Grading and policies

Final grades will be comprised of

• 20%: Problem sets, which contain both written and programming portions.
• 25%: Exam 1 (in-class exam).
• 25%: Exam 2 (in-class exam).
• 30%: Final project, including project proposal (10%) and final report (20%).

Late policies:

• Late policy: everyone will get three late days to use for homework assignments. After all three late days have been exhausted, no more late submissions will be accepted.
• For unforeseen health and personal emergencies, please contact the instructors at cmsc723instructors@gmail.com. Job interviews / other schoolwork are not excuses for late homework.

AI policies:

• Using assistance from AIs such as ChatGPT to complete your homeworks and projects is allowed. Using AI assistance for the in-class exams is not allowed.
• If you take advantage of any sort of AI assistance for an assignment, you will be required to submit the specific prompts you used as well as a description of how the AI helped (or did not help) you complete the assignment.
• This should go without saying, but please don't argue about your grades because "the AI generated the wrong answer". If you are using AI assistance, you are also responsible for making sure it is correct before submitting it.

Collaboration policies (with humans):

• Other than the aforementioned AI assistance, all of the content you submit, both code and text, needs to be produced on your own. For group projects, work must be produced only by members of the group.
• Do not share code or written materials with other students. Do not look at others' code. For homeworks, you may discuss problems and the project with others, and we encourage it, to help understand the material. This is obviously not true for the exams!!!
• If you find, use, or build off of published material, for example on the web or from a textbook, you must cite the source.

Some examples of the policy:

• Acceptable: Alice and Bob discuss alternatives for storing large, sparse vectors of feature counts, as required by a problem set.
• Unacceptable: Alice and Bob sit down together and write code for storing feature counts.
• Acceptable: Bob is confused about how to implement the Viterbi algorithm, and asks Alice for a conceptual description of her strategy.
• Unacceptable: Alice and Bob divide the assignment into parts, and each write the code for their part, and then share their solutions with each other to complete the assignment.
• Acceptable: Alice asks Bob if he encountered a failure condition at a "sanity check" in a coding assignment, and Bob explains at a conceptual level how he overcame that failure condition.
• Unacceptable: Alice or Bob obtain a solution to a previous year's assignment or to a related assignment in another class, and use it as the starting point for their own solution.

We follow the university’s Code of Academic Integrity. If you have questions about a particular situation, please ask.