General Rules and Policies for CSCI 1228

• Registration You must be formally registered, via the Registrar’s office, in both the class itself and the lab.
• SignupYou must sign up for the protected part of the course web site at that point in the course when you are asked to do so by the course instructor, since this is required for you to have the necessary access to protected areas of the site. By completing this signup you agree to adhere to the rules and policies set out in this document that you are now reading.
• Attendance Students are expected to attend both lectures and labs. Any registered student who has not made an appearance in class or lab by the end of the second full week of classes, or who "disappears" from the course without notice for an extended period later on in the term, will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course.
• Tests and Exams No student will be permitted to write the final examination early, for any reason. If, for medical or other legitimate reasons, you are unable to write a test or the final exam at the scheduled time, you must so inform the instructor at the earliest possible opportunity, and other arrangements may be made. Similarly, if you have or develop a medical condition or other problem that is affecting, or is likely to affect, your performance in the course over the long term, your instructor must be notified at the earliest opportunity. With respect to the final examination, the following specific rules are in effect:
  • All students are expected to write the exam at the scheduled time. Simply "needing more time" is not a valid reason for missing the final exam. Neither is having two exams in one day.
  • If a student cannot write at the scheduled time, the instructor must be notified at or before the start time of the exam. Only in the most dire of circumstances will a failure to conform to this rule be waived and a student be permitted to write late. The days of students waltzing in two or three days after an exam, or whenever, saying they missed the exam for some vague reason, and then expecting to write that exam, are over.
  • Documentation supporting the reason for missing the examination must be submitted to the instructor as soon as possible after the exam, and in no case later than three days (72 hours) following the start time of the exam. The instructor reserves the right to confirm the validity of the supporting documentation with the issuer. Be advised that a dim view will be taken of any note, even from a doctor or nurse, that says anything like, "So-and-so tells me he/she had a whatever ailment on whenever date and could not write the test/exam."
• Cooperative Effort vs. Plagiarism Saint Mary's University has reasonably strict guidelines with respect to plagiarism and cheating. See A Student's Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism. As far as this course is concerned, working with other students to exchange ideas and to solve problems is encouraged. But, copying another person’s work directly, electronically or otherwise, or having someone use your account or another account to complete work for you is strictly forbidden. Any such practice is subject to severe penalties, and the following specific policy will be in place for the duration of this course:
  • All submitted assignments, projects, tests, and exams (that is, every submission for course marks) must consist entirely of work done only by the student making the submission, unless explicit permission for a joint submission is given. That is, unless explicitly noted otherwise, every pen stroke or key stroke of work submitted by each student must have been done by the student whose name appears on the submission, and no unauthorized team work of any kind will be accepted for these submissions. On the other hand, discussion of the basic ideas involved in an assignment or project is encouraged. It is the actual work done to produce the solution—the physical effort, if you will—that must be done individually by each student.
  • If a team effort is explicitly permitted for one or more submissions, the above rule applies to the team collectively, as well as each individual on the team.
  • Each student taking this course is expected to be aware of this policy and is advised that the penalty for a breach of it may include the forfeiture of a pass in the course, irrespective of the grade achieved, and irrespective of whether the student (or team) has supplied or received work passed from one student (or team) to another for inclusion in any formal submission of a homework assignment, test or exam.
  • Violations of this policy will be reported, with details, to the Dean of Science and the Registrar, along with a recommendation for disciplinary action.
• Special Note on Avoiding a Form of Cheating Peculiar to this Course There are programs (generally called Java decompilers or Java disassemblers) that can be used to retrieve the Java source code from a Java class file. If your instructor provides a Java class file as a sample executable for an assignment and you use one of these programs to produce the source code, and hand in that source code as your own work, instead of designing and writing the code yourself, this will be considered cheating on your part. There will be a policy or zero tolerance for this activity in this course. It is not something you can do inadvertent ly, and if you are discovered to have done this, you will receive zero on any associated work, you will be asked to withdraw from the course, and an instance of cheating will be placed in your university record. And all this will happen the first time you do it. So ... be forewarned. There will be no second chances on this one.
• Cell Phones Cell phones must either not be brought to class or lab, or be turned off during the class or lab period. If you are expecting a telephone call which absolutely must be answered during a particular class or lab time, don't come to that class or lab. In other words, there is a zero tolerance for cell phones in the classes and lab sessions of this course. Moreover, anyone caught using a cell phone, or any other electronic device not explicity permitted by the instructor, during a test or exam will receive a grade of zero on that test or exam.