WORKING DOCUMENT: SUBJECT TO CHANGE
Program Submission Guidelines
15-212, Spring 1998


Make sure to read this entire page before starting your programming project for this week.

Submission Deadlines
Electronic Submission
Grading
Cross Platform Development
Teams and Team IDs


Submission Deadlines

Programs are due, electronically, by exactly 9 a.m., and will be submitted electronically. Do not make changes to your submission directory between 9:00 a.m. and 9:15 a.m., or your submissions may be lost. Programs submitted in the 24 hours following the deadline will recieve 85% of the credit earned. Programs submitted in the 24 hours following that will receive 50% credit. Programs submitted after that will be graded, but no credit will be given . Extensions, if absolutely neccesary, may be granted by the instructor grading your homework. If any part of your program is submitted beyond the deadline (that is, picked up by the second or third collection (see late submissions under Electronic Submission, below), your program will be marked as having been submitted with its latest file.

Some graders will require submission of your program on paper. Your grader will explain in section whether this is required. The hard copy submission must be the same program you submit electronically, including all formatting. You may use programs such as enscript or prettyprint to clean up your results, but your electronic file must be equally readable (see Grading, below). This hard copy should be submitted to the instructor grading your team's programs. Only one team member need submit a hard copy, where applicable.

All members of a team will receive the same grade on a programming project and, consequently, on the programming portion (35%) of your final grade. Sometimes, members of a team feel that the work load is not being shared equally. If you feel that this is the case, you should first try to work it out diplomatically with your partner. If that fails, you should contact your TA before the problem becomes a big issue.

Finally, as with the homeworks, the programming projects are also subject to the course policy on cheating and collaboration, so please review them if neccesary. Remember, you can always talk to your instructor if extenuating circumstances are placing your team under time pressure.


Electronic Submission

Each team has a directory under /afs/cs/academic/class/15212-s98/teams. The directory name is a random identification number (see Teams and Team IDs, below), and is subject to change (we'll tell you first, of course). The members (or member, if you are working alone) of a team have total read and write permissions to their directory.

Do not do your program development in that directory. Files that are not .java or for submission are subject to random and untimely deletion. (This isn't just so we can be mean; if everybody works in the submission tree, we'll run out of space).

To submit your project, create a subdirectory in your team's directory named progX, where X is the number of the current programming project. Leave the .java files that you are submitting in those directories (do not submit .class files; they will be ignored and/or deleted). At the submission deadline (9 a.m. on the appropriate Wednesday), files in your progX directory will be copied and sent to your grader. Your directory will be renamed progX-submitted, and you will lose write priviledges. There is no early submission, and any problems (i.e., your submission directory does not exist at collection time) are the responsibility of the team.

For late submissions, you may create a new progX directory, which will be collected in the same manner 24 or 48 hours later (be sure to read Submission Deadlines, above). In those cases, the directory will be renamed progX-submitted-85, progX-submitted-50, or progX-submitted-0.


Grading

Programs will be graded on a scale from 0 - 100. As the semester goes on, programming style will become less important, but will always be significant. See the project assignments page to see the balance for a given assignment. Programs will be graded by your section instructor. Make sure that your programs are sufficiently tested on Sun computers (see Cross Platform Development, below). Graders will be more lenient on malfunctioning programs and bugs if they are documented in the program comments.

Style, that elusive aesthetic quality of your program, is defined (insofar as this class is concerned) in 15-212 Java Coding Style. Note that this document is a work in progress, and will not be enforced for the first assignment. For further information on coding style, you may look at the links under, you may Java Coding Standards on the course textbook page.

If you have any questions about these guidelines, see your section instructor.


Cross Platform Development

Your programs will be graded on Sun computers in the andrew.cmu.edu domain. Therefore, make sure that your programs run on a Sparc. In general, there are very few differences between versions of Java on different platforms. However, different platforms are sensitive to different kinds of subtle bugs, and the subtle bugs that we will find will all show up on a Sparc. Therefore, while you may develop on any platform that you would like, we reccommend thoroughly testing your program on a Sparc. Also, we will be grading using JDK 1.1, so ensure that you are using the correct version of the compiler. While Java is virtually identical across platforms, it differs drastically between releases.

Teams and Team IDs

If any of these pairings are incorrect, please contact Sal (sal@ri.cmu.edu) as soon as possible.

Team NumberMembers (e-mail, section)
Team ID assignments awaiting student responses from section C.


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