General

People

Instructors:

TAs help run the labs and code walkthroughs, grade assignments, and hold office hours. They are your peers who have taken similar courses, and can see your problems from your perspective.

Office Hours

Office hours are spread among several rooms; please check this calendar carefully to know where and when staff will hold their office hours.

Communications

If you need help, you may talk to the instructors or the TAs during their office hours.

You can also post questions and look for answers to similar questions on Piazza. Here is a link to the Piazza site for this course. Please join this page if you have not already.

Do not post answers to assignments to Piazza. Also refrain from using Piazza as a “crowdsourcing” tool for your assignments. Think about your problem well before posting it here.

Computing Environment

You will complete your assignments using the IntelliJ IDEA IDE. This is a free, open source IDE that is used in many universities and companies. The Free Community Edition will suffice for all the requirements of this course. However the Ultimate Edition is available to you for free, as a Northeastern student. Please follow the Piazza post on getting access to this.

We will be using the Google Styling convention to impose style on our Java code. You can read about this styling convention in the style guide. In order to enforce this style within IntelliJ, we will use intellij-java-google-style.xml. See the instructions in Lab 1 for this.

Lastly you will use the handins server to submit your assignments, keep track of revisions and view grades. You will need to log in using your CCIS username and password and register for this class (CS 5010) as a student to use the server. Please do so as soon as possible.

Collaboration and academic integrity

Cheating helps no one, and if caught, will cause you only trouble. All work for this course has to be completed individually, except the group assignments. You are allowed to discuss only about what must be achieved in an assignment, not how. The following are some examples of academic dishonesty:

• Sharing code with another student

• Helping another student to write or debug code

• Receiving code from another student only to modify it yourself

• Sharing written work in any form

• Discussing an assignment in enough detail so as to influence somebody’s code

All the above offenses are equal to each other in seriousness, and will have equal consequences. The above list is not exhaustive. If you are unsure about a particular method of working, don’t assume it is legitimate, check with me.

For group assignments, you are allowed to share code only with your group partner. You are not allowed to look at code of another student (other than your group partner) under any circumstances.

Online help: You may look at articles or code online. However it is your responsibility to ensure that the code you write is not similar to code that can be found online (any such similarity will be considered cheating). This applies even if the code is licensed to be used, and you cite it in your work.

What to do if you are in trouble

• Please approach and TA or instructors. That’s what we are here for!

• Please visit office hours regularly. Even if you do not have any pressing questions, it is good to get accustomed to talking with us, for the time when you really need help!

• If a classmate is in trouble please send them to us, or inform us that somebody needs help.

The instructors have the liberty to ask you questions about your submitted work to verify that you have indeed worked on it by yourself. Penalties for cheating will range from a zero for the entire assignment in question to an “F” for the course. Irrespective of the size of the offense, you will be officially reported and the incident will go on your academic record. Please review the Northeastern University policy on academic integrity: \url{http://www.northeastern.edu/osccr/academic-integrity-policy/}.

CCIS takes academic integrity very seriously and usually punishes offences severely (deferred suspension, loss of coop and even termination from program).

Homework

In general, you should submit your assignments according to the instructions on the web page for the individual assignments.

Submitting by email

Homework will ordinarily be submitted to the handins server at https://handins.ccs.neu.edu. However, sometimes (detailed below) it may be necessary to submit by email. In this case, email your instructor with the subject line “HW N submission” (where N is the appropriate homework number). Attach to the email the same zip file that you would otherwise submit to the server.

Submission troubles

If you have trouble submitting to the server and you have time before the deadline, please wait few minutes and try again; it may also be worth checking on Piazza to find out whether other students are experiencing similar difficulties. If upon retrying you still cannot submit, email Dr. Shesh (ashesh@ccs). Or if you don’t have time to try again then you should submit by email.

Late days & late work

Each student gets four free, no-questions-asked late days for the term. The purpose of late days is make the extension process fair and transparent by getting the instructors out of the extension-granting business entirely. Instead, when you need an extension, you can take one—provided you have a late day remaining.

To use a late day, log on to the submission server after the deadline has passed. When you try to submit, the server will warn you that the submission will cost you one late day. The server will keep track of the number of used late days. Conserve your late days carefully.

No more than one late day may be used on any one assignment. You may not look at and must avoid gaining knowledge of the self-evaluation questions until you have submitted your late assignment. Late days cannot be divided fractionally, but must be used whole. Late days cannot be transferred to or shared with a partner, so in order to take an extension both you and your partner must have sufficient late days remaining. Choose your partners carefully.

Only applicable for assignments with self-evaluations: Using a late day to submit your files does not automatically grant you a late day for the self-eval: it will remain due at the normal time.

Grades

Your grade will be based on your performance on the assignments (70%), labs (10%) and code walks (20%).

The grades will computed on an absolute basis: there will be no overall curving. The instructor may choose to curve an individual assignment, but please do not bank on such a chance.

The mapping of raw point totals to letter grades is given below. Please note that these grade boundaries may move slightly at the discretion of the instructor, but the grade boundary for A is unlikely to change.

Lectures

Lectures policy:

You are required to read the lecture material for the given lecture before coming to class. During the lectures we will discuss the material covered in the required reading, answer questions, provide additional examples and applications.

It is OK if you do not understand everything when you first read it, but reading about the new concept ahead of the time will give you a chance to anticipate the questions you may have and allow you to follow better the details of explanation during the lectures.

Labs

Labs policy

The goal of the labs is to see in practice problems that illustrate the concepts covered in the lectures, and to prepare you for the next programming assignment.

We will ask you to submit some of the lab problems at the end of each lab.

Please come to the labs with your own computers. The lab room has no computers.