ICS 142: Compilers and Interpreters

Summer Session II, August 6 – September 12, 2001

Policies (Tentative)

The policies for this course are not very different from those of other courses you have taken in the past, but you should read them carefully anyway. We will enforce our policies strictly but fairly. There will be no exceptions.

Course Grades

Your work in this course will be graded on a normal distribution curve (bell curve). For your reference, we will also publish the scores actually achieved in comparison to the expected scores. This allows you to judge how much you lived up to our expectations, something that will not be reflected in your grade. It will also allow us to see how well we did as teachers.

Requesting Regrades

If you believe that we made a mistake in grading your homework or exam, you can request a regrade. Your request must be received within one week after the grade was posted. You must supply a short written description of the mistake(s) and hand the exam or homework back in. However, please be aware that we will regrade the entire homework or exam.

Late Assignments

Homework assignments are due by 1:30 pm on the dates listed in the schedule. This applies to both written and electronic parts of your homework, so you should make sure to email your solutions to programming assignments before you go to class, and bring the written portion to class with you. Late assignments will receive 50% off for each 24 hour period after the deadline. This means that handing in homework at 1:31 pm already incurs this penalty.

Using Third-Party Code

The assignments for the project developed as part of this course build on each other to a certain extent. You are allowed to reuse a solution for assignment n-1 from a third party (students enrolled in this course, teaching assitants) in order to complete your own assignment n. For example, you can reuse someone else's scanner to write your parser, or someone else's parser to write your code for intermediate representations and semantic analysis.

If you decide to do this, you have to document whose code you used for which parts of the assignment, and you have to hand in that code with your assignment as well. Furthermore, you accept full responsibility for the code you reuse, which means you can not blame someone else if the solution you turn in is not working. Of course, using someone else's code for assignment n to solve the same assignment is not allowed and considered cheating.

Academic Honesty

Academic honesty comes down to this: Do not cheat!. This simplifies the official policies (which you should read) slightly, but it is the simplest description we can give. Examples for cheating are undocumented collaboration on homeworks, copying answers (or programs) for homeworks or exams, having someone else take your place in an exam or solve a homework for you, etc.

To be clear on the collaboration issue: There is no collaboration in exams. There is unlimited collaboration for reviewing the material pertinent to this course (study groups). There is limited collaboration with one other person taking this course on homeworks, and that person's name must be marked clearly on the homework (including programs) you hand in. However, you still have to write your own answers and programs for homeworks.

Cheating will be taken very seriously, and all students involved will have to face the consequences of their actions. Depending on how severe an incident is, it might result in a letter that is placed in your file, an F for the particular homework or exam, an F for the course, or (in extreme cases) suspension or expulsion from the university.