Assignment Policies

This page is about assignment policies. There’s another whole section devoted to the actual assignments and the logistics of submitting them and getting feedback.

Unfortunately, there is a lot to know about assignments!

Purpose

Assignments are where the rubber hits the road. They provide opportunities to deepen your learning by applying the concepts discussed in lecture. The point is not to earn marks by any means possible; marks are a consequence of the understanding gained through practice.

Overview

In CS135 there are (approximately) weekly assignments. See the Assessment page to see how much they are worth.

Assignments are created by the instructors and are marked by the graduate teaching assistants based on specifications drawn up by the instructors. The midterms and final are created by the instructors and marked by instructors, ISAs, IAs, and TAs.

Assignment submission, evaluation, and return is a paperless process. Students will submit their assignments via the course web site. Parts of the assignment will be graded by computer; parts will be marked by humans. When all assignments have been marked they will be available for viewing .

Your own work

Assignments are your own work. See Academic Integrity for more details.

Coverage

Each assignment will specify the last slide of material covered as part of the assignment header. Material beyond that slide is not needed – and should not be used even if you think it would be useful. Individual problems may put further restrictions on which techniques must or must not be used. Using such off-limits material generally results in a significant loss of marks.

In general, the basic tests will try to warn you if inappropriate functions and special forms are used.

Assignment Submission

You may submit your solutions via the Assignments page as often as you wish.

• Submitting a partially completed solution is a good idea, just in case you don’t get back to it before the due date and to serve as a backup in case your computer breaks or is stolen.
• We mark the most recent submission, not your best submission.

We do not accept assignments except through the course website. Do not email your assignment to us. Do not send it via Microsoft Teams (or everybody in the class might get a copy!).

If the servers go down, we will make a fair accomodation, communicated via Ed. The exact accomodations will depend on the nature of the outage, when it occurred, and how badly it affected people.

Due Dates and Late Policy

Assignments are due at the date and time specified on the assignment itself and the Assignments page . All dates and times refer to the time in Waterloo.

Late submissions are penalized, depending on how late they are:

• Up to 2 hours late, -2%.
• Up to 11 hours late, -10%.
• More than 11 hours late, -100%.

That is, for an assignment that is due at 9:00pm, 2% is lost on files submitted before 11:00pm, 10% on files submitted before 8:00am the next morning, and no marks are given for files that are submitted after that.

The percentage late penalties apply on the points available in the file(s) that are late. If the assignment requires submission of 3 files and only 1 is late, only the late one has marks deducted. We track whether a file has changed since the previous submission and do not apply a late penalty if the file has not changed since the last submission that was on-time.

Stage 1 submissions, when required, have a 0% late penalty until the next morning at 8:00am and a 100% late penalty after that.

If you are ill, see Illness & Absence .

If You Are Unable to Submit…

If you are unable to submit before 100% penalty period starts:

• If due to illness, see the Illness page.
• If due to life events outside your control (e.g. death of a family member, serious auto accident), email Karen Anderson .
• If due to technical problems, you’re probably out of luck unless (maybe) you can document the issue (which is typically hard to impossible). Email Karen Anderson .
• If life was just too busy, you’re out of luck. Life is like that sometimes.

No matter why you were unable to submit on time, we recommend the following:

• Do the assignment as soon as possible.
• Submit it in the usual way. The system will warn you but still accept it.
• Email the ISAs and ask them to “mark it for feedback”. You won’t get marks but you will get feedback that may be valuable on future assignments.

Testing

We do several kinds of testing on your submissions:

Basic tests

Each time you submit before the due date, we run a set of “basic tests” on your submission. The basic tests are to assure you that your assignment was accepted and is markable by our software. It protects you from mistakes such as submitting the wrong file, a file with a syntax error, misnamed or missing functions, etc. It’s amazing how many fatal errors can appear during last-minute tidying up!

It is your responsibility to check the basic tests, especially on your last submission, to make sure everything went right. We will not be sympathetic to issues that could have been detected by you by simply reading the basic tests and re-submitting.

Do not make your last submission immediately before the deadline – it gives you no time to check the Basic Test results and respond, if needed.

The basic tests do not test the correctness of your code, only that it is likely testable by our automated systems. The numeric mark appearing on the basic test marksheet is only for guidance. Not achieving full marks on a basic test indicates you will almost certainly lose marks on the correctness tests.

Correctness tests

After the submission deadline we run a second set of tests to assess your code, including:

• Does it produce the correct answer?
• Does it conform to any restrictions on the solution?
• Does it follow style expectations?

Your assignment submission may also be hand-marked by course staff.

These post-deadline tests and hand-marking form your mark for the assignment.

Assignment 0 is Mandatory

You must receive full marks for Assignment 0 before the due date for Assignment X to receive any marks for Assignment X.

A00 can be submitted any time but you obviously want to submit it before your next assignment is due. If you procrastinate long enough, this rule can easily cause you to fail the course.

Returning Assignments and Feedback

Your assignment will be marked by a computer and by a human (usually a graduate student or an ISA). It takes about one week to mark your assignment.

When your assignment has been marked, you can check your grade at Assessment -> View Marksheets .

After each assignment has been marked, we will create a Post-Mortems page which shows common errors that students made on the assignment. You should read it, even if you got perfect on the assignment.

Assignment solutions are posted on the Solutions page.

Remark Requests

It is our goal to assess your work fairly, but sometimes we mess up and mark your work incorrectly. If this happens you may submit a re-mark request .