Grading breakdown:

1. Projects: 48% 56%;
2. Labs: 10% 12%;
3. Mid-term: 16%;
4. Final exam: 16% 20%;
5. Post-lecture quizzes: 10% 12%;

Collaboration

CS 131 projects require every student to turn in a separate code repository that contains their own code. Learning benefits from discussion, so you are welcome to discuss approaches and solution ideas with your classmates, but you must write your own solution code and answers to conceptual questions. Here's what that means and why we're doing it this way.

Collaboration is an important part of both CS 131 and real-world software engineering. Talking through your code with other students leads to less stress and loneliness and to easier debugging.

But collaboration can hurt your learning, too. We want every student to have worked on every project, and to have encountered the intellectual challenges it poses. Simply asking your classmates to show you their solution and copying it hurts your learning, and constitutes academically dishonest behavior (i.e., plagiarism).

We seek a middle ground in which you don't feel isolated and form productive collaborations with your classmates, but still reason through your own code. We therefore ask every student to hand in separate code for each project. You may discuss this code with classmates and help your friends debug, but every piece of code you submit must be written by you and you must not submit wholly identical solutions. A good way to ensure this is for you to type in your solutions individually, even if you are discussing your approach with your friends and you help each other debug.

Collaboration is encouraged on all aspects of the course except exams. You are welcome to communicate with your classmates about strategies for solutions and about specific bugs, and you are welcome to use Internet resources for general information. However:

• You must not ask questions on Stack Overflow, paper.camp, or any similar site. Of course, if you search for some C/C++ problem, Stack Overflow answers may come up – just don't ask questions about the assignment code yourself.
• You must not use solutions from past (or future) years.
• Acknowledge help from others. If a classmate, other collaborator, or online resource helps you, acknowledge this in your assignment submission. Name the helpers and briefly describe how they helped. (You do not need to cite help from course staff or resources directly linked from this site.)
• Do not post your code or solutions in a public place or make them available to future CS 131 students.

Diversity and Inclusion

Each student has 72 total late hours for projects. These hours are designed to help you cope with unexpected emergencies, and only apply to project submissions. In other words, you can hand in your projects late, but the total amount of lateness summed over all the deadlines must not exceed 72 hours. For the purpose of calculating late hours, we exclude hours between midnight and 7am. This means that you can get a good night's sleep before you continue working on your assignment without losing extra late hours while you sleep.

If you don't hand in an assignment by the last day of classes, we'll give the assignment a zero (i.e., no credit whatsoever). However, if you hand an assignment in late, and your total late time (including the late time for that assignment) exceeds 72 hours, and you hand it in by the last day of classes, then we'll give it a D or an F depending on whether it seems to basically work. Therefore, it's better to complete and hand in a project even if you have already used your late hours.

You can divide up your 72 hours among the projects however you like; you don't have to ask or tell us. However, you can only use the 72 hours for the projects, and not for post-lecture quizzes or labs. If you want an exception to these rules, you will need a Dean's note.

Finally, if you find yourself struggling, please contact the instructors as soon as you feel able; and if you have a health condition that affects your learning or classroom experience, please contact us so we can seek accommodations. We do not generally make exceptions to the late policy, but we work hard to help all our students complete the course without overwhelming stress.

Accommodations

Brown University is committed to full inclusion of all students. Please inform the instructor if you have a disability or other condition that might require accommodations or modification of any of these course procedures. You may email the instructor, come to office hours, or speak with the instructor after class, and your confidentiality is respected. We will do whatever we can to support accommodations recommended by SEAS. For more information contact Student and Employee Accessibility Services (SEAS) at 401-863-9588 or SEAS@brown.edu.

Mental Health

We expect everyone to complete the course on time. However, we certainly understand that there may be factors beyond your control, such as health problems and family crises, that prevent you from finishing the course on time. If you feel you cannot complete the course on time, please discuss with the instructor the possibility of being given a grade of Incomplete for the course and setting a schedule for completing the course in the upcoming year.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Eddie Kohler, James Tompkin, and Tom Doeppner for providing policy text that we have adapted for CS 131.