Before you get started
This class requires you to do a LOT of work between homeworks (3 or 4),
reading assignments, reading the textbooks, a pretty large project, and two exams.
Grading is quite strict as well, in that failure to get a passing grade in, say,
the project will earn you a failing grade in this class. Put it another way,
you cannot get around work by skipping assignments and hoping to pass based
on a good class average.
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Grading
- Homeworks: 15%
- Midterm: 20%
- Final: 30%
- Project: 35%
The following grading scale will be used:
- A: [90, 100+)
- B: [80, 90)
- C: [70, 80)
-
D: [60, 69) ... this grade may not be assigned to graduate students,
instead an E will be assigned.
- E: [0, 59) This is a failing grade!
To pass this class you will need to have the following marks:
- 60% for the homeworks average, AND
- 60% for the project, AND
- 60% in the final exam, AND
- The overall average is 60+ as well
Please read this again since it is not your typical grading policy.
All scores posted on the Blackboard will be percentages, between 0 and 100.
For example, let's assume that a homework is worth 123 points and you get 97
points: what will be posted on the Blackboard is (97/123)*100 which will be
rounded up -- using the round-half-up rule -- to 79. The same applies for
exams, labs, etc.
Class participation will help settle borderline grades. While class attendance
is not taken, your instructor believes that regular class attendance is
important and expects students to actively participate in class. Questions
and comments are always welcome.
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Late Work
All work that you turn in must be submitted on the
Blackboard before
midnight (Central Time) the day the work is due.
I understand that from time to time you'll get overwhelmed with work,
or that you may have personal problems that will make you less productive
than you'd like. That's why each student in this class has a credit of
two (2) days for late work.
You can use this credit as you see fit, for good reason or no reason at all,
all at once or in pieces -- though there is no fractional credit.
The only thing we ask for is that, in your Blackboard submission
(in the COMMENT field) you indicate how much of your credit you want to use.
Once you've used late credit you may not go back and ask us to apply it
for something else; once you use it it's gone.
After you've used your "late work credit", or if you don't
want to use it, there is a 5% per calendar day penalty for late work.
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Academic Honesty
All the work you submit must be individual, including, but not limited to,
those cases when your instructor has approved pair-programming for you; in these
cases the only thing that may be identical with somebody else's is code.
Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. IIT has a strict academic honesty
policy; here are the top points:
-
The misrepresentation of any work submitted for credit as the product
of a student’s sole independent effort, such as using the ideas of others
without attribution and other forms of plagiarism.
-
The use of any unauthorized assistance in taking quizzes, tests or
examinations.
-
The acquisition, without permission, of tests, answer sheets, problem
solutions or other academic material when such material has been withheld from
distribution by the instructor.
-
Deliberate harmful obstruction of the studies, research or academic work of
any member of the IIT community.
-
Making material misrepresentation in any submission to or through any office
of the university to a potential employer, professional society, meeting or
organization.
-
The intentional assistance of others in the violation of the standards for
academic honest.
You can read IIT's Code of Academic Honesty
here. You should read it until you fully understand it.
A good way to test whether you understand it is to try to explain it to
somebody else.
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Programming Language(s)
For any of the assignments in this class, including the project, please feel
free to use any of the free and/or open-source
(FOSS)
object-oriented programming languages
in the set { Java, Ruby, JavaScript, Python }.
You may even use Smalltalk if you want to, however this will make testing
somewhat more difficult for us. Before you start, please check with your
instructor to make sure he's ok with it.
Work done using languages other than specified above, as well as the linking
of free and open-source software with proprietary 3rd party libraries will not
be accepted.
To learn more about free software check out the
Free Software Foundation.
You should also know that free software is not the same thing as open-source
software,
this
article from the GNU foundation clarifies the matter for you.
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Test Environment
All programming work you do for this class will be tested on *our* computer(s)
running a fresh installation of
Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa).
I'm sorry, but the fact that your code runs on your computer and not on ours
is not enough to earn you credit for your work.
If you've been using Linux, then this requirement is very easy to satisfy.
If you're new to Linux, then you'll have some learning to do, which is a very
good and valuable thing.
Let me repeat, we're not going to test under any version of Windows, nor
are we going to do it under any other Unix variant other than the one
described above.
Moreover, we are not going to test your project inside Eclipse or any other IDE; we
need to have clear instructions for how to get the code, build executable, deploy.
If we ask you to demo your project, then you'll have to do it in the test
environment specified above. A full demo will require you to do the following:
- Check out your code from the repository
- Build the executable
-
Run the script that calculates unit-test coverage and prove that it meets
the project requirements
- Deploy the executable
- Prove that your project does what the requirements call for
You typically have 30' for the demo.
If your application requires things (e.g. libraries, plug-ins, gems, etc.) that
don't come with the standard Linux distribution, then you should tell us, in
the README file you provide with your other deliverables, how to install required
dependencies. Better yet, your build script will install all that's needed
for a successful demo.
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Unit Testing
We're all tired of bad software, whether because it crashes when we least
expect it or because of security holes that allow the bad guys to take over
our systems and identities. We all pretty much despise software maintenance,
in particular when we're asked to modify code that we never touched, don't
really understand, and have no way of making sure our changes don't damage
existing functionality.
The good news is that we can do something about it: creating automated unit
tests for all your code is a very good start. Doing it in Test-Driven Development
(TDD) fashion is even better.
You cannot possibly get full credit for your work unless each and every method
in your classes has good unit testing. By good we mean meaningful and
sufficient:
- A unit-test that just asserts true is not meaningful.
-
Providing only one unit test for a method that requires multiple tests is
not sufficient.
You will be required to measure and include with your deliverables the unit
test coverage as measured by the tool of choice in your chosen programming
language.
As a general rule automated unit testing will account for 50% of your mark
in any assignment. If you fail to submit unit testing, then you cannot expect
to get more than 50% in the assignment.
Unit test coverage above 80% is required for full credit. Unit test coverage
below 50% doesn't earn you any credit. For anything in between, you get one
percentage point of credit for each percentage point of unit test coverage.
For example, if your test coverage is 73%, then the most credit you can get
for unit testing is 30-(80-73)=23. In another example, if the unit test coverage
is 51%, then the most credit you can get is 30-(80-51)=1.
Unit tests that are useless will be removed and the coverage will be measured
again before a mark is assigned for your work.
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Communications
Typically the first person you should contact for any questions related to
assignments is your TA.
Please be descriptive in the subject line when you email your instructor such
that processing doesn't get delayed. At the very minimum you should indicate
the class and the term, followed by a brief description of what is it that
you want to communicate.
Examples of good subject lines for your email:
- cs445, Spring 2022 - Hw1, part (i)
- cs445, Spring 2022 - When will the grades be posted on the Blackboard?
- cs445, Spring 2022 - Question about project
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Project
The purpose of the project is to give you the opportunity to practice the
concepts discussed in this class. The requirements are purposely somewhat
vague such that you can interact with the client (that's your instructor) to
figure out the detailed requirements.
In addition to various deliverables you have to produce throughout the semester
and a working product on the due date of the project,
you are expected to develop a lot of automated unit tests as you work on this
project.
You'll be required to review the project of a peer, comment on it and make
critical recommendations for its improvement. 10% of your "Project"
mark will be tied to how well you grade your peer's project. Another 10% will
be the mark given to your project by the student reviewing it. Please note
that if you submit your project late, then your grade will be determined
entirely by your instructor.
We'll want to see constant progress in your project work; just getting started
a day or two before the due date is not going to cut it. That's why you're
required to give access to your software repository to both your instructor
and your TA by the end of 2/1/22. If you already have a GitHub account, then
you can share it with us. If this is the first time you have to do it, then
you may want to look at Github, Bitbucket, Pivotal Tracker, etc. We like
Bitbucket a lot.
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