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UM EECS 487: Grading Policy

1. Course Grade Composition:
   • 1 Final Exam: 15%
   • 1 Midterm Exam: 15%
   • 2 Homework and n Pop Quizzes: 16%
   • 10 Lab Assignments: 20%
   • 4 Programming Assignments: 32%
   • Class Participation: 2%

   Both the midterm and final exams are open-book, open-notes exams. The final exam is cumulative. Pop quizzes are also open-book, open-notes. Each pop quiz covers material between the last and current pop quizzes. Homework will be due before lecture and must be turned in as hard copy in class. Pop quizzes before the midterm exam will be counted towards your HW1 grade, while those after will be counted towards your HW2 grade. Lab assignments are to be demoed to the GSI or grader for grading. Programming assignments must be turned in online by copying them to the course directory. Do not email any of your assignment to the teaching staff.

   If your individual effort is lacking, a failing grade is a distinct possibility. Roughly, you'll get an E if you failed the exams and do not show sufficient efforts. Insanely great work gets an A+, excellent work an A, good work a B, and acceptable work a C.

2. Regrade and Late Days

   You have five working days from when a piece of graded work is returned to ask for a regrade. Due to grade reporting schedule, request for regrade of the final exam must be submitted the same day it is returned. To ask for regrade, you must submit a written request explaining the technical reasons that would make a regrade necessary. A regrade means regrading your whole work and may result in an overall lower grade.

   You have four free late days, including weekends, to use on any of your programming assignments and homework. It is your responsibility to keep track of your own remaining free late days. Once the free late days are used up, late programming assignments will be assessed a penalty that is a fraction of the total assignment grade according to the following schedule:

   • the first 24 hours or fraction thereof: 4% of the assignment's total points,
   • the second 24 hours or fraction thereof: 8%, on top of the 4% above, for a total of 12%,
   • no late homework will be accepted beyond 48 hours (2 days) after the deadline,
   • the third 24 hours or fraction thereof: 12%, plus 12% above, for a total of 24%,
   • the fourth 24 hours or fraction thereof: 16%, plus 24% above, for a total of 40%,
   • no late programming assignment will be accepted beyond 96 hours (4 days) after the deadline.
   For example, suppose the assignment is worth 100 points and you turn in your work late by 24 hours and 10 minutes. If you have no free late days left, your late penalty will be 12 points. If you still have one free late day left, your late penalty will be 8 points. Free late days will be consumed first before the late penalty schedule is applied. No late lab assignments will be accepted. There is no late nor make-up pop quiz. Since we have the free late days and late penalty schedule, no extension will be granted. You will be provided a message-digest based mechanism to timestamp your early submission of labs.

   Start your assignments early, and plan to have them finished a few days ahead of the due date. Many unexpected problems arise during programming. In addition, the computer labs can become crowded and computers crash and networks fail. Extensions will not be granted even if these things happen. Plan for them to happen.

3. General Policy on Collaboration

   All works must be completed individually.

   You are encouraged to discuss ideas and techniques broadly with other members of your class, but not the specifics of assigned problems. Sharing of code or intermediate designs is expressly prohibited. If you receive substantial help from others, you must acknowledge them in your work. If you use any published materials (books, papers, or materials found on the Web) in your solution, you must give full citation that help facilitate the locating of the original materials (for example, the URL of the Web site).

   You must not discuss exam questions with others nor lookup solutions to homework and exam questions online. You are forbidden to solicit help or copy of old homework, assignments, exams, or solutions from students who have taken this course prior to the current term. You are also forbidden to give help or copy of homework, assignments, exams, or solutions to others. To do either will be considered a violation of the College of Engineering Honor Code.

   Acts of cheating and plagiarizing will be reported to the Engineering Honor Council. Cheating is when you copy, with or without modification, someone else's work that is not meant to be publicly accessible. Plagiarizing is when you copy, with or without modification, someone else's work that is publicly available without acknowledging the original author. To incorporate publicly available code in your solution is considered cheating in this course. To pass off the implementation of an algorithm as that of another is also considered cheating. For example, if the assignment asks you to implement sort using heap sort and you turn in a working program that uses insertion sort in place of the heap sort, it will be considered cheating. If you can not implement a required algorithm, you must inform the teaching staff when turning in your assignment.

   You are required to read the College of Engineering Honor Code.

4. Specific Policies on Collaboration
   1. Specific Policy Applicable to Homework
      You are allowed to consult both online and offline sources, including humans, to help solve homework problems. If you do consult outside sources, i.e., other than yourself and the teaching staff, you MUST cite them. You do not need to cite the teaching staff nor the textbooks nor the lecture slides. These are the only exceptions. What you turn in must be your individual work. Your classmates can give you an idea on how to approach a problem, but they cannot give you any solution to these problems. If you find an online solution to any of these problems, you are allowed to consult them, but not to use them verbatim. You must phrase your solution in such a way that shows you have understood the problem and solution. Violation of any part of the above policy will be a violation of the Honor Code. If you turn in a handwritten solution, please write legibly. Illegible scribble will earn zero points.

   2. Specific Policy Applicable to Exams
      You will be asked to attest that you have read, understand, and will abide by the following policy prior to the start of an exam. You may therefore want to review it now and ask for any clarifications necessary prior to taking any exam in this course.
      Open-book, open-notes exam. You may consult the two course textbooks, Theoharis et al., Graphics and Visualization: Principles & Algorithms and Shreiner, OpenGL Programming Guide, your own notes, course homework, lab assignments, programming assignments, your solutions to them, any solutions provided by the instructors, and other notes provided by the instructors, including the course lecture slides. You may also consult the OpenGL, GLU, GLUT, and GLSL manual pages. The above listed material may be accessed in hard copy or electronic form, either offline or online. A calculator or a calculator program is also permitted for the exam. These are the only uses of a computer and the Internet permitted. Any other use of the computer and the Internet is strictly forbidden. You are expressly not allowed to use any form of search engine to search the Internet/Web/Wikipedia for answers to the exam questions. You are not allowed to compile and run any programming code (including but not limited to C/C++/C#/Java/Python, OpenGL/GLSL, Direct3D/HLSL) during the exam. You must not consult any resources other than those listed above.
      Notation. In your answers, you are required to represent vector as lowercase letter with an arrow above, matrices as uppercase letters with hats, points as lowercase letters with tildes, and colors as lowercase letters. Do not forget to use (+) and (*) when necessary.
      Write legibly. If the person grading your exam cannot read what you've written, he will simply assume that you meant the illegible portion as a note to yourself and will ignore it. If you lose points because part of your answer could not be read, you will not be given the opportunity to explain what it says.
      Do not ask questions during the exam. Most questions are unnecessary and they disturb other students. Figuring out what the exam question is asking is part of the exam. If you think you have to make some unusual assumption to answer a problem, note what that assumption is on the test. The answers to most questions should be short. If you find yourself writing an excessively long response, you may want to think more carefully about the question.
      Write your name on the upper right hand corner of every page.
      You will be asked for your signature to indicate that you have read, understand, and will abide by the instructions and policies above and the College of Engineering Honor Code.

   In case of conflicts, the specific policies override the general policy, and the general policy overrides the College of Engineering Honor Code. The parts that are not in conflict still apply.