grading.md

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Grade Weights

The following point structure will be used in determining the grade for the course. Your final grade will depend solely on your own performance, graded according to the scale given below. Grades will not be curved. Of all homework assignments (but not project assignments), the worst one will be dropped in calculating your grades.

5%	Lab Participation
25%	Project Assignments
15%	Other Homework Assignments
20%	Midterm Exam
35%	Final Exam

Class participation and attendance is strongly encouraged, but will not be enforced or affect grades directly. (Experience shows, however, that attendance and participation correlate highly with success in classes.)

Grade Scale

The final grading scale will be based on class performance and we will NOT use a fixed rubric as in past semesters. However, we will guarantee a standard grading scale (90-100 = A range, 80-89 = B range, etc.) and lower that scale at the end of the semester as warranted if scores are lower.

Homework Grade Policies

For each assignment, a precise time will be specified (usually at 11:59.59pm) on the due date. Submission must be made correctly via your githum account. Each student has 4 grace days they can use over the course of the semester. A maximum of 2 grace days can be used on a single assignment. Once you have used your grace days, any late submission will not be accepted and graded as a 0.

To use a late day you MUST follow the submission policy outlined in our late submission instructions to alert the course staff to fetch your late submission.

We will grade your assignments using gcc/g++ at the command line in the virtual machine we provide for the course. You are free to use other compilers or IDEs to develop your code, but in the end, it has to work with g++ in the virtual machine. You probably want to test that it does before submitting.

Grading Disputes

We will work hard to post HW scores and feedback within 2 weeks of the homework's due date. Exams will typically be graded within at most a few days of the exam date.

Any disputes with posted grades must be raised within 2 weeks of the score posting. (If your schedule does not permit a detailed request within 2 weeks, you should register a short note that you plan to dispute, and then submit the dispute when you are ready.) Notice that any regrade request will result in us trying to give the fairest possible grade to you, which could be higher or lower than the one you received originally.

To raise an issue with your exam score, you should come to the office hours of the professor teaching your section. If you cannot make posted office hours, schedule one by e-mail. The TAs will not be allowed to grant regrades on exams.

Since we want to be able to make sure we can address all of your homework-related concerns as easily as possible, please follow the below policy for creating homework regrade requests:

1. You will receive a grade report for your homework or project on GitHub.
2. If you have questions, you should assign your grader to the issue, and then describe your questions in the comments for this issue.
3. If the grader and you cannot resolve the issue, the grader will reassign the issue to one of the TAs.
4. The TA will then review your homework and make any necessary adjustments, up or down.

Final settlement will be, if necessary, decided by the professors.

Academic Integrity

The official language on academic integrity is on the syllabus. Here is a little more clarification.

Practically speaking, it is important to be able to seek out helpful information and collaborate, yet it is clearly wrong to pass off work done (even just in part) by others as your own. When in doubt whether some behavior you are considering is appropriate, feel free to consult with us (course staff) before engaging in it. As a general guideline, imagine that your professor is looking over your shoulder, but can't read your mind. Would it look to him like you're legitimately seeking to understand things, or trying to get a better grade than your own work warrants? That should guide your behavior.

A few things are clearly fine, while a few are clearly not fine. We are listing some of the most relevant ones here:

• Asking other students for hints or discussing high-level ideas. This is clearly OK.
• Having other students look at your code and help you discover mistakes. This is also OK, though the other student may have to be careful about not copying from you (which would have negative consequences for both of you).
• Asking course staff (instructor, TAs, sherpas) for help, ideas, having them look through code, etc. Clearly no problem; if you are asking for too much help, we'll simply not provide that much.
• Copying code from other students, even if you subsequently edit, improve or change it. Clearly not OK, even if you intend to understand the code before submitting it as your own. This is most definitely plagiarism. We will run software on all submissions in the class to detect instances of copying.
• Sharing your code with your classmates. Even if you have the best of intentions, such as helping a friend understand the material, this is very dicey. It allows someone to appear to do better than they do. We have had several cases of trusting friends getting into trouble because their "friends" submitted code as their own.
• Looking at other students' code (before having finished your own). This is a gray zone. If you just take away some basic conceptual ideas, then it is fine. If your code ends up resembling the other student's very closely, then it is cheating. To avoid accidentally cheating, we recommend that whenever you checked out a friend's code extensively, you spend significant time (about an hour) doing something else before returning to your own code. That way, you will just work based on your understanding of the code, and not accidentally copy anything.
• Looking up concepts, syntax, and basic instructions on how to deal with the topics online. This is clearly OK, as you are learning.
• Looking online for solutions to specific homework questions, such as copying code from Wikipedia and other sites. Clearly not ok, even if you subsequently edit them. You are trying to use the work of others instead of your own. Clearly cheating.
• Posting in online forums asking people to solve homework questions (or parts thereof) for you. Clearly cheating, for the same reason as the previous one.

Unfortunately, we are aware that (1) there are solutions to many homework questions available on the WWW, and (2) even USC students tend to cheat quite frequently on homeworks. Please help us restore faith in the integrity of Trojans by not being those students.