Each problem set will consist of a written and programming portion. This course’s policy on academic honesty builds on the honor code and is best stated as "be reasonable." We recognize that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between asking for help and submitting someone else’s work. For individual assignments students are permitted to ask classmates and others for conceptual help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you (e.g., writing your response, copy-pasting code, or making your slides). Please review the Academic Integrity section of the syllabus for more information.
When you complete the assignment (and honestly at any major checkpoint) you should always back up your code to a private github repo, to your gdrive, or some other external storage device!
Make sure to submit your final written PDF to Gradescope as well as you final modified code files per the coding pset instructions. The code autograders should be moderately fast (a few minutesa) so if you find that it is taking a very very long time to return a grade, your code most likely is inefficient or has an infinite loop. You may re-submit as many times as you want until the deadline. The last submission you make before the deadline will be used for your final grade on the assignment.
Note: Make sure to use your official .edu email when signing up for Gradescope so that your grades will link with your student record!
All re-grade requests must be submitted as a private message on Slack within 1 week of the grade being returned. Do note that grades could go up or down! Since for autograded assignments you can submit as many times as you want until the deadline, regrades will only be considered in extraordinary circumstances. Grades from Gradescope will be synced to the course website following the submission deadline.
The late policy of this class follows a policy found in many Barnard/Columbia CS courses. Each day (24-hour period) or partial day late incurs a 25% penalty on the assignment. However, you are allowed a total of 5 “flex” days, to be used as you wish throughout the semester, with a maximum of 2 per assignment. Late hours round up the nearest day. Note that these are NOT applicable on any final project related deadlines. To use a “flex” day, simply submit your work late and send a note to the course staff indicating how many “flex” days your late submission has incurred, and how many remaining “flex” days you have. When possible, advance notice is appreciated. If there is a situation that you feel should be exempt from this policy, you must reach out over email at least 48-hours prior to the due date.
You will need to use LaTeX to prepare your solutions to the written exercises. For those who aren't familiar with LaTeX, it is a language for typesetting technical documents, and is particularly adept at presenting math.
The course staff recommends using the cloud based editor, Overleaf. Overleaf also has Github integration and you should be able to get access to all such premium features by associating your CU email with your account!
Note: We will also post a LaTeX template you must use for each assignment so you will only need to figure out how to fill in answers! We will also give you a template for the final project. So, don't worry about how to construct an entire document!
We will use Google Colab for our coding assignments as it provides free access to GPU machines (which many of you may not own). To use Google Colab you will just need a Google email account and you should only need to use the free tier for this course. Google Colab is essentially a fancy Jupyter notebook that has some additional bells and whistles but is also missing some features. I'll provide plenty of examples that you can build on to implement most functionality you need. That said if you Google around the internet you'll find folks have leveraged Google Colab to do a wide variety of things.
If you are having any trouble, please reach out to us on Slack, we're here to help!