The rationale behind this policy is to support two central learning goals of this course: (1) building a solid foundation in programming and (2) strengthening your critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. In our experience, outsourcing your work to GenAI tools undermines the growth of these skills—skills that are crucial not only for success on written exams, but also for excelling in technical job interviews and for making effective use of GenAI tools in the future.
Lectures. Your lecture participation score is determined by answering iClicker polls during lecture. The score is based on participation (and not whether your responses are correct). Using a classmate’s iClicker account (or allowing someone else to use your iClicker account) during lecture is prohibited.
Precepts. Your precept participation score is determined by attending and participating in precept. You are expected to attend and participate in the precept for which you have officially registered. To earn participation credit, you must mark yourself present at the beginning of precept.
Office hours. Your office hour participation score is determined by attending at least one of the course instructors' office hours in the first half of the semester (up to and including October 16, 2026).
Automatic waivers. We automatically waive your lowest four lecture participation scores and your lowest two precept participation scores. This accounts for illnesses, religious observances, varsity athletic competitions, late course enrollment, and technical issues with your iClicker app.
Special waivers. To request a lecture (or precept) participation waiver (beyond the automatic ones), please post in Ed using the Accommodations category and the Lectures (or Precepts) subcategory and explain the situation. Do not request a special waiver until after you have used up all of your automatic waivers.
Collaboration policy.
You must complete each question variant
(that is randomly assigned to you) entirely on your own,
with no outside help beyond the course materials;
in particular, use of generative AI tools is prohibited.
However, you are permitted to discuss a question variant after it is
submitted (and you are assigned a new question variant).
If you wish to discuss a question variant on
Ed Discussion,
post the entire question, answer, and explanation,
including the question and variant IDs (the numbers after instance_question/ and variant_id= in your browser's
address bar), which the course staff can use to uniquely identify your submission.
Grading policy. You may attempt each question in each quiz as many times as you like, but there is a delay between attempts (the exact period depends on the question, but it is usually 2 or 15 minutes). On each attempt, you will receive a randomly assigned variant of the same question. After submitting your answer, you will receive the correct answer and an explanation. We will record your best score for each question.
Late submissions. Quizzes are due at 11:59pm ET on Saturday. Your maximum possible score decreases by 10% for each day (or part of a day) past the deadline. For example,
When computing the quiz component of your course grade, we will drop your lowest quiz (one week of questions). This accounts for illnesses, religious observances, varsity athletic competitions, late course enrollment, and technical issues. Please do not request a quiz extension unless you have special circumstances for more than one week of quizzes. Quiz extensions are considered only with the recommendation from your Assistant Dean for Studies.
Grading. Programming assignments are worth 30% of your total course grade, split into two components:
Submission. You may resubmit files without penalty up until the submission deadline.
Submitting with a partner. On assignments that permit working with a partner, you must register your partnership in TigerFile. Either partner may submit files. Both partners receive the same score.
Check all submitted files. Clicking the Check All Submitted Files button compiles your Java programs, runs a battery of unit tests, and reports the results. You may click this button at most 10 times per assignment; if you are working with a partner, this limit applies to the group.
Acknowledgments file.
All assignments must include a file named acknowledgments.txt,
which includes your acknowledgment of original work
(as specified in Rights, Rules, Responsibilities),
any citations, along with the names and dates of those who provided help.
Submitting the acknowledgments.txt file indicates that you have stopped
working on your assignment and your submitted work is ready to be graded.
Your assignment will not be graded unless you submit the acknowledgments.txt file.
Late submissions.
Assignments are due at
11:59pm ET on Monday evenings.
If any part of an assignment is submitted late, the entire assignment will be marked late.
We consider your assignment submitted as soon as you submit the acknowledgments.txt file.
Penalties for late submissions. Late assignments incur a penalty of 10% of the total points per day (or partial day) late. Penalties for the first four late days are automatically waived. This accounts for illnesses, religious observances, varsity athletic competitions, late course enrollment, conflicting deadlines, and travel. Please do not request an assignment extension unless you will exceed this limit.
Additional extensions are considered only with the recommendation from your Assistant Dean for Studies and granted under special circumstances. Requests made at the last minute are less likely to be approved, and extensions for the final assignment are particularly rare due to grading constraints. For such a request, please have your Assistant Dean for Studies email the senior course staff with the following information:
If you are working with a partner, any late penalties apply to the group. The number of free late days a group can use is the minimum of the number of free late days each member has remaining.
Penalties for submission mistakes. If you make a submission mistake, you can request a regrade with a penalty of 5% (on the total assignment grade, including the code review component). Examples of submission mistakes include: submitting an incorrect version of a file and forgetting to submit the acknowledgments.txt file.
Classwide competitions.
On some assignments, you may (optionally) submit your code to a classwide
competition. We will time your programs and display the results in a
public leaderboard. To enter the competition, submit your code
along with a file nickname.txt. Whatever
you put in nickname.txt will be used as your alias in the leaderboard.
There is no official reward for doing well in the competition.
Coursera policy. You are not permitted to use the Coursera autograders from Algorithms, Part I or II.
Each student completes 3 code reviews over the semester. Code reviews take 20 minutes and are conducted one-on-one with a TA.
What to expect. The TA will ask you to demonstrate specific components of your submission. You may refer to your code and run it. The goal is to get clear evidence that you understand how your code works; the TA is not trying to trick you.
Component-based grading. Your code review grade is based on demonstrating individual components of the assignment. A component earns credit only if you can show a real connection between your code and its behavior, and is graded according to the following scale:
| activity | your partner | course staff | 226 alums | generative AI | classmates | other people |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discuss concepts with ... | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| acknowledge collaboration with ... |
✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| expose solutions to ... | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | no | no | no |
| view solutions from ... | ✔ | no | no | no | no | no |
| plagiarize code from ... | no | no | no | no | no | no |
Your solutions. You must individually compose all of your solutions. The term solutions refers to any of the products created when completing a programming assignment, such as source code (including comments). It includes both finished and unfinished products, regardless of correctness or completeness.
Collaboration with course staff. You are welcome to discuss your solutions with course staff members (instructor and preceptors) in office hours or via a private post in the course discussion forum. Do not post or email us your code; instead, submit it via TigerFile.
Collaboration with classmates. We encourage you to discuss common concerns with classmates either privately via personal interactions or publicly in the course discussion forum. These discussions must be kept at a general level, without exposing your solutions.
| For example, you may discuss: | But, you may not: |
|---|---|
|
|
Collaboration with COS 226 graduates (including lab TAs and peer tutors). You are permitted to show your solutions to anyone who has successfully completed COS 226. So, for example, you may receive help from lab TAs in debugging your code. Of course, you must still individually compose your solutions. So, for example, you may not allow another individual to write, type, or dictate code; lead you step-by-step through any part of the assignment; or communicate solutions (including their solutions from a previous offering). Other individuals may help you under these same conditions, provided they are not taking COS 226 now and never will in the future.
Collaboration using generative AI. You may not use generative AI (such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Jetbrains AI Assistant, or Cursor) to create or debug code.
Collaboration with a partner. On those programming assignments designated as partner, the collaboration policy is relaxed to permit working with a classmate, subject to the following rules:
Collaboration with yourself. If you took COS 226 (or Algorithms, Part I or II from Coursera) during a previous offering, you may refer to your old programming assignment only if you wrote all of the code on your own in the previous offering (and you are not working with a partner in this offering). Though, in our experience, students who re-do all of the assignments from scratch are much more likely to succeed in the course, so this is what we strongly recommend.
Collaboration acknowledgment. You must acknowledge all collaboration in the acknowledgments.txt file for that week’s assignment.
Outside sources and citations. Copying or adapting code that is not yours is permitted only if it comes from the course materials (i.e., the course textbook, companion booksite, programming assignment specifications, checklists, lecture slides, and precepts). You must cite any code that you copy or adapt; the only exception to this rule is for code that appears in the assignment specification or checklist, which you may use without citation.
Plagiarism. Programming is creative work and the academic regulations that apply to plagiarizing prose also apply to plagiarizing code. Rights, Rules, Responsibilities defines plagiarism as “the use of any outside source without proper acknowledgment.” It ranges from “verbatim copying” (e.g., cutting-and-pasting code) to “thorough paraphrasing” (e.g., changing variable names or rearranging code). We use sophisticated tools to flag similar programs and our teaching staff takes the issue very seriously.
Regret clause.
If you neglect to cite a source on a programming assignment in this course,
you may resubmit your acknowledgments.txt file, adding proper acknowledgments,
at any time before Dean's Date. You must also notify the course instructor.
If the source is unauthorized, you will likely receive a zero (0) on the assignment
(for violating course policies).
However, with proper acknowledgments, this would not be plagiarism,
so we would not initiate a Committee on Discipline (CoD) case.
Once a case has been submitted to the CoD, the matter is outside of our control
and the regret clause cannot be invoked.
Penalties. We refer alleged academic violations (including plagiarism and failure to disclose the use of generative AI) to the Faculty–Student Committee on Discipline. If found responsible, you will receive a zero (0) on the assignment adjudicated by the CoD, plus whatever penalty the CoD imposes. A finding of responsible on multiple assignments can result in more serious course penalties, including an F as a course grade.