COS316

Grading and Course / Assignment Policies

Grading

Course evaluation consists of programming assignments and exams. For more information on the schedule, see Assignments and Exams. Note that the schedule for assignments on the website are preliminary and subject to change. In case of a mismatch between this document or the information available on the website and announcements by course staff, the latter shall prevail.

Programming assignments put the ideas from lecture into practice by building components of a web framework.

Regrades: If you feel we have made a mistake while grading your work, email your preceptor with a short note describing the potential mistake. You must do this within two weeks of the work being returned.

Late Submission: You should submit your work on an assignment (electronically) before its due time. All assignments will be due at 11:59 PM on their selected days.

If you submit your work late, we will award you a fraction of the score you would have earned on the assignments had it been turned in on time, according to this sliding scale:

90% for work submitted up to 24 hours late
80% for work submitted up to 2 days late
70% for work submitted up to 3 days late
60% for work submitted up to 5 days late

For example, if you would have earned 8/10 points but submitted 36 hours late, you will instead earn 6.4 points.

That said, you are allowed three “free” late days during the semester (that can be applied to one of assignments 1 through 4; the final assignment is due on Dean’s Date and cannot be turned in late). You do not need to tell us that you are applying your “late day” – we’ll remove the late penalty at the end of the semester from the assignment(s) that benefits you the most.

We will grant no-penalty extensions only in the case of illness (with a doctor’s note) or extraordinary circumstances (with the involvement of the dean of your residential college). If illness or an extraordinary circumstance will cause you to submit an assignment late, then you should discuss the matter with your instructor as soon as possible.

Please plan your work on the assignments so that travel, interviews, athletics, touring, student clubs, extracurricular activities, religious holidays, etc. do not cause you to submit it late. None of the above reasons nor a heavy academic workload constitute an extraordinary circumstance.

The course grade will be composed as follows:

Percentage	Contribution	Details
50%	Programming Assignments	5 total, 10% each 5% tests score and 5% interview score for each
25%	Midterm Exam
25%	Final Exam

We do not anticipate applying a grading curve. In no case will grades be curved down (i.e., 93.00% will always translate to an A).

Assignment Policies

The following sections provide an overview over the course’s assignment and collaboration policies. Lecture 2 discusses the course policies in detail. In case of a mismatch between this document or the information available on the website and announcements by course staff, the latter shall prevail.

Programming Assignments

You will complete programming assignments individually. We will grade the last commit to your GitHub repository. We will supply you with all the tests for each assignment, so you will know your score for the tests even before we officially grade it.

Your score for each programming assignment will be evenly split between a test score and an interview score (each are worth 5% of your overall grade for each assignment). Interviews are 10 minutes per assignment with the course staff where they will ask you a few questions that test if you understand and can explain your code and how it solves the assignment.

Collaboration Policy

This course permits many forms of collaboration, including help from course staff, classmates, and lab TAs. Googling and AI resource use is allowed in this course. You may use any online resource as long as you cite the source (e.g., including the URL of source in the code).

Here is a summary, where ✔ means YES and ❌ means NO. If you have any questions, please contact the course staff.

activity	course staff	COS 316 grads	classmates	other	AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude Code)
discuss concepts with …	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
acknowledge collaboration with …	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔
expose solutions to …	✔	❌	❌	❌	✔
view solutions from …	✔	❌	❌	❌	✔
plagiarize code from …	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌ *

* Submitting code produced by AI tools is not considered plagarism for this class as long as you cite it.

Your solutions. The term solutions refers to any of the products created when completing an assignment, such as source code (including comments) and documentation. It includes both finished and unfinished products, regardless of correctness or completeness.

You must never expose solutions to anyone who is taking COS 316 now or who might take COS 316 in the future.
If you leave your computer unattended, be sure to protect it with a password.
You must never receive or view someone else’s solutions to a programming assignment (or variant of an assignment).

Plagiarism. As members of the University community, students are bound by the rules and procedures described in Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.

All the rules above continue to apply after assignments are graded and after the end of the semester.