Assignment Expectations

Last updated: 2010 Sept 10

N.B. Not all of this file may apply for each assignment. When in doubt, ask your TA during office hours.

Presentation

Your assignment should have a cover page which clearly lists the following:

Course name and number
Assignment name/number
Your name
Your student number
Date submitted

Source code should be printed in a monospaced font, such as Courier. If you're using something like 'mpage', which puts several pages of output on one piece of paper, make sure the output is still legible.

Submission

We will be using the CMPT COURSYS for all your programming assignments exercises. Thus all assignments submissions will be in electronic format. The TA will explain details of using the server.

It is always the case that some students experience extenuating circumstances preventing them from finishing their assignments on time. It is impossible for the instructor to adjudicate which excuses are acceptable. So we will adopt the following scheme: assignments may be turned in upto three (3) school days after the due date with a penalty of only 10% per day cumulative. After 3 days, the missing assignment automatically obtains a mark of 0. However, we do record that you have completed the assignment no matter how many days late the submission. Hence, it is to your advantage to complete all assignments. Please note that an assignment turned in one day late drops your final mark by less than 0.5%. No worries!

Programming Style

Ask yourself these questions when you're writing/reviewing your program:

Is your program well organized?
Is your program easy to understand? (From a user and/or programmer perspective)
Is your source code easy to read?
Have you made good use of whitespace and indentation?
Does it have meaningful, succinct comments?
Do you have meaningful variable/constant/function names?

Testing

Every program must be tested well. This means that the TA will be convinced that your program works as intended. Use the example inputs specified in the assignment plus your own test cases. Try to find a small (but nontrivial) set of test cases that test the general case, boundary cases, and erroneous input cases. (Not easy to do, I know.) Definitely do not supply pages and pages of test cases that test similar cases.