Course policies

Here is the Collaboration Policy for Homework and Exams. Please check with the course staff if you have questions about what is or is not permitted.

• The HW assignments will be submitted in small groups (up to three). It is fine and good to discuss between groups (please acknowledge your collaborators), but each group must type up their solutions on their own, from scratch.
  • The following is OK: Your group and another group work through the problems together over a couple of days. You bounce ideas off each other, and eventually come up with a pretty good solution idea. You and your group type up that idea in your own words, perhaps lightly consulting notes you took while working with the other group.
  • The following is NOT OK: Your group and another group work through the problems together over a couple of days. You bounce ideas off each other, and eventually come up with a pretty good solution idea. Your group types up the solutions first. Since the other group helped, you share your write-up with them as a starting point for their own write-up.
  • A good test: if you ever share your typed-up solutions with another group, or if someone shares theirs with you, it is probably NOT OKAY.
  Collaboration outside of this quarter's CS161 class is not allowed.
• No collaboration is permitted on exams.

More generally than the Collaboration Policy, students must adhere to the Stanford Honor Code. If we have reason to believe that you are in violation of the honor code, we will follow the university policy to report it to the Office of Community Standards. Here are a few of the examples of honor code violations in this course:

• Looking at the HW writeup or code of a student not in your HW group.
• Showing your HW writeup or code to a student not in your HW group.
• Discussing homework problems in such detail with students outside your HW group that your group's solution (writeup or code) is almost identical to another group's.
• Uploading your HW writeup or code to a public repository (e.g. github, bitbucket, pastebin) so that it can be accessed by other students. - if you are aware of any, please alert the teaching team.
• Looking at solutions from online repository or previous years’ homeworks - if you are aware of any, please alert the teaching team.
• Collaborating with others during exams.
• Entering homework questions into any software, apps, or websites. Accessing resources that directly explain how to answer questions from the actual assignment or exam is a violation of course policy.

The Stanford Honor Code

The Stanford Honor Code as it Applies to CS courses

We all make mistakes, even when grading. You may submit a regrade request for homework on Gradescope. Please include a thorough description of the error that the grader made. You must submit a regrade assignment within one week of having your graded work returned, by the end of day (i.e. 11:59 PM). Some notes:

• We will regrade the entire assignment on a regrade request. This means you may lose more points on other problems if we discover grading errors in the other direction.
• Your regrade request will go to the TA who graded your work originally, as well as to the instructor.
• Legitimate regrade requests include:
  • The points were not added correctly.
  • The comments say I'm missing part (c), but it was actually on a different page.
  • The comments say that my algorithm is incorrect on this case, but I implemented my algorithm and it does work in that case.
• Illegitimate regrade requests include:
  • I disagree with the rubric; I should have gotten more partial credit for my solution.
  • I understand that my solution wasn't clear, but what I meant to say was correct.

• Homework:
  • You have six late days to distribute as you like among the seven homework assignments, with a maximum of two per assignment. Each late day is an extension of 24 hours. So if the assignment is due Wednesday at 10am, you may hand it in by Thursday at 10am and use one late day, or by Friday at 10am and use two late days.
  • You are responsible for keeping track of your late days! You can always ask to find out how many you have left.
  • The point of late days is to give you flexibility to deal with extenuating circumstances (illness, travel, etc). Do not ask for an extension if you still have late days left; this is what late days are for.
  • No credit will be given for homework turned in more than two days after the due date, or for late homework after all late days have been used.
  • Please email cs161-spr2223-staff@lists.stanford.edu or ask privately on Ed for guidance about corner cases or special circumstances.
• Exams: Please do not miss the exams! If you know you will have a conflict, email cs161-spr2223-staff@lists.stanford.edu or ask privately on Ed about it ASAP, and before Wednesday April 12. We will let you know before the add/drop deadline whether or not we can accommodate your conflict. We cannot promise to accommodate conflicts raised after Wednesday April 12.

The elements of your grade are:

• 7 homework assignments (49%, or 7% each).
• One "pre-HW assignment" (1%), graded for completion.
• Exam I (May 4) (25%)
• Exam II (June 12) (25%)
• Bonus Points (see Bonus Point Policy below).

Your score on each assignment will be normalized to become a number (points scored)/(points possible) between 0 and 1, and these numbers will be added together with the above weights to obtain your final numerical grade. The numerical grade will be converted to a letter grade at the end of the course. The final distribution will depend on the class's performance; typically the median is a B+.

After your final numerical grade and letter grade has been computed, the Bonus Point Policy (below) will be enacted, which can boost your final letter grade.

Throughout the quarter, there will be opportunities to get "bonus points" (for example, extra problems on homework sets, the Bug Bounty Policy below; we will also award a bonus point for extremely nice solutions to normal homework problems). These points are not officially worth anything. However, at the end of the quarter, if your numerical grade puts you near to a letter-grade cut-off then if you have lots of bonus points (compared to your classmates) you may be "bumped" above the cut-off. (You cannot be bumped down.) For example, if your numerical grade is 0.814 and the cut-off for an A- is 0.820, then bonus points could promote you from a B+ to an A-.

We hope that all course materials are bug-free. However, if you find an error in course materials (slides, iPython notebooks, or PSETs), point it out to us! (Post on Ed). The first finder of each error (that affects understanding) will get one bonus point. (See above for how bonus points will be applied).

"Errors that affect understanding" include pretty much anything other than little tpyos in wrds -- although we'd be grateful if you point those out too. For example, if there is incorrect arithmetic on a slide, or indexing errors in pseudocode, or a conceptual error (without a disclaimer), or if there's some piece of crucial information that's missing from a problem, those all count as errors that affect understanding. Please point these out to us! You'll help us, your classmates, and yourself (via bonus points). It's a win-win-win situation!