# Course Policies

The following policies establish expectations for how this course will be managed. Your responsibilities are outlined here, so you should take time to review them carefully.

# Team Formation

You are expected to form project teams in the first couple of weeks. The following guidelines apply:

Students are responsible for matching up and forming teams. Teams must be formed by the end of the second week (i.e. the add-course deadline). If you fail to find a team, you must inform the instructor by this deadline.
We do not guarantee you a team after the end of the second week. If you have not joined a team, and have not made some arrangement with the instructor, you may be required to withdraw from the course.
Course enrolment will be managed by the instructor to encourage teams of four students. If necessary, the instructor may authorize larger or smaller teams, or modify team membership to accommodate everyone that is enrolled in the course.
You must be able to attend class with your team. You are not allowed to take this course remotely, or while on a work term that prevents you from attending in-person. If you attempt to take this course remotely, you may be required to withdraw from the course.

# Team Participation

You are expected to participate in the course project to the best of your ability.

If you fail to participate in project activities in the weeks leading up to the project proposal, you may be removed from the course. This is necessary so that teams can launch their projects successfully.
The instructor reserves the right to adjust your grade based on your participation in the course. This may include a reduction in your final grade if you fail to actively participate in the team project. This is rarely done, but it is necessary to ensure that the final grade reflects the effort of each student. Students that fail to actively participate in their team project should expect their grade to be reduced accordingly, and in extreme cases may fail the course because of this.

# Attendance

Students are expected to attend class with their team and contribute to the course project (see the schedule). This is supported by the course calendar guidlines on class attendance:

Students are expected to attend all scheduled components of the courses in which they have enrolled.

Students may be required to present documentation confirming the reasons for non-attendance. During the course Add Period, students may be removed from a course for non-attendance. Students who are removed from a class will be notified by the Office of the Registrar.

# Self-Declaration

If you test positive for COVID-19 or have COVID-symptoms, you are required to use the COVID-19 self-declaration form. If you are ill but do not meet the COVID-19 self-declaration guidelines, you should instead follow the guidelines and steps outlined in the Math Accommodations page.

In both cases, you must also follow the instructions listed above.

# Short-Term Absence

You cannot use a short-term absence (STA) to delay a team deliverable. You cannot use a STA to gain an exemption for attendance, since lecture sections are 2 full days apart; you should be able to attend at least one of the lectures each week.

At the instructors discretion, you may use a STA for an accommodation of a quiz deadline. In this case, you would be expected to contact the instructor within 24h of the deadline.

# Inclusiveness

It is our intent that students from all diverse backgrounds and perspectives are well-served by this course, and that student's learning needs be addressed both in and out of class. We recognize the immense value of the diversity in identities, perspectives, and contributions that students bring, and the benefit it has on our educational environment. Your suggestions are encouraged and appreciated. Please let us know ways to improve the effectiveness of the course for you personally or for other students or student groups. In particular:

We will gladly honour your request to address you by an alternate/preferred name or pronoun. Please advise us of this preference early in the term, so we may make appropriate changes to our records.
We will honour your religious holidays and celebrations. Please inform us of these at the start of the course.
We will follow AccessAbility Services guidelines and protocols on how to best support students with different learning needs.

# Academic Integrity

To maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo community are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility. Contact the Office of Academic Integrity for more information.

You are expected to follow the policies outlined here for quiz and project submissions.

To ensure academic integrity, MOSS (Measure of Software Similarities) is used in this course as a means of comparing student projects. We will report suspicious activity, and penalties for plagiarism/cheating are severe. Please read the available information about academic integrity very carefully.

# Ethical Behaviour

Students are expected to act professionally, and engage one another in a respectful manner at all times. This expectation extends to working together in project teams. Harassment or other forms of personal attack will not be tolerated. Course staff will not referee interpersonal disputes on a project team; incidents will be dealt with according to Policy 33.

# Plagiarism and Third-Party Code

Students are expected to either work on their own (in the case of quizzes), or work with a project team (for the remaining deliverables in the course). All work submitted should either be their own original work or work created by the team for this course.

The team is also allowed to use third-party source code or libraries for their project under these specific conditions:

Published third-party libraries in binary form may be used without restriction. This may include libraries for networking, user interfaces and other libraries that are introduced in class.
Source code from external sources may only be used if the contribution is less than 25 lines of code from a single source. Code copied in this way must be acknowledged with a comment embedded directly in your source code in the appropriate section.
All external sources (libraries and source code) should be identified in the project's README file.

Failure to acknowledge a source will result in a significant penalty to your final project grade (ranging from a minor deduction to a grade of zero for the project, depending on the severity of the infraction). Note that MOSS will be used to compare student assignments, and that this rule also applies to copying from other student projects, source code found online, or projects from previous terms of this course.

# Reuse of Materials

You cannot base your project in part or in whole on course-work that you have completed for a different course. You cannot submit the same project to multiple courses for credit, even if you are taking the courses concurrently (i.e. CS 346 and CS 446 would require different projects to be submitted that do not share source code).

Similarly, you cannot use anything that you created prior to the start of this course without explicit written permission from the instructor. This includes code, documentation, and other materials that you may have created in previous courses or work terms, or materials that you have created on your own time.

# Large Language Models (LLMs)

The use of Large-Language Models (e.g., ChatGPT, CoPilot and similar systems) is restricted in this course. You are not allowed to use such systems when writing quizzes, or for generating any part of your written submission (e.g., design document, user instructions, final report).

You are allowed to use Copilot and similar tools to generate a limited amount of code towards your project, if you adhere to the policies described above under plagiarism. Content generated by these systems must be treated as a source and cited properly, just like any other third-party source, and you are limited in how much generated code is used.

Improper use of these tools will be subject to Policy 71 and an investigation into academic misconduct.

Note that you are responsible for the content generated by these systems. LLMs can (and often do) generate incorrect and illogical code, and you are responsible for ensuring that the code generated is correct and appropriate for your project.

# Student Discipline

A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity to avoid committing an academic offence, and to take responsibility for his/her actions. A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offence, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offences (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) should seek guidance from the course instructor, academic advisor, or the undergraduate Associate Dean.

For information on categories of offences and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71, Student Discipline. For typical penalties, check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties.

# Intellectual Property

Students should be aware that this course contains the intellectual property of their instructor, TA, and/or the University of Waterloo. Intellectual property includes items such as:

Lecture content, spoken and written (and any audio/video recording thereof)
Lecture handouts, presentations, and other materials prepared for the course (e.g., PowerPoint slides)
Questions or solution sets from various types of assessments (e.g., assignments, quizzes, tests, final exams), and
Work protected by copyright (e.g., any work authored by the instructor or TA or used by the instructor or TA with permission of the copyright owner).

Course materials and the intellectual property contained therein, are used to enhance a student’s educational experience. However, sharing this intellectual property without the intellectual property owner’s permission is a violation of intellectual property rights. For this reason, it is necessary to ask the instructor, TA and/or the University of Waterloo for permission before uploading and sharing the intellectual property of others online (e.g., to an online repository). Permission from an instructor, TA or the University is also necessary before sharing the intellectual property of others from completed courses with students taking the same/similar courses in subsequent terms. In many cases, instructors might be happy to allow distribution of certain materials. However, doing so without expressed permission is considered a violation of intellectual property rights.

# Continuity Plan

As part of the University’s Continuity of Education Plan, every course should be designed with a plan that considers alternate arrangements for cancellations of classes and/or exams.

Here is how we will handle cancellations in this course, if they occur.

In the case of minor disruptions (e.g. one lecture), the lecture content will be reorganized to fit the remaining time. This should not have any impact on demos or deliverables.
Cancellation of multiple classes may result in a reduction in the number of sprints and associated deliverables to fit the remaining time. If this happens, lecture content will also be pruned to fit available time. Assessment weights will be redistributed evenly over the remaining content if required to align with the material.
Cancellation of in-person (midterm or final) examinations has no effect on this course, since we do not have scheduled exams.