CS157 Homework Submission Policy

Format

Although you are submitting your homework as a file, please follow these format instructions.

You may submit in one of three formats: plain-text ASCII, HTML or PDF. Of the three, plain-text is very much preferred. It allows us to grade in situ, by adding special "grading language" mark-ups to the submission for scores, comments and so forth that can later be collected by a script we wrote for this purpose. HTML is also preferred for the same reason: it is easy to add extra text to it. Binary files (e.g. PDFs) cannot be edited in place like this, and therefore create extra work. Furthermore, non-text files cannot be easily opened in a Linux terminal window, which is the environment in which grading is done.

While you may submit PDFs, please do so only for a good reason. For example, wanting to write α or φ instead of 'alpha' or 'phi' is not a good reason. However, laying out your proof in a very structured way that is not easy to do in plain-text could be a good reason. Basically, please do not submit PDFs if all you do is make the headings bigger or perform other purely cosmetic adjustments.

Please do not submit in other formats than .txt, .html or .pdf. In particular, do not submit Word/OpenOffice documents (.doc, .odt...), rich-text (.rtf) and so forth.

• Plain-text ASCII. Please use this notation:
  • ∧ should be & or ^ (just be consistent), ∨ should be |
  • ¬ should be ~ or − (again, be consistent)
  • ⇒ should be =>, ⇔ should be <=>
  • σ should be sigma
  • Σ should be Sigma or bigsigma (the latter is easier to distinguish)
  • ∀x. p(x) should be Ax. p(x)
  • ∃x. p(x) should be Ex. p(x)
  • and so forth. If you are unsure of how to write something, don't hesitate to get in touch with us.
  Please make sure to leave space between exercises and questions, and to clearly label what is what.
• HTML. You may submit your homework in HTML. You should not need to, but if you must use images they must be placed in some publicly accessible place and the HTML must link directly to them, with a fully qualified URL. (No local URLs.) You may use HTML entities, such as &not; for ¬ and so forth.
• PDF. You may submit PDF files (e.g. from a word processor or LaTeX). If you use non-standard fonts, make sure your PDFs have fonts embedded. (This is not usually the default on Windows systems, I have found.) Please note that PDF files should not be made merely to make a submission look pretty; rather there should be some functional reason (e.g. layout of a proof) for you to use a PDF.

Submission

Please submit all your homework here: https://www.stanford.edu/class/cs157/restricted/submit.fft. You will be asked to log in to WebAuth. If you are for some reason unable to log in to WebAuth (note that you must be registered on Axess to have access to the submission script) please contact David.

Resubmissions: When you resubmit, your new file will replace the old one. If you use different file names, a new file will appear on the server. Therefore, please always use the same filename. If there are several files, it makes it less immediate to see which file is your most recent submission.

If your submission succeeds, you will get an email shortly after submission confirming the receipt of your assignment along with the name of the file you submitted. You probably should double-check the contents to make sure that you submitted the right file.

Late Policy

We will be following a strict late day policy. Any assignments submitted after 11:59pm on the due date will be docked 10% for each late (calendar) day. So, if an assignment is due on Thursday and it is submitted at 12:00 midnight (1 minute late) on Thursday night, 10% will automatically be deducted; if it is submitted at 12:00 midnight on Saturday, 30% will be deducted; and so on. There is one major exception to this rule:

Each student is allowed two 24-hour extensions that (s)he may apply to any homework, no questions asked; note that these extensions can be used for separate homework assignments or can be combined to make a single 48-hour extension for any single homework. To let us know about your decision to apply an extension to a particular homework assignment, you need to state this decision in the text of your submission for that assignment, along with the number of extensions being used for the assignment.

The usual late day policy applies after the free extension has been used. For example, if you use both 24-hour extensions for homework 1 then you will get full credit if you submit your solutions before 11:59 pm on Saturday (since it is then becomes a 48 hour extension); then you will have 10% off if you submit your solutions between 12:00 am Sunday morning and 11:59 pm Sunday night, and so on.

These extensions are there for the purposes of emergencies, medical or otherwise. Apart from this, there will be no other extensions given out, except under extreme circumstances (If you feel this is the case, contact the staff ASAP.).

Homeworks will NOT be accepted any more than 5 (five) days late.

Save a copy

Finally, please remember to save a copy of your homework, in the unlikely event that something happens to it. If we require another copy but you do not have one on hand, you will have to type up your homework again.