Grading and policies

Final grades will be comprised of

• 10%: Quizzes/exercises, approximately weekly.
• 20%: Problem sets, which contain both written and programming portions.
• 40%: Two Midterms (in-person written exams), 20% each. They will be scheduled outside of class time. Makeup or accommodation alternative exams must be arranged in advance with the instructor.
• 5%: Final project proposal (earlier in the semester)
• 25% Final project report (due at end of semester).

Late policies:

• Late policy: We will not have late days this year. Gradescope submissions may be shown as "late" for students with individual arrangements. We may accept homework that is submitted a few minutes late. After that, we will not accept homework under normal circumstances wthout steep late penalties; please submit whatever you have by the deadline.
• For unforeseen emergencies regarding individual work submissions, please contact the instructors at cics.685.instructors@gmail.com to arrange a possible late submission. We follow University policy in accepting work late due to health, personal, and religious holiday circumstances. Arrangements in non-emergency circumstances must be made in advance (at least 24 hours) with course staff. A request for late submission may not always be accepted. Note job interviews or other schoolwork are not excuses for late homework.

AI policies:

• Using assistance from AIs such as ChatGPT to complete your homeworks, quizzes, and projects is allowed.
• If you take advantage of any sort of AI assistance for an assignment, you will be required to submit the specific prompts you used as well as a description of how the AI helped (or did not help) you complete the assignment. If you do not submit this acknowledgment, but used AI assistance, you risk losing your grade or an academic honesty violation.
• Typically students who heavily rely on AI make many errors. We will grade appropriately.

Collaboration policies (with humans):

• Other than the aforementioned AI assistance, all of the content you submit, both code and text, needs to be produced on your own. For group projects, work must be produced only by members of the group.
• Do not share code or written materials with other students. Do not look at others' code (including the codes from previous years). For homeworks, you may discuss problems and the project at the high level with others, and we encourage it, to help understand the material. Please do not share all the details of your solutions.
• If you find, use, or build off of published material, for example on the web or from a textbook, you must cite the source.

Some examples of the 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:

Academic Integrity:

Your academic honesty and integrity are critical for your and your peers' education. We follow all aspects of UMass' Academic Integrity Policy.

Course Community Code of Conduct:

The instructor and the course staff are committed to provid-ing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and expres-sion, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic. Please be courteous, respectful, and professional in all of your interactions with other students, TAs, and graders in all mediums of communication in-cluding but not limited to in-person, email, video meetings, chat, discussion forums, and re-grade submissions.

Demeaning, insulting or harassing any member of the course community over any medium of communication is not acceptable behavior, including in person, through official course platforms and through personal/private platforms (social media, email, DM, text, etc.). Students who engage in such behavior will be warned at most once before the behavior is reported to the Dean of Stu-dents office. If you feel you have been or are being harassed or made uncomfortable by a member of this course community, please contact a member of the course staff immediately (or if you do not feel safe doing so, contact the Chair of the Faculty of CICS, Erik Learned-Miller (chair@cs.umass.edu), or the Dean of Students office). We care about making this course a safe and welcoming place for all.