 75% of the grade. A project that does not compile will receive no more than 50% of the grade. These guidelines are for incomplete projects where a good effort was made. Garbage will receive 0%.
Read this section carefully! It describes what constitutes as cheating for this course. If you have questions, as the instructor. Ignorance will not be accepted as an excuse after the fact.
All projects must be completed by your own individual effort. You should never have a copy of someone else's project either on paper or electronically under any circumstance. Also, you should never give a copy of your project, either on paper or electronically, to another student. This also means that you cannot "work" on the project together. Cases of academic dishonesty will be dealt with severely. Egregious cases of cheating will be written up as a "more serious" infraction. In this case, you will not be allowed to drop the course. Also, a "more serious "infraction would appear as a permanent part of your student record and would be seen by potential employers when they ask for an official copy of your transcript.
We will be using special software to check for cheating. The software is quite sophisticated and has "surprised" some students in the past. We will, of course, not release the details of the internal workings of this cheat-checking software, but you are forewarned that there is no difficulty in comparing every pair of submitted projects --- even in a class of this size.
Finally, you are also warned that if your project is turned in by someone else, then both you and the person copying your project will receive a 0 for that project. This includes "substantially similar" projects. Furthermore, all parties concerned will have their prior projects checked for cheating. So, if you cheat on Project 5, you can lose all the points from Projects 1 through 4 --- even if you did all the work and just "let" other people copy from you.