PROGRAMMING ASSIGNMENTS

Grading policy.  Your code will be graded for correctness, efficiency, clarity, programming style (including comments), and elegance. It is your responsibility to describe how you have completed the assignment in the submission, not ours to glean this information from your code.

Lateness policy.  If you submit an assignment late (more than a few hours), you risk losing a substantial number of points. Assignments submitted more than a week late, or after the Dean's date, will receive no credit. Your preceptor can grant extensions on an individual basis at their discretion.

Collaboration policy.  Programming is an individual creative process much like composition. You must reach your own understanding of the problem and discover a path to its solution. During this time, discussions with other people are permitted and encouraged. However, when the time comes to write code that solves the problem, such discussions are no longer appropriate: the code must be your own work. If you have a question about how to use some feature of Java, the operating system, or some other relevant application, you can certainly ask your friends or the teaching assistants, but specific questions about code you have written must be treated more carefully. For each assignment, you must specifically describe in your readme.txt file, whatever help (if any) that you received from others and tell us the names of any individuals with whom you collaborated. This includes help from friends, classmates, lab TAs, and course staff members.

Do not, under any circumstances, copy another person's code. Incorporating someone else's code into your program in any form is a violation of academic regulations. This includes adapting solutions or partial solutions to assignments from any offering of this course or any other course. Abetting plagiarism or unauthorized collaboration by "sharing" your code is also prohibited. Sharing code in digital form is an especially egregious violation: do not e-mail your code or make your source files available to anyone.

There is one exception to the code-sharing rule: You may adapt code from the COS 126 or COS 226 course materials provided that you explain what code you use, and cite its source in your comments. An example citation appears in StdGaussian.java.

This policy supplements the University's academic regulations, making explicit what constitutes a violation for this course. Princeton Rights, Rules, Responsibilities handbook asserts:

The only adequate defense for a student accused of an academic violation is that the work in question does not, in fact, constitute a violation. Neither the defense that the student was ignorant of the regulations concerning academic violations nor the defense that the student was under pressure at the time the violation was committed is considered an adequate defense.

Pair programming.   Unless explicitly prohibited, you may work jointly with one partner in your precept. In such cases, both partners are responsible for jointly contributing to and understanding all parts of the completed assignment. In this case, only one partner submits the code and analysis; both partners receive the same grade.

Submission.  Submit your solutions electronically via the web submission system on the course home page. Be sure to write your name and precept number on every file you submit. Be sure to submit all of the required files, and use exactly the (case-sensitive) filenames provided. Once you submit all of the required files, click the Run Script button to make sure that it compiles cleanly. If you do not follow these directions, you will lose a substantial number of points. You can resubmit and unsubmit files as needed up until the submission deadline.