Grades will be assigned roughly as follows:
- Projects: 40%
- Homeworks: 20%
- Midterms: 20%
- Final: 20%
There will be two midterm exams and a final exam for this course:
- Midterm 1: Friday April 20, 2001
- Midterm 2: Friday May 11, 2001
- Final exam: 2:30-4:20 pm, Wednesday June 6, 2001
Homework will be due 1 week after it is assigned. It will primarily consist of questions from the textbook.
Projects will be the most significant part of this course. We will be dealing directly with the Linux operating system. Although they might take a long time to complete you will probably learn more from these than any other part of the class.Correspondingly, you need to be quite comfortable programming in C. (If you know C++, then you basically already know C.) If you're not already well-versed in C programming, you will need to teach yourself, and do so in a hurry. This will put you at a disadvantage relative to your classmates...
(Many of these policies are taken verbatim from previous instances of this course.)
- Late Policy: unless otherwise indicated, assignments and projects are due by the end of lecture on their due date. If you hand in an assignment late, we will take off 20% for each day (or portion thereof) it is late. So, if an assignment is due on Jan 8, it must be in the TA or lecturer's hands by 12:30 pm in class on that day. We will not consider granting Incompletes as grades.
- Reasonableness: the "Reasonable Person Principle" applies throughout this course. This principle simply states that a reasonable request made in a reasonable fashion shall be reasonably handled by reasonable persons. The TA's and I are reasonable people: we expect that everybody else involved in this class will be as well.
- Cheating vs. Collaboration: Collaboration is a very good thing. On the other hand, cheating is considered a very serious offense. Please don't do it! Concern about cheating creates an unpleasant environment for everyone. If you cheat, you risk losing your position as a student in the department and the college. The department's policy on cheating is to report any cases to the college cheating committee. What follows afterwards is not fun.
So how do you draw the line between collaboration and cheating? Here's a reasonable set of groundrules. Failure to understand and follow these rules will constitute cheating, and will be dealt with as per university guidelines.
The Gilligan's Island Rule: This rule says that you are free to meet with fellow students(s) and discuss assignments with them. Writing on a board or shared piece of paper is acceptable during the meeting; however, you should not take any written (electronic or otherwise) record away from the meeting. This applies when the assignment is supposed to be an individual effort or whenever two teams discuss common problems they are each encountering (inter-group collaboration). After the meeting, engage in a half hour of mind-numbing activity (like watching an episode of Gilligan's Island), before starting to work on the assignment. This will assure that you are able to reconstruct what you learned from the meeting, by yourself, using your own brain.The Freedom of Information Rule: To assure that all collaboration is on the level, you must always write the name(s) of your collaborators on your assignment.