CS/COE 1501

Assignments

• If you would like ungraded feedback on an assignment, you may send an email to your TA/grader or to the instructor and ask for feedback.
• When emailing with a question about a program you are writing (or a problem you are having with it), send enough code so we have some context and can diagnose your problem (it is ok to send all of your code). Asking questions without sending code is like asking a doctor to make a diagnosis without first doing a examination.
• You are highly encouraged to save your work frequently and maintain backups of your computer and, especially, any programs you are writing for this class. "My computer crashed" or "I lost my usb drive" are not valid excuses for turning an assignment in late.

  You should always have multiple copies of your work. You can have one on your computer or laptop and another on Box, Dropbox, email, or a usb drive. Since you will be using GitHub to submit assignments, it is strongly recommended that you frequently push to your repository as your off-site backup.

• You can make as many pushes to your repository as you want before an assignment deadline, without penalty. You can take advantage of this to submit an assignment early. Then, if you later decide to improve your program, you may do so and push the changes to the repository without penalty (as long as it's before the assignment deadline). The last commit pushed before the deadline will be the one graded.
• Occasionally, a student will discover they received a lower grade than they were hoping for on an assignment. When they investigate why, it turns out that:
  • they accidentally pushed the .class files and not the .java files,
  • the files in their repository were not the latest versions of the file (i.e. they didn't save before committing and pushing the files)
  • they accidentally upload the files for another assignment
  • they forget to push their changes to the repository
  • they push to the wrong repository
  • they forget to add files to git
  In each of these cases, after the submission deadline has passed, there is no way to resubmit for more points. It is your responsibility to ensure the file(s) in your repository are the ones you intend to submit. To avoid the above problems from happening, do the following:
  1. Run your program to ensure it is behaving the way you expect it to behave.
  2. Save the file(s) and exit the IDE, text editor, word processing program, etc.
  3. Run git add -p to review and add all your changes to tracked files.
  4. Run git status to see whether there are any untracked files that should be added. If there are, add them.
  5. Commit and push your changes to your repository.
  6. Clone the repository to a new location.
  7. Does the newly-cloned directory contain all of the files? Open those files to make sure they were what you intended to submit. Compile and run the program. Does your program still behave the way it is supposed to?
• Students sometime encounter problems submitting their assignments by the deadline. Here are some suggestions on avoiding these problems:
  • Do not wait until the deadline (e.g. 11:59 pm) to submit your assignment. The submission time is the time the server receives your assignment. The server uses its clock, not your computer's clock. If your clock is slow, then your computer may say it's 11:55 pm when the server says it is 11:59 pm. The server's time will be used to determine whether an assignment is late.
  • Assignments must be received before the deadline. If it is even one second after the deadline (e.g. 11:59:01 pm for an 11:59 pm deadline), it will be marked as late. Give yourself some time to submit the assignment so you don't end up submitting it seconds after the deadline.
  • Occasionally, a student may encounter problems with connecting to GitHub. If this happens, try again a few minutes later (yet another reason to not wait until the deadline to submit your assignment). If you are still having trouble, email the instructor your assignment. The time he receives your email will be your submission time -- if it is late, you will receive a zero for the assignment.

General Course Tips

• Emergencies are typically situations involving police or medical doctors (e.g. car accident, mugging, death in the family, or medical emergency). Properly-documented emergencies are emergencies that have a note from an unbiased third party (e.g. police officer or medical doctor) that include:
  • Your name
  • Date and time of emergency
  • Basic/general description of emergency
  • Contact information for the unbiased third party (e.g. phone number or email address)
• If you are having issues that can affect your grade, it is better to talk to me sooner rather than later.
• While talking to me before or after class is a good way to bring something to my attention, it is also easy for me to forget who talked to me or what they talked about. Please also email me so I can have the details and not forget about your request.
• I occasionally get asked to write letters of recommendation for students. Unfortunately, the structure of the course makes it hard to write a good letter for students (writing a "did well in class" letter doesn't help a student much). So if you think you might want me to write a letter of recommendation for you, please talk to me early so I can more closely observe your performance. Students who want me to write a detailed letter might consider working on projects outside of class that apply concepts from the course.