שאלות ותשובות - Everything you need to know about Matam's assignments Frequently Asked Questions - Everything you need to know about Matam's assignments Вопросы и Ответы - Everything you need to know about Matam's assignments أسئلة وأجوبة - Everything you need to know about Matam's assignments

		.. (לתיקייה המכילה)

General

Each assignment is submitted both manually, a printout of your work + documentation, and electronically. The manual submission goes to the course's box on Taub's 1st floor, and electornic one is through a link in the site. Submission should be done no later than the specified deadline. Note that deadlines contain an exact hour. Each day delay carries a penalty of 5 points. A day late is anything between 0.001 seconds and 24 hours after the deadline. If you submit your "dry" (printout) works after the deadline, it should go to the box of the TA in charge of this exercise, NOT to the course box.

Copying - read carefully

Copying will be handled severly in this course. Your dry works and wet submissions are randomally checked. If you have been caught cheating, you and the poor persons who did the mistake and let you copy, will start with being expelled from the course with a 0, and continue with "Vaadat Mishmaat". Please, do not come crying afterwards, especially those of you who worked hard and just let others to copy.

Reserve Duty

Reserve duty during the period of an assignment entitles you to a day postponment on each day of reserve duty. There is no need to come in advance and ask for postponment; you can just submit late without asking anyone. Just to remind you; late submission of the dry works is to the box of the TA in charge of the assignment. When you return from the vacation, bring a copy of your reserve duty certification to the TA in charge, Yaniv; and to him only.

Late Submission

The only legal late submission is due to reserve duty, explained above. Any other late submission carries a fine of 5 points per each late day. It is not possible to submit more then 7 days late. Late dry submissions are only to the box of the TA in charge of that assignment. Do not submit to the course box, since it will intermix with the next assignment. Late wet submissions are as usual, via the web site.

Automatic Checker

Although it's quite a long document, it is essential that you read it fully; to help you pass the course in one piece. In this course we put emphasis on teaching you how to build relatively large systems, from specifications and existing modules. This is a very important lesson when coming to work in the IT industry. What we do is simulate real-life projects in the home assignments we give you. That means that for each assignment you will receive the following: A detailed description of the requirements. Pre-written modules from us, which are "black box" to you; meaning you have no access to the actual implementation of them. Each such module comes with a detailed documentation that is enough for using it. A set of examples, containing input and expected output, for you to test your solution before submitting it. In order to check your solution, we apply both manual check of the "dry" work you submit, and automatic check of your "wet" submissions. The automatic check is a robot which checks to see if your solution confirm to the requirements. It tests your solution as if it is a black box; gives it various inputs and sees what it outputs. Each input is a test, and there are several. If your program's output differs from the expected output - that test has failed. Now; note that if the expected output is "Matam", then both "Matam " (with an extra trailing space) and "koko-loko" are equally different, both are considered as a failure, and both cause you to lose the same amount of points. Since both have failed the requirements. There is no point in arguing the automatic check results; they are final. However, under one of the following conditions you have a right to ask for a re-check: Your submission file, with is a zipped file, is corrupted from some reason and could not have opened by the automatic checker. You have forgot to submit a file. You have submitted a file with a wrong name (probably contains capital letter). However in order for us to accept your request you must have your submission files on your t2 account with a date stamp prior to the deadline. This way we can be sure that indeed it was an innocent mistake of yours. If you didn't work on the t2, you cannot appeal; no diskettes, Windows accounts, or lab accounts will be checked; only your t2 account. You also should make sure you do not touch the files there, otherwise their date stamp will change, and hopa! there goes your appeal. Requests for appeals must first be approved by the TA in charge of the course, Yaniv, before approaching the TA in charge of the specific assignment. Only the 3 reasons stated above are eligible; following are examples of common excuses that are denied: "But, but, but we worked on the exercise for X (X -> infinity) hours!" "It's not wrong output, it's wrong error message!" "Besides this little-tiny-microscopic error, our program is perfect!!" "But it works on Visual-C!!" "I did copy+paste and forgot to modify some line :(" "I submitted 5 minutes after the deadline because _____ and it cost me 5 points!" "I checked the exercise, but then I added some remarks, for documentation, before I submitted it, and because of THAT it doesn't work" "Well, I agree, I made some mistakes, but -30 ???? it doesn't reflect the amount of work I invested in it!" "Oh really, you can't call THAT a mistake, come on!"

Understanding Automatic Checker Results

Each of you have a personal directory containing the exercise files as submitted by you, as well as our test files and their results. This directory is ~cs234122/public/<semester>/ex<exnum>/ex<exnum>.results/<id>/ (e.g. ~cs234122/public/0203b/ex1/ex1.results/012345678-987654321/). There you find the following files: test.results - how your program worked on each test, how many points you lost on manual check, and/or late days. test_runN.csh - run this script to compile your code, and execute test #N on your code, producing files outN,errN. These files are then compared against expoutN,experrN. Various source files we used with some tests, see the .csh of each test for details. In ~cs234122/public/<semester>/ex<exnum>/ex<exnum>.results/automatic_checker_tests.txt (e.g. ~cs234122/public/0203b/ex1/ex1.results/automatic_checker_tests.txt) you'll find a text file that contains a short description of each of the tests.

Why have I received -55 as "Manual check grade" ??

This means that your dry work was not checked for some reason. It might be because you submitted it late, put it in the wrong cell, in the wrong TA box or that you been caught copying. In any case, besides the latter, contact the TA in charge of the course.