Coursework and grading

Grading breakdown

Project (60%)

You will submit a programming project at the end of the semester, including both an oral and a written report. You do the project on your own or in collaboration with one other student. If you collaborate, you will be required to include a summary of the contribution of each collabator to the project. You will also be expected to turn in a one-page proposal, due in the third week, and one-page progress reports, due in the eighth and twelfth weeks.

The goal of the project is to gain more insight into a particular problem and a mechanism (or family of mechanisms) for dealing with it. Your project may either be (1) an implementation of a system described in one of the papers we will read in class or others on related topics or (2) an original piece of work. For (1) you may be expected to go beyond the original paper in some way. You may write your program in any language, but avoid programs that fail to run on particular platforms (in particular, those that only run on Windows).

The oral report on your project should resemble what you would present at a conference.

The written report (less ambitious than a conference paper) should include these sections:

• Goals: if (1) selected, a brief summary of the paper behind your project and what you've done differently, if anything; if (2) selected, motivation for the work and its relation to other work
• Implementation
• Results
  • What happened
  • What you learned
  • What you would do differently, or in addition, if you had more time

Grading

Discussion of readings (25%)

For each of the reading assignments, one student will be assigned to present the paper and lead the discussion on it in class. This will include posting one or two questions to the Oncourse Readings Forum. Some suggestions for in-class presentations of readings:

1. You do not need to discuss all of the details of the paper; you may choose to leave out aspects that you think are not particularly relevant for the class.
2. Be critical; discuss what is not clear, what is not justified, what might not scale well.
3. Use examples to illustrate points in the paper which you feel need more explanation than the paper provided.
4. Discuss other papers referred to in the paper if you feel these are necessary for understanding the paper itself.
5. If the work described in the paper has a publicly available implementation, you may want to show this.

Participation (15%)

You will be expected to attend class and to participate in discussion of papers and other topics. The discussion of papers and other topics will start before the class within the Oncourse Forum and may continue there after the class. You will also be expected to participate in those discussions.

Grading procedures

Late submission

I will not accept late assignments. This means that if you can't submit an assignment on time, you don't have to explain, unless you are asking for, and believe you qualify for, an Incomplete in the class. Excuses end up being discriminatory because some students are more likely to use them than others, who have equally good reasons, so, in the interest of fairness, I prefer to ignore them altogether. Remember that one of your homework assignments and one of your discussion question assignments will be dropped, so even if you miss one of these each, you can get an "A" in the course.

Incompletes

The policy towards Incomplete grades in this course is the university's own policy. The following is from the IU Academic Handbook.

CIRCUMSTANCES PERMITTING INCOMPLETES
The grade of Incomplete used on the final grade reports indicates that the work is satisfactory as of the end of the semester but has not been completed. The grade of Incomplete may be given only when the completed portion of a student's work in the course is of passing quality. Instructors may award the grade of Incomplete upon a showing of such hardship to a student as would render it unjust to hold the student to the time limits previously fixed for the completion of his/her work.

Probable grading breakdown

© 2009. Indiana University and Michael Gasser. www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/b659-gass/coursework.html 2009-10-15