Course policy

Please read the course policy very carefully and make sure that you understand it. Not being aware of the course policy will not be accepted as an excuse for violation of course policy.

Standards of Conduct: Under the Duke Community Standard, you are expected to submit your own work in this course, including homeworks, projects, and exams.

• On many occasions when working on homeworks and projects, it is useful to ask others (the instructor, the TAs, or other students) for hints or debugging help, or to talk generally about the written problems or programming strategies. Such activity is both acceptable and encouraged, but you must indicate in your submission any assistance you received (including help from the course staff). Any assistance received that is not given proper citation will be considered a violation of the Standard.

• In any event, you are responsible for writing, understanding, and being able to explain on your own all written and programming solutions that you submit.

• Copying solutions to any problem in any assignment from other students in the class, even if you have discussed those problems with them, is strictly prohibited. If we find that answers have been copied, both the student who copied and the student who allowed copying will be held equally responsible for the violation of the course policy. 

• For instance, it should not be the case that a group of students is working together to come up with a single solution. Everyone should try to solve the problems on their own, and then you can discuss with TAs and other students for debugging. If you are stuck with a problem, we strongly encourage to go to TA office hours than asking other students for hints to avoid wrong solutions.

• Never look at another student's homework for the purpose of coming up with your solution or copying it from them. 

• Changing variable names or minor changes in code does not count as your own solution. We have sophisticated tools and a deep memory to catch potential violation of the course policy. 

• It is frequently the case that one is tempted to violate the course policy when they are under stress and pressed on time to submit a homework. As mentioned again and again, please start working on your assignments early right after they are posted and get done with them ahead of time. Then the course staff has enough time to help you and debug your solutions if you are stuck. 

• It is strictly not allowed to seek help outside your TAs and classmates for solving the assignments, so you CANNOT search for answers on the Web, ask students from previous semester taking this course or anyone else for help and material, or search for solutions from previous semesters.

• The assignments, exams, projects, and solutions are proprietary to this class. They cannot be uploaded to other websites or distributed to others outside the class. Any violation to this policy will be actively investigated  and actions will be taken.

• You can use online tutorial and resources for your project, but the entire code must be written by your team members. Please acknowledge all websites that you have consulted in your project milestone reports.

• LLMs: We are now in the era of LLMs. LLMs can be a lot of fun and very useful tool as well. However, since you are learning writing queries in different languages for the first time, we have to be careful in how we use them. You can use LLMs to learn material in this class and practice problems (acknowledge the help from the LLM in the homework submission). LLMs should not be used to solve questions from assignments in this class unless explicitly approved in the question (do not copy the question from the assignment and ask LLMs to solve it!). Note that LLMs make mistakes but won't take the blame, and you won't have access to a computer or Internet in the exams (35% weight) when you have to solve problems yourself by hand. 

• Exam policy: Exams are open book, open lecture slides in printed note form, along with 1-page (2-sides) of your own hand-written note. No collaboration or electronic devices or internet are allowed. Exams are comprehensive (until the lecture before the exam). Warning: Time is precious in the exam (especially in the midterm) and looking at the notes or books does not help much during the exam. The focus should be on problem solving instead.Most problems will test your understanding of the material in the class and problem solving skills, not your memory. 

• The course staff will pursue aggressively all suspected cases of violations, and they will be handled through official University channels. Any proven violation of course policy would result in a zero in the entire assignment (not just the problem with violated policy), will be reported to the Duke Office of Student Conduct, and may result in strict disciplinary actions.

• If you are unsure of a policy, please ask Sudeepa and do not assume anything.