General Policies and Procedures

Getting Help and Contacting Us

Each course will have its own guidelines about who you should ask for what reasons. Usually, you should ask the TAs for help on the course material and the instructor for administrative matters.
You can contact the instructor and TAs by email or by coming to office hours. Email addresses and office locations can be found on the course web site.
All email to the instructor and TAs should follow the email guidelines.
Don't email and then come to office hours and ask the same question. It wastes our time by having us write a response that you don't read.
In some courses, an email list has been set up for you to use for help. Usually this contains all of the TAs, so you will get a response from whoever can reply first. If this address exists, you must send queries to it.

For courses where assignments are submitted electronically, they must be submitted before midnight on the due date. That is, before the next day starts—if an assignment was due on the 5th, and you handed it in at 11:50 p.m. on the 5th, it isn't late.
For courses where assignments are submitted on paper, they are due at the end of lecture on the due date.
Late assignments will have 10% deducted per day (20% for intersession courses). Weekends count the same as weekdays.
Late marks are calculated the same way as due dates: either before midnight or the end of the lecture time.
No excuses for submitting an assignment late will be accepted, except perhaps a doctor's note that says you were unable to complete the assignment any time between when it was assigned and due.

Some examples of unacceptable behaviour:
- Handing in assignments that are not 100% your own work (in design, implementation, wording, etc.), without proper citation.
- Using any unpermitted resources during an exam.
- Looking at, or attempting to look at, another student's paper during an exam.
- Submitting work that has been submitted before, for any course at any institution.
If you are unclear on what academic honesty is, see SFU's Policy S10-01.
All instances of academic dishonesty will be dealt with very severely.
In general, minimum requested penalties will be as follows:
- For assignments: a mark of -100% on the assignment. So, academic dishonesty on an assignment worth 5% of your final mark will result in a zero on the assignment, and a penalty of 5% from your final grade.
- For exams: an F in the course.
Please note that these are minimum penalties. At the instructor's option, more severe penalties may be given/requested. All instances of academic dishonesty will be noted on your University record.
The instructor may use, or require students to submit assignments to, an automated service that will check for plagiarism.

Midterms may be in different rooms than the lectures. You will be notified by email.
Exams may be written in either pen or pencil. Calculators or other aids are not allowed unless explicitly stated.
Midterm exams and other tests may or may not be returned, depending on the course. If they are returned, you can get them from the instructor's office hours. You can not dispute the marking of your exam after you have taken it out of the instructor's office.
Final exams are not returned to students by University policy; they are kept by the instructor.
If you miss a test or exam, you must present a note from a doctor to get a mark other than zero. Arrangements to make up the lost marks will be made on a case-by-case basis by the instructor. Make-up exams may be given as an oral examination.
You must get a pass on the weighted average of the exams to pass the course.

Except for final grades, this is how you can go about getting your mark changed:

Requests for a change in your mark must come to the course instructor. TAs will not change your mark, except for errors in addition or data entry.
Requests should come in the same form as you received your marks: if you got marks by email, forward that email to the instructor; if you had paper handed back, return that.
You should give a brief explanation of why you want your mark reevaluated.
The instructor will remark the entire assignment/test. This will be your mark, whether it is higher or lower than the original.
Appeals may be made up to two weeks after the mark is returned or until the final exam date, whichever is first. After that deadline, you must make a formal mark appeal for any changes.
For exams in particular, these are not reasons to get more marks:
- I knew what I was saying here, but didn't write it.
- This is the correct answer for some question other than the one asked, but I didn't get any marks for it.
- I didn't understand the question.

If you're concerned about your mark at the end of the course, you can see the instructor. Here are some guidelines:

You can come to the instructor's office at designated times to review your final exam.
Like assignments, you can ask the instructor to reevaluate your final exam marking.
The following are not good reasons to get a higher final mark:
- I want it.
- I think I deserve it.
- I need it.
- I'm close to the next grade cutoff.
This is a good reason:
- There's a marking irregularity on my final or some other piece of work.
The marking scheme is fixed. If you did badly on a midterm, you can't weight the final more heavily.