Grading and policies

Final grades will be comprised of

10%: Participation and in-class exercises.
35%: Problem sets, which contain both written and programming portions. We plan to have six problem sets (HW0 to HW5).
15%: Midterm (in-class).
40%: Final projects, including project proposal (10%), progress report (5%), poster (5%), and final report (20%).

Late policies:

Late policy: homework will be accepted up to two days late, with a penalty of 20% per day. It is usually better to just turn in what you have on time.
For unforeseen health and personal emergencies, please contact one of the instructors. Job interviews and schoolwork are not excuses for late homework.

Collaboration policy:

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 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.

If you have questions about a particular situation, please ask.