CS170: Operating Systems (undergrad)

Exams

Exams: There will be two in-class exams.

Unless stated otherwise, all exams above will be closed book. They will cover material from class meetings, labs, readings, homeworks, and any other assigned material.

Grading

Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights:

15%: Homework and class participation
25%: Lab assignments
25%: First exam (midterm)
35%: Second exam

Work in the "homework" category will be graded loosely. To receive credit, you must make a credible effort to solve the problem; mistakes will not be penalized, in general. Everything else will be graded strictly.

Turn-in policy and lateness

Late homeworks and lab assignments will not be accepted. However, we will give you some flexibility on the homeworks: we will drop your lowest two homework scores.

Note:If you do not hand in an assignment by the due date, or hand in a blank assignment, you get a 0 for that assignment. It is waaaay better for you to hand in an assignment that receives a lower than A grade than to simply give up on the assignment (averaged-in zeroes are damaging).

Exemptions of the lateness rules will be allowed in three cases:

Illness, which requires a doctor's note. The instructor will not look at such notes; instead, bring the note to the undergraduate program coordinator, who will communicate with the instructor.
Death in the immediate family.
Accommodation for students with disabilities, as prescribed by the university.

No extensions will be given for any other reason (including job interviews, business trips, work on research publications, etc.).

Collaboration, source material, and academic integrity

Here is this class's collaboration policy:

The work that you turn in must be yours. Code that you turn in must be code that you wrote and debugged. Do not discuss code, in any form, with your classmates or others outside the class (for example, discussing code on a whiteboard is not okay). As a corollary, it's not okay to show others your code, look at anyone else's, or help others debug. It is okay to discuss code with the instructor and TAs.
You must acknowledge your influences. This means, first, writing down the names of people with whom you discussed the assignment, and what you discussed with them. If student A gets an idea from student B, both students are obligated to write down that fact and also what the idea was. Second, you are obligated to acknowledge other contributions (for example, ideas from Web sites or other sources). The only exception is that material presented in class or the textbook does not require citation.
You must not look at, or use, solutions from prior years or the Web, or seek assistance from the Internet. For example, do not post questions from our lab assignments on the Web. Ask the course staff, via email or Piazza, if you have questions about this.
You must take reasonable steps to protect your work. You must not publicly publish your solutions (for example on github or stackoverflow), in this semester or any future semester. You are obligated to protect your files and printouts from access.
If there are inexplicable discrepancies between exam and lab performance, we will overweight the exam, and possibly interview you. Our exams will cover the labs. If, in light of your exam performance, your lab performance is implausible, we may discount your lab grade (if this happens, we will notify you). We may also conduct an interview or oral exam.

We will enforce the policy strictly. Penalties of failing to comply with the policy include an F grade in the course, referral to the university's disciplinary body, and possible expulsion. Note that we will use a variety of mechanisms to detect cheating, including software-similarity detection softwares, so getting away without being detected will be hard.

More about source material

You are welcome to use existing public libraries in your programming assignments (such as public classes for queues, trees, etc.). You may also look at code for public domain software such as Linux. Consistent with the policies and normal academic practice, you are obligated to cite any source that gave you code or an idea.

Per the policy above, you may not look at any course material relating to any project or lab similar to this course's assignments. You may not look at work done by students in past years' courses. You may not look at similar course projects at other universities. If you are unsure about whether a particular source of external information is permitted, contact the instructor before looking at it.

More about academic integrity

The above guidelines are necessarily generalizations and cannot account for all circumstances. Intellectual dishonesty can end your career, and it is your responsibility to stay on the right side of the line. If you are not sure about something, ask.

Regrades

You can submit any graded item for a regrade, under the following conditions. First, you need to submit a clear, written statement that explains the request (what was wrong and why). Second, you must submit your request within one week of when the graded work was returned. Third, we will regrade the entire exam, homework, etc. (so a regrade can potentially decrease your grade.)

Last updated: 2018-12-30 15:57:48 -0800 [validate xhtml]