Grading

Homework assignments vary in difficulty, and they will weigh towards the final grade based on their corresponding difficulties.

Policies on cheating and plagiarism

You are encouraged to discuss the content of this course with anyone you like, but your writing should be your own and be based on your own conclusions. Copying from other students or other external sources is strictly disallowed. Assignments are to be completed individually, unless specified otherwise. Please do not discuss your answers with others, although feel free to point each other to any relevant documentation. Feel free to look-up information on the web that you may find useful in completing the assignments and project. If you discuss material with anyone besides the instructors, acknowledge your collaborators in your write-up. While you may discuss assignments and material at a high level with others, your solutions have to be your own!

You are prohibited from posting or otherwise sharing any class material, including solutions to assignments and exams, on publicly accessible sites and repositories.

Project work will be done in groups. When working in groups, you can divide the work as you see fit. Groups can talk to each other about their projects as much as they want. Of course, if two teams pick the same project, we expect each team to produce original work different from that of other teams. When in doubt, contact the instructors about whether a potential action would be considered plagiarism. If you do discuss material with anyone besides the instructors, acknowledge your collaborators in your write-up. If you obtain a key insight with help (e.g., through library work or a friend), acknowledge your source and write up the summary on your own. In most write-ups, we will expect to see citations. Occasionally you may want to borrow a graph or figure from an existing presentation for your in-class presentation. This is OK with proper citation. You should not, however, copy the majority of someone else's slides. You are presenting the paper from your perspective, not the perspective of the paper's author. You should point out the merits of a paper, but you should also point out the deficiencies and areas for improvement that the author did not consider.

Again, we cannot emphasize enough that you must cite all your sources properly. You must remove any possibility of someone else's work from being misconstrued as yours. We also consider the facilitation of plagiarism (giving your work to someone else) as plagiarism as well. Never misrepresent someone else's work as your own. It must be absolutely clear what material is your original work. Plagiarism and other anti-intellectual behavior will be dealt with severely.

Generative AI tools and technologies should not be used unless explicitly permitted by an assignment. Use of such tools to derive solutions will be treated as cheating.

Late policy

The cutoff for on-time submission of homework assignments is midnight of the due date. Late days are counted in 24-hour periods. Submitting one minute past midnight until midnight of the next day is one day late, and so on. You are given 3 "grace days" (self-granted extensions) which you can use to give yourself extra time without penalty. Grace days work only on individual homework assignments, not on the mini-project. Late work handed in when you have run out of grace days is discounted 10% for each day you are late.