Grading and policies

Final grades will be comprised of

10%: Quizzes / exercises (approximately weekly).
30%: Problem sets, which contain both written and programming portions. We plan to have four problem sets (HW0 to HW3).
20%: Midterm (take home).
40%: Final project, including project proposal (10%), progress report (5%), in-class presentation, and final report (25%). This is done in groups (everything else is independent)

Late policies:

Late policy: everyone will get three late days to use for homework assignments. After all three late days have been exhausted, no more late submissions will be accepted.
For unforeseen health and personal emergencies, please contact one of the instructors. Job interviews and other schoolwork are not excuses for late homework.

Collaboration policy:

For all non-group (non-project) assignments, all of the content you submit, both code and text, needs to be produced independently. Your work must be in your own words and based on your understanding of the solution. ("Independently" applies to homework; for group projects, work must be produced only by members of the group.)
Do not share code or written materials. Do not look at others' code. You may discuss problems and the project with others, and we encourage it, to help understand the material.
On your homework, list the names of everyone you collaborated or had discussions with.
If you find, use, or build off of published material, for example on the web or from a textbook, you must cite the source. Always explain the answer in your own words.

Some examples of the collaboration policy:

Acceptable: Alice and Bob discuss alternatives for storing large, sparse vectors of feature counts, as required by a problem set.
Unacceptable: Alice and Bob sit down together and write code for storing feature counts.
Acceptable: Bob is confused about how to implement the Viterbi algorithm, and asks Alice for a conceptual description of her strategy.
Unacceptable: Alice and Bob divide the assignment into parts, and each write the code for their part, and then share their solutions with each other to complete the assignment.
Acceptable: Alice asks Bob if he encountered a failure condition at a "sanity check" in a coding assignment, and Bob explains at a conceptual level how he overcame that failure condition.
Unacceptable: Alice or Bob obtain a solution to a previous year's assignment or to a related assignment in another class, and use it as the starting point for their own solution.

We follow the university’s Academic Honesty Policy and Procedures. If you have questions about a particular situation, please ask.

Accommodation statement:

The University of Massachusetts Amherst is committed to providing an equal educational opportunity for all students. If you have a documented physical, psychological, or learning disability on file with Disability Services (DS), you may be eligible for reasonable academic accommodations to help you succeed in this course. If you have a documented disability that requires an accommodation, please notify me within the first two weeks of the semester so that we may make appropriate arrangements.

Disability statement:

Since the integrity of the academic enterprise of any institution of higher education requires honesty in scholarship and research, academic honesty is required of all students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Academic dishonesty is prohibited in all programs of the University. Academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to: cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and facilitating dishonesty. Appropriate sanctions may be imposed on any student who has committed an act of academic dishonesty. Instructors should take reasonable steps to address academic misconduct. Any person who has reason to believe that a student has committed academic dishonesty should bring such information to the attention of the appropriate course instructor as soon as possible. Instances of academic dishonesty not related to a specific course should be brought to the attention of the appropriate department Head or Chair. Since students are expected to be familiar with this policy and the commonly accepted standards of academic integrity, ignorance of such standards is not normally sufficient evidence of lack of intent (see here for more).