Comp 527: Grading Policies

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There will be a number of short written homework assignments, most likely four of them. Written homeworks will be announced in class and on the newsgroups and will be available from the Web. Submissions will generally be handed in at the beginning of class on the day due, although electronic submissions beforehand are encouraged. You are expected to do written assignments on your own, although you may certainly make use of outside sources like Web pages or books. You should disclose this fact and cite the sources, as you would in any scholarly work. If you have questions about questions on the assignment, post them to the course newsgroup, guaranteeing you faster response than you might get by e-mailing your T.A. or professor.

Please send all electronic submissions via e-mail to dwallach+comp527@cs.rice.edu. Any properly-formatted MIME message in text/plain, text/html, application/postscript, or application/pdf is acceptable. Microsoft Word is not acceptable.

Late Policy

Sometimes, you're taking another class which (inconveniently) has the same deadline as Comp 527 or you get temporarily swamped. Sometimes you're just having a really bad-hair day. Generally speaking, assignments are due on the due date and late work is not accepted. Period. Of course, disasters occur and can be worked around. I'm willing to make custom arrangements if you talk to me in advance of a deadline. If you see a looming time conflict, you must notify me in advance.

Final Project Grading

The final project is pretty big. It includes a proposal at the beginning, a mid-term status report, a final oral presentation, a final paper, and (oh by the way) you also have to do the work. Rather than give you a precise grading breakdown, let me say I will show more sympathy if you've been working diligently all along.

I often receive complaints that somebody cannot find their partner, or that their partner continues to promise things that are never delivered. To address this concern, my policy is you flake, you fail. Simply put, if you disappear or are generally not pulling your own weight at any time during the semester, you get an F in the course right then. End of story. Of course, disasters happen that may pull you away from campus. You are responsible for notifying your partner(s) and your professor if a major time conflict arises in your life. In the real world, you don't just disappear from your job for a week. You tell people you have to go. The same thing applies here.

Dan Wallach, CS Department, Rice University
Last modified: Tue Aug 29 12:41:51 CDT 2000