Go up to the ICS UVa page (md)
The honor system is in effect for all written assignments; details can be found in the course syllabus (md)
Submission is through the online submission system. Note that the assignment will not open up until a few days before the due date.
Unless otherwise specified, it is not allowed. We encourage you to discuss the problems and your general approach with other students in the class. However, the answers you turn in must be your own original work, and you are bound by UVa’s honor policy.
For programming assignments, you may not look at any other student’s code for ANY reason, period. Not to debug, not to help, not to learn. You may not let another student look at your code for any reason. Needless to say, you cannot copy code from online sources unless the assignment specifically allows it (and in those cases, you must cite your source). See the syllabus (md) for more details.
Unless otherwise noted, all submissions are due by the end of the day of the due date given – this means by 11:59:59 pm.
Any late assignment is docked 25% per day late, rounded up. So an assignment that is 1 second late to 24 hours late will its score reduced by 25% (i.e., multiplied by 0.75); 24 hours and 1 second to 48 hours has the score reduced by 50%, and so on. This means that after 3 days (72 hours) late, it will receive a zero. The submission server’s clock is set to the US Navy Atomic clock.
We don’t like fluff! This mostly applies to the written homeworks, but could certainly apply to the programming homeworks as well in the comments. Fluff is when you add lots of extra verbiage to pad out a written assignment to make it look longer, or to try to get certain keywords in because you think it will help with the grading. Trust us, it won’t – we don’t scan for keywords. We read the entire assignment. If it’s too long, or it’s full of fluff, then we will get cranky and give you a zero. We are looking for quality over quantity. Thus, there is no particular required length. And don’t do any of that silly formatting with fonts or margins to make it look longer, either. We were all college students once, and we know all those tricks too…
Some written assignments will be essays. These will have a strict word limit, such as 500 words. Each assignment will specify the word limit for that assignment (if it applies). 500 words is about 1 page worth of content. Note that your name and title (if any) do not count toward the word limit. References, if you use any, also do not count against this limit. If it is over the word limit, then we will not grade it and give you a zero!
While we are not grading you based on your English writing skills, it still has to be reasonablly good English grammar (and spelling). Unless otherwise stated, it needs to be prose, not bulleted lists or similar.
While this is not an English course, you have to have well English in your document – both spelling and grammar. If you can’t figure out what that sqiggly red line under a mis-spelled word means, then we are going to get all cranky when grading it.
All written homeworks must be submitted as a PDF. This is an upper level elective for comptuer science majors, so if you don’t submit it as a PDF, we won’t grade it. The PDF has to be a reasonable file size for the submission system to accept it – since there aren’t likely to be images in the document, that shouldn’t be a problem.