The main purposes of the homework assignments are to (1) help you learn the course material, (2) provide you another opportunity to obtain feedback from the course staff about your understanding, and (3) prepare you for the exams.
The “grading” of the homework assignments will be more lenient than that of the exams.
Please abide by the following rules for preparing and submitting the write-up of your solutions. The purpose of the rules is to make grading as easy as possible for the course assistants, which in turn helps us ensure that you get the credit you deserve for your work.
The write-up must be neatly and legibly typeset as a pdf document; digitized handwritten submissions are not accepted. You may use LaTeX, Microsoft Word, or any other system that produces high-quality typesetting. Please make sure that all mathematical expressions (e.g., equations) are legible and correctly typeset, all figures are appropriately labeled and captioned, and that the formatting is clean and consistent.
Please proofread your final pdf document before submitting.
(If you need to combine multiple pdf files, try PDFtk.)
Gradescope is used to collect and grade homework write-ups.
When you make your submission, for each problem, you must explicitly mark (within Gradescope) all of the pages that contain your solution for that problem. If part of your solution is on an unmarked page, it will be considered missing.
If you are working in a group of two or three, then exactly one student in the group must make the submission, and that student must add all group members to the submission within Gradescope at the time of submission. It is every group member’s responsibility to make sure the submission is conducted correctly; an improper submission will result in point deduction on the assignment. Note that if you want to “update” your submission, you must again add all group members to the new submission.
Some homework problems will request source code as part of the solution in the write-up. There are many ways to do this. If you use LaTeX, consider using the listings or minted packages in LaTeX. If you use Jupyter Notebook, you can export it to LaTeX directly from the notebook, and then compile it to a pdf (say, using Overleaf). Or you can directly copy the code into your document as preformatted text in a fixed-width font; please make sure it is readable, and that any necessary indentation is preserved.
Some homework assignments may request that you submit your source code in a separate zip file. Please collect all Python source files (.py) into a single zip file. If you used Jupyter notebooks (or something similar), make sure to export the code to .py (e.g., in Google Colaboratory, go to “File”, “Download”, “Download .py”). Please name the files appropriately (e.g., problem1.py, problem2.py). We will collect this as a separate “assignment” in Gradescope. The same policies regarding groups (above) applies to code submission.
After homework grades are released on Gradescope, you will have four work days to submit any regrade requests. The regrade request must be submitted using the facilities in Gradescope, and must be accompanied by a detailed explanation of what the grading error is. Any request that does not meet these requirements will be ignored, including requests that simply express an opinion that the grade is too low, or requests that do not explain what the grading error is. You are encouraged to come to office hours to discuss your homework grades with the course staff. We will evaluate the regrade requests after the regrade deadline has passed, and will not consider any regrade requests submitted after the deadline. Please note that we reserve the right to regrade any part of the entire homework assignment, which may result in a lower grade.