Attendance is part of your grade.

Students are responsible for knowledge that is disseminated during class starting from the first day. If you miss class, please arrange beforehand with a friend to get notes/handouts for you. If you join the class later in the quarter, you are expected to complete all missed work immediately and late penalties may apply

If you know you are going to miss something important, contact the instructor beforehand. It's much easier to accommodate planned absences.

This term we will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help quickly and efficiently from classmates, the TA, and myself. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, I encourage you to post your questions on Piazza. If you have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com.

Find our Piazza class page at: https://piazza.com/uci/winter2014/inf141cs121/home

A welcome post is up on Piazza. If you don't see it, please investigate the problem so that you do not miss required information.

Some announcements will be emailed to your UCI Net ID / Login through the EEE system. Please make sure it is set up properly and being forwarded to whichever account you normally read email from. Make sure it is not on your spam list or being filtered as junk mail.

Many other announcements will be made in class as well.

We highly recommend contacting the course staff through the Piazza system, during any of the 3 class periods during the week, or during virtual or actual office hours. As the quarter goes on, email becomes a very unproductive tool for class related issues.

Personal issues can be addressed through a private message on Piazza or through a face-to-face meeting

If you do try to contact us through email, to make sure that the class staff see your email, please include the class code, "[INF 141]" or "[CS 121]" , at the beginning of the subject line.

The late penalty is 1% per hour after the due date.

Due dates are specified with a date and time in local time.

For example, if an assignment's due date is 11:59pm on Monday night and it is turned in on 11:59pm Tuesday night it is 24 hours late will be result in a 24% penalty.

Please note that electronic quizzes and surveys often close 4 days after the due date to allow for late credit. For the official due date, please refer to the calendar page

If you find that you are unable to make it to a scheduled event (class, exam, presentation, etc.) due to sickness, please get some documentation from a health care provider to assist us in maintaining fairness to the other students in the class. In the absence of such documentation, please contact the staff as soon as you realize that you are going to miss a scheduled event. Generally sicknesses will be treated on a case by case basis. We will accommodate you as best as we can depending on the circumstances.

Electronic Add/Drop only. Standard university time lines apply.

Recent enrollment growth are stretching the staff and facilities quite thin, so it is nearly impossible to accomodate any course waivers especially for missing prerequisites or enrollment over capacity.

Incompletes grades are for students who, through some unforeseen emergency, are unable to complete the requirements of the course. Whether something constitutes and emergency is up to the discretion of the instruction. Other uses of incompletes are not accomodated.

Every quarter I fail students for cheating. Will it be you this quarter? I hope not.

Here's my take on academic honesty: This is not a job. This is a class. Someone is paying me to make sure that you learn the course material. When I give you assignments, it isn't because I want to know the answer. I know the answer. I want you to do the hard work of finding out the answer in a particular way. This is how you learn new things. You can give me a "correct" answer that you obtained in an incorrect way. That isn't the goal. Because, let me say it again, I know the answer. Your grade is about you learning. Academic Honesty is about getting the answers in the right way so that you actually learn. Some of the things you do in this class will therefore be inefficient and difficult.

You may never use anyone else's work without clearly acknowledging the source. This includes code you find on the web, text from books, and answers from friends. Doing so is called plagiarism.

Plagiarism is any work that you use that you did not create and do not credit. If you plagiarize another work without crediting the source, you will receive a failing grade for the entire course at the discretion of the instructor. It takes 2 seconds to cite your source. If you want to be intellectually lazy, do something else with your life. If you forget to do an assignment, consider the trade-off between a zero on the assignment (which you didn't turn in) and a zero for the whole course (when you turn in a plagiarised piece of work).

If an assignment specifically requires you to do the work yourself, and you copy work from another source, but acknowledge it, then you did not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. It's not plagiarism but it's still not doing the assignment correctly. This is also grounds for failing an assignment.

This has happened in my courses before, it has happened in conferences that I have chaired and I have sat in conferences in which others have presented my work verbatim. In each of these cases I took the strongest possible recourse available to me at the time. Our global academic system relies on properly crediting sources for everything to function. Plus it bugs me.

My colleagues and I have kicked students out of UCI for cheating in our courses. Here is a list of cheating incidents at UCI that were dealt with at the university level.

Please familiarize yourself with the latest UCI academic honesty policy: http://www.editor.uci.edu/catalogue/appx/appx.2.htm.

Please read a more detailed definition of plagiarism defined by the ACM: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy.

Please watch a tutorial on Academic Honesty at UCI.

The calendar web page for the class is subject to update. Check it frequently and be sure to refresh / reload the web pages when you browse them.

Please follow the assignments exactly. If you need clarification, ask before the assignment is due.

Any student who feels he or she may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability, religious observance (or anything else) should contact me privately to discuss his or her specific needs. If appropriate, contact the Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.

This often seems like a big deal to an affected student , but as an instructor we are familiar with making appropriate accomodations.