Syllabus and general information for MCS-270: Object-Oriented Software Development (Spring 2000)

Overview

Office hours

World Wide Web

Text

Labs

Attendance is mandatory for all lab sessions, unless you have already turned in your lab report. I will excuse up to three absences per student, for any reason. Use yours wisely. If you exceed this allowance, I may reduce your course grade by one letter grade. In the second half of the course, your project team's weekly meeting with me will be covered under this attendance policy.

Tests

Honor

Any substantive contribution to your solution by another person or taken from a publication should be properly acknowledged in writing. Failure to do so is plagiarism and will necessitate disciplinary action.

The same standards regarding plagiarism apply to team projects as to the work of individuals, except that the author is now the entire team rather than an individual. Anything taken from a source outside the team should be be properly cited.

One additional issue that arises from the team authorship of project reports is that all team members must stand behind all reports bearing their names. All team members have quality assurance responsibility for the entire project. If there is irreconcilable disagreement within the team it is necessary to indicate as much in the reports; this can be in the form of a ``minority opinion'' or ``dissenting opinion'' section where appropriate.

Late assignments

If you are too sick to complete an assignment on time, you will not be penalized. Simply write ``late due to illness'' at the top of the assignment, sign your name and hand it in. Other circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Grade changes

Grading

• 40% lab assignments (4 @ 10% each)
• 20% exams (2 @ 10% each)
• 40% project

For the major team project in the second half of the semester, I will grade you in accordance with the goals you establish for yourselves. It is up to you to decide what the deliverables of your team are. If you decide that all there is going to be is a working program at the end of the semester, then that is what you will be graded on -- all or nothing. If, on the other hand, you establish a timetable in which there are other deliverables scheduled along the way -- such as a requirements document, one or more design documents, an interface mock-up, a web page of information for users, a suite of test cases, etc. -- then you will be graded on each of them, and you will have less of an "all the eggs in one basket" problem. But it is really up to you. Similarly, my default mode of grading will be to give the same grade to all members of the team. However, if you establish specific assignments of responsibility, then I will grade each team member on those items he or she is responsible for (as well as including a common grade portion for those items not assigned). Each portion of the project for which an individual is assigned responsibility needs some mechanism for separate assessment. For example, if someone has responsibility for programming a module, then that person must show test results for that module in isolation in order to show that it works, rather than just combining it with all the other modules and leaving it to me to figure out which ones work and which don't.

Style guidelines

Accessibility

Syllabus