CP264: Assignments - Winter 2024

Assignments are due 11:59 pm Sunday.

The Assignments

Assignment Validator

Assignments are posted on this web site at least one week before their due dates. If you do not see the assignment when you select them from the listing, they aren't there yet. Don't panic! They will be posted.

Sample solutions are posted on MyLearningSpace in the Contents section.

The Course Instructor will make alternate arrangements in case of equipment failure, holidays, illness, errors, etc. These changes are posted to the CP264 mailing list. Check your email on a regular basis!

Not all questions on all assignments are marked. The questions to be marked are not announced ahead of time.

If you have questions about your assignment mark, please contact your marker. If you still have questions, then you may speak with the Course Instructor. Please bring your questions to your marker's attention within one week of getting your marks back.

If you have questions about the assignment, its structure, the material covered, or the use of the Pydev IDE, please contact the Course Instructor. If you have questions about the mechanical part of submitting assignments (using Windows, WLU, email, etc.), please contact ITS.

Your work is evaluated individually, so do all your assigned work yourself. Submitting work as a group - unless specifically requested - is unacceptable. Such work receives a grade of zero. Plagiarism - the submitting of someone else's work as you own - is a serious offence. The purpose for working together is to help each other learn. If collaboration is done in order for one or more people to avoid having to learn and/or work, then it is very likely going to involve plagiarism. Please read the section on Academic Integrity in University Governance and Policies. If you are assigned group work, every member of your group receives the same mark for the work submitted. Watch out for self-proclaimed computer gurus. Have a professional attitude.

Submitting Assignments

Submit Assignments through MyLearningSpace.

You must adhere to our standards when submitting your assignments. You may use whatever tools you wish to create your assignments, but it is your responsibility to meet these standards:

• All of your project work - C programs, sample output, testing, discussion - must be done in Eclipse. Programs are contained in Pydev modules: .py files; sample output, testing, discussion, and all other non-program files must be saved in text files: .txt files.
• Name your Eclipse project with your Laurier login: an underscore, 'a' (for 'assignment'), then the two-digit assignment number: login_a0n.zip. For example, if the user barn4520 submits Assignment 1, the project name should be: barn4520_a01. Give your .zip file the same name when exporting your project. Thus with the previous example the .zip file must be named barn4520_a01.zip. Use only Eclipse's built-in archive capability to create these .zip files. No other format is accepted. Refer to the appropriate tutorial on how to create an archive file from Eclipse.

• Validate your assignment through the Assignment Validator. The validator checks your project naming and set up and warns you of errors. It does not check if your work is correct, merely if the submitted zip file is valid.

  If there are problems with an assignment submission that would have been caught by the Validator, but you did not use it (or ignored the errors), we will not remark the assignment.

• All assignment material must be submitted electronically through MyLearningSpace. MyLearningSpace does not accept late submissions and assignments not submitted receive a mark of zero.
• Put your name, ID, and email address on each piece of your assignment.
• Submit only one zip file per assignment with all your assignment files zipped into this one file. Note that MyLearningSpace allows you to resubmit an assignment. In any case the markers mark only the last .zip file submitted to MyLearningSpace.
• Unless otherwise specified, put all functions into separate files. The filename consists of the function name with a '.py' appended.
• The text portions of your assignments must be in plain text. The TAs cannot mark material they cannot read. Use a .txt extension on these files. Put all non-implementation (i.e. testing) answers into a single file named testing.txt. Create these files in Eclipse.
• The C code must compile and run under the Eclipse / Pydev IDE on the WLU network. C code that does not compile and run on the WLU network is not marked. Towards this end, make sure that your project options are properly set.

Take the time to adhere to these standards. Don't wait until five minutes before the due date to try and make your program work on the WLU network, or to convert your text from Electric Pencil 5.2 to ASCII.

We strongly suggest you keep back up copies of your assignments on a network drive or memory stick. You are responsible for the back up of your course material.

After marking your assignments your marker posts your mark and comments on MyLearningSpace. Markers have two weeks after the assignment submission to return your marked assignment to you.

You may request a reassessment of your assignments by specifying the reasons for such request in an email.

If you have problems, get help before the assignment is due.

Benefit of the Doubt Mark

Our markers spend a fair amount of time with students discussing assignment issues involving only one or two marks. Because the impact of the number of marks involved in these discussions is so insignificant, we would like to reduce this time. In order to do this we are adding a Benefit of the Doubt (BD) Mark to assignment marks. The way this mark works is this:

When your assignment is graded, this mark are added to the final assignment grade. If you bring your assignment back to your marker for remarking, this mark is removed from the final assignment grade. Thus, it is not worth bringing your assignment to your marker's attention for only 1 or 2 marks as the final assignment grade is unchanged (or lowered!). The only exception is simple addition errors which corrected by your marker without affecting the BD mark.

Please bring your questions to your marker's attention within one week of getting your marks back. Any later and no changes can be made.