Assignments

Assignments will be made available on the departmental computing system through the 402 home page (http://www.csd.uwo.ca/courses/CS402b). The availability of assignments will be announced via e-mail. Students are responsible for checking their e-mail on a regular basis.

Assignment Submission

• All assignments are due by midnight of the due date in the locker assigned for this course. This includes an Assignment Submission Form (see web site) that is filled out and signed.

• All programming assignments will be submitted electronically using the submit command on GAUL. More details will be provided with assignment handouts.

• To be eligible for full marks, assignments must run on the departmental computing equipment. You may develop assignments on your home computer, but you must allow for the amount of time it will take to get the final product working on GAUL. Assignments that work on your own computer but not on GAUL will be eligible for part marks.

Late Assignments

• Late assignments may be handed in, but with a penalty of marks, where is the number of days late. For example, if an assignment is turned in one day late, 2 marks are deducted, and so on. Saturday and Sunday together count as one day.

• Assignments more than 5 days late will not be accepted.

• Extensions will be granted only by the course instructor, not by a TA, and will be granted only on serious medical or compassionate grounds. To obtain an extension, you must take supporting documentation to the office of the Dean of your faculty, who will contact the instructor.

• In cases of undocumented minor illness, extensions will not be given, and you should use late coupons (described below).

Late Coupons

Each student will be given 3 ``late coupons''. Each coupon can be thought of as a potential one-day assignment extension. It is entirely up to you to decide when to use your coupons; more than one coupon may be used per assignment. You will indicate the number of coupons to be used on the Assignment Submission Form. The number of coupons used will be recorded.

The intent of late coupons is to give you some ``free'' days in case of minor illness, work overload, etc.; no extensions will be given in such cases.

The rules for late coupons are the following:

• Coupons are not transferable to another student.
• Once a coupon has been used, you cannot ``take it back'' to use for another assignment instead.
• Coupons cannot be redeemed retroactively. (If an assignment has been marked, a coupon cannot later be used to reduce the late penalty.)
• Unused coupons are not redeemable for extra marks.
• Using a late coupon does not change the final date on which an assignment will be accepted. Whether or not coupons are used, the assignment must be handed in within 5 days of the original due date.
• The coupons are ``virtual", and you must indicate the number of late coupons you wish to use for a particular assignment on its Assignment Submission Form. Handwritten notes or email messages will not be accepted.
• No more than three coupons may be used for an assignment.

Assignment Backups

To guard against the possibility of lost assignments and errors in recording marks, students are advised to retain all assignments that are handed back to them, as well as disk copies of all materials they hand in, at least until final marks for the course are posted. (Otherwise, we have no evidence that a mark should be revised.)

Assignment Marking

Here is some general information related to assignment marking.

• Assignments will be marked by the TA's. You are responsible for picking up your assignment from the I/O counter.
• Every effort will be made to have assignments marked and handed back within 3 weeks of the handin date, preferably sooner.
• A request for an adjustment in an assignment mark must be made within 2 weeks after the assignment is returned in class. All assignment marks are considered to be final after that date, even if you did not pick up the assignment. All requests for mark adjustment are to be written and submitted to the instructor.

Programming Assignment Marking Schemes

• A programming assignment is considered to be ``working'' if it is shown to satisfy all the requirements specified in the assignment description, including correct results.
• Note that a programming assignment is an exercise meant to give you practice in certain concepts. Therefore, a program that produces the correct output is not necessarily a ``working'' program; it must also satisfy the specifications given in the assignment description!
• Other criteria in terms of which an assignment will be evaluated include coding style, comments, and efficiency.