ICS 45C Spring 2022, Project Guide

Introduction

This quarter, much of your focus will be on the programming projects found here. Being a course in C++ programming, all of these projects will be written entirely in C++; they are designed to expose you to a variety of concepts and techniques that are important in C++, and to prepare you for later coursework in ICS, such as ICS 46.

I do not assume that any of you will have previous C++ experience, though I do expect that all of you have at least a year or so of introductory programming experience in some language other than C++. For a lot of you, that will have been our first-year sequence in Python; others will have taken introductory courses in other places in any of a variety of programming languages. In general, if you have some experience programming in something — equivalent in depth to what you might have learned in our first-year ICS courses — you'll be fine, provided that you're willing to put in the time and effort to learn something new, especially something that might look and feel quite different from what you're accustomed to. Your most important focus when learning a new programming language is forming an understanding of the idioms the new language provides, as opposed to attempting a line-for-line translation from the language you prefer to the language you're learning; different programming languages encourage you to think differently about programming problems, and you might find C++ to be a big departure from what you've seen before, but big departures are how you grow your knowledge and ability.

Note that C++ programming requires a level of care and attention to detail that exceeds what you may have experienced in languages you've used previously, requiring a dual focus on both higher-level abstractions and lower-level implementation details that many languages hide by handling automatically. Focusing on the small details of the code you write in C++ is more important than it is in many other languages. Debugging can be more of an adventure, given that program crashes will not necessarily be accompanied with the clarity of diagnostics to which you've become accustomed; willingness to learn about additional tools for diagnosing these kinds of problems is essential. For these reasons, it's important to start your work early, encounter problems early, and get questions asked and answered early. Many of the most perplexing debugging problems I've ever faced in my professional career were in C++ programs, and having enough time to get these kinds of issues resolved may well decide whether or not you finish your work.

While prior C++ (or C) experience is neither required nor assumed, it doesn't hurt; however, if you have prior experience, especially in C, you may find that some of the practices you've learned in the past are not acceptable in this course. We're focused not just on writing programs that generate the correct output, but at least as importantly on techniques that modularize programs, manage and hide complexity, and generally make the best use of what C++ has to offer, above and beyond what is provided by its C heritage. (It's important to realize that, while C and C++ share a common lineage, they have diverged in many ways over the 40 or so years of C++'s history; be aware that our focus here is squarely on C++, not C.) We'll start with some of the baseline concepts first — and ignore a lot of the higher-level abstractions — but will quickly realize that writing clear C++ programs requires avoiding the manual, error-prone techniques as often as possible, so we'll gradually learn techniques to automate them or render them unnecessary.

Evaluation of your work

Evaluation criteria

Each of your projects will be graded on a 30-point scale, with the points split (albeit unevenly) into two categories: correctness and robustness (i.e., does the program work?) and quality and design (i.e., how well is the program written?). They are described in more detail below.

Criteria	Value	Description
Correctness and robustness	20 points	Summary: Does the program do what it's supposed to do for any input that meets the project specifications? When the program is given valid input, does it generate the output specified? Is the output spacing and case correct, if these are specified? When the program is given unusual or erroneous input, and the project write-up doesn't specifically forbid us from testing it, is it handled gracefully? Are all resources allocated by the program (e.g., memory, open files) released before the program ends?
Quality and design	10 points	Summary: Strive to write a clear, well-organized, readable, modifiable program. Your program should be divided into logical parts, each encapsulating a single task or idea. Large functions or classes should be broken up into smaller ones that do simpler jobs. Identifier names should be chosen to reflect their objective; the names should be meaningful to the reader. Comments should be included where necessary to introduce clarity for the reader (though it should be noted that good modularity and well-named identifiers make the commenting burden significantly lighter). Any other rules and/or limitations specified in the project write-up should have been followed.
TOTAL	30 points

Code that does not compile

If you submit a program that does not compile, we will not be able to execute it and, thus, will not be able to evaluate its correctness. It is your responsibility to turn in code that compiles, and it's important that it compiles in the development environment specified for this course — more about that below. Though we will make an honest effort to assess its overall correctness and quality, we can, at our discretion, assign a score as low as zero to a program that does not compile, and you can assume that your score on such a program will not necessarily apporach the percentage of completeness and correctness you actually achieved, as it is impossible for us to measure that without being able to run and test your program.

At the level of experience that is assumed of you, you should be able to ensure that code compiles, even in a partially-completed program. You should be able to work incrementally, saving copies when you reach a stable state, so that you can always have at least a partially-working solution that compiles and runs. You might also consider using a source control tool like Git, which helps you to formalize this kind of incremental work, though this is not required. If you've never used a source control tool before, it would be worth the effort spent to learn about one; given its flexibility and popularity in professional and open source circles, Git is a very good choice. If you prefer something else, feel free to use it. (Git is installed on the ICS 45C VM, but you can install other systems on to the VM pretty easily if you prefer something else.)

Re-evaluation of your work

As projects are graded, you will receive scores and feedback on each in an email from a grader (either a TA or a reader). If you believe that you've been graded unfairly, your first move is to contact the grader and discuss the issue with him or her directly, as they are more familiar with the details of the grading of your work than I would be — the first thing I usually do is to contact them, anyway. Most issues are resolved this way. Note that we do not reconsider the rubric used to grade your work afterward, but if it was applied unfairly or incorrectly, we can consider an adjustment.

If, after this, you still believe that you haven't been treated fairly, you are welcome to raise the issue with me and I can arbitrate, though I should point out that it is relatively rare that I overrule a grader's judgment. I've communicated a fair amount with the graders about grading ahead of time, so they're generally acting on my instructions, so I don't find very often that I think a grader has graded work unfairly.

Late work

Things happen and ten-week quarters can be unforgiving. It's not unreasonable to expect that you may find it difficult to finish one of the projects on time, even if you're on top of things most of the time. I get emails often from students, saying things like If I just had one more day to work on this, I'd get it done! On the other hand, being consistently behind is a recipe for struggle in this course; we'll be moving quickly, and it will be progressively harder to catch up the farther behind you get.

The best balance between these two realities is that everyone is allowed to have a tough time with a project once this quarter with no penalty — maybe you underestimated the difficulty of an assignment, maybe you have three midterms and a paper due the same day, maybe you have a sudden outside commitment that can't be avoided. However, we generally require you to keep up with the due dates as assigned, and we do generally assign a penalty for work submitted late.

Submitting late work

Aside from the "one-time" late submission, described below, late work is accepted according to the following policy:

You may submit late work, subject to a penalty of 1% of your final score per hour beyond the deadline.

Full or partial hours are counted. So, for example, a project submitted at 3:15am the morning after an 11:59pm deadline would be subject to a 4% penalty, because it was submitted 3-1/4 hours late (i.e., three full hours plus a partial one). In that example, if your score on the project would have been 27/30 ordinarily, it will be reduced by 4% and become 25.92/30 instead.

This means, in general, that a project submission has at least some value for 99 hours beyond the stated deadline. At the 100th hour, the project has no value remaining.

The "one-time" late submission

To accommodate the occasional unforeseen issue, we do also allow a "one-time" late submission:

Each student is permitted to submit any one project up to 99 hours late with no penalty, with no questions asked about why and no prior notification required.

For the purposes of clarification, here are some additional details about how this policy works.

You are not required to notify us in advance — in fact, in all honesty, we'd prefer that you didn't. (There are a lot of students in this course, so that would represent a lot of extra work for us.) We'll be looking for submissions beyond the deadline of each project, so yours won't be lost in the shuffle.
There is no grace period after the due date. If you submitted your files at 12:08am (or even 12:00am) for an 11:59pm due date, your submission falls under the late policy and would be considered one hour late. No exceptions!
If any one file is submitted beyond the due date, the entire project is considered late and, hence, it falls under the late work policy.
If you submit more than one project late this quarter, we will automatically determine the best possible outcome for you, so that you get the maximum benefit from this policy. For example:
- Suppose you submit Project 1 five hours late and your score would have been 10/30 before taking lateness into account.
- Suppose you submit Project 2 two hours late and your score would have been 30/30 before taking lateness into account.
- The late penalty on Project 1 would be 5% of 10 points, or 0.5 points.
- The late penalty on Project 2 would be 2% of 30 points, or 0.6 points.
- Given these numbers, we would apply the "one-time" exception to Project 2, since it will provide you the most benefit (0.6 points instead of 0.5).
Just to be clear, the policy works by "refunding" the largest late penalty at the end of the quarter. That's it. Nothing can be submitted after the 99-hour late deadline. In particular, be aware that other scenarios are not applicable under the policy, such as these:
- Splitting the 99 hours up on multiple projects (e.g., one project 40 hours late and another 50 hours late).
- Submitting something 110 hours late and applying the 99-hour policy to it by subtracting 99 hours from the late penalty.

In general, this procedure is automatic and does not require negotiation or notification; we will apply this consistently to everyone as described above. The goal is that this should accommodate the unforeseen issues that might otherwise prevent you from finishing a project on time, while freeing course staff to focus on helping students to learn and improve.

Does this policy apply to Project #0?

Project #0 is not covered at all under this policy. It must be submitted when due in order to be considered at all.

Does this policy apply to the reinforcement exercises?

No. The reason for the reinforcement exercises is to keep you on track as we proceed through the course, so those are also not covered by the late policy.

What to do if you're chronically late

Out-of-the-ordinary circumstances sometimes warrant exceptions to this policy; if you are faced with a problem that is preventing you from getting your work done on time, either on a single project or chronically, please contact me and we can talk about how best to approach the problem. It's important to contact me sooner rather than later; earlier in the quarter, there are a lot more things I can do to help than there are in the tenth week or after the final course grades are determined.

Development environment

Unlike programming languages such as Java or Python, which make it a point to be (more or less) independent of the hardware and the operating system that they run on, C++ is decidedly platform-dependent. This is especially true in recent years, as four new versions of the C++ Standard (called C++11, C++14, C++17, and C++20) have been completed, but not all compiler implementers have implemented all of the new features of the language yet (and library support is even more hit-or-miss). And even amongst the features that all compilers share, there are differences — all the way down to details such as the maximum value you can store in a variable of type int — that make it important for us to agree on a single development environment: a particular compiler running on a particular version of a particular operating system.

Because not every one of you will be running the same operating system on your own machine, and to avoid the problem of having each of you install and configure the necessary software yourselves, the officially-supported development environment for ICS 45C is provided in the form of a virtual machine, a complete environment that includes an operating system, compiler, debugger, text editors, and so on; we'll call this the ICS 45C VM. Rather than installing software, you'll download the ICS 45C VM and run it as an application on your computer, but log into it as though it was a separate computer. This is explained in more detail in Project #0, which describes how to download it and set it up for use.

What if I don't want to use the ICS 45C VM?

Everything we do this quarter will be standard C++17. Aside from incompatibilities between compilers — both those arising from new features that are implemented by some compilers and not others, as well as platform dependencies — I would expect you to be in good shape using something else a large percentage of the time, though you'll find that you hit bumps in the road sometimes, and it may not be obvious when you do. You may end up writing a program that works in your environment but doesn't work in the provided environment; this is a realistic possibility in C++, especially when we're working with newer language features that aren't implemented in every compiler.

Be aware that we will be grading your work using the ICS 45C VM, so, at minimum, you should always test your projects in the ICS 45C VM before submitting your work. Submitting work that compiles on your favorite compiler but not in the ICS 45C VM is viewed the same as any other work that does not compile at all; as when you work for (or with) someone else professionally, you don't always get to choose your favorite environment for your work, but instead have to adapt to what is appropriate to the situation. Additionally, be aware that you're on your own to get software other than the ICS 45C VM set up and configured; we can't realistically support everyone's separate home installation, whereas the ICS 45C VM gives us a single system to support.

Also (and especially if you've never used Linux before or spent a lot of time on a command line), you should consider the practical usefulness of learning new skills that will no doubt prove to be valuable as you pursue professional and academic options further down the line. Trying out something new while having the safety net of a large course staff to help you is a lot better than struggling with it on your own. Even if only for that reason, I'd strongly encourage you to use the ICS 45C VM for all of your work, even if it seems like a difficult transition at first. Linux and command lines are an important part of real-world computing, and you would be wise to gain some experience with them.

Submitting your projects

When you complete each project, you must submit it to us electronically on Canvas. Understand that we will only accept projects submitted to the appropriate dropbox (for the appropriate assignment) on Canvas; we do not accept printed copies of your projects, nor do we accept them via email or other means under any circumstances.

You are responsible for submitting the version of your project that you want graded. We will grade the most recent submission made before the deadline. Accidentally submitting the wrong version will not be considered grounds for a regrade, nor is there any remedy (outside of the late policy described above) for forgetting to submit your work at all.

Academic honesty

The policy

As ICS 45C students, you are expected to know and follow the academic honesty policies of both the Bren School of ICS and the University as a whole. Please take a few minutes to read the policies, which can be found at this link.

All of your work on projects and reinforcement exercises is expected to be completed solely by you. Working in larger groups and/or sharing of code between students is not permitted. Note that "high-level discussion of course material for better understanding" is permitted and encouraged, but when it comes time to sit down and write code, that is expected to be done by you and you alone. All submissions are compared to one another using an automated plagiarism detection system. This system is extraordinarily good at finding similarities between submissions, even when there are superficial differences. (Note that we also compare your submissions to those submitted during previous quarters whenever one of these assignments was given during a previous quarter, so it is an exceedingly bad idea to turn in, or even refer to, code written by a friend of yours who took the course already.)

Since all of your work is expected to be completed solely by you, you will be held responsible even if you plagiarize only a small portion of someone else's work.

Academic honesty is a two-way street. Providing your code to other students for them to turn in as their own is not permitted any more than turning in someone else's code. Resist the temptation to give code to your friends "for reference." Based on my experience, I can say that your "friends" may very well betray you and turn it in, anyway, and then you'll have a lot to answer for.

Naturally, the Final Exam is also expected to be an individual effort. Dishonest behavior during an exam will not be tolerated.

All violations of academic honesty policies will be reported to the UCI Office of Academic Integrity & Student Conduct (AISC) and will trigger an administrative procedure, which is described on their web site. Additionally (and at least as importantly), you can receive a course grade of F — as a number of students in my courses do, because of this issue, every quarter — without the option to drop the course to avoid the grade. A single documented case of academic dishonesty may also have other ramificiations, such as precluding you from switching into computing majors, registering for computing minors, joining the ICS Honors Program, and graduating from a computing major with honors. All of this is University and Bren School of ICS policy and is not subject to negotiation.

Knowing when you're being dishonest

I've been asked by students how they know when they're crossed the line between asking for help and being academically dishonest. To me, there is a fairly straightforward way to know the difference. Did you actually write the code in question? That's not a matter of whether you typed it in; that's a matter of whether it was you who wrote it (i.e., it is comprised of your own ideas about how to solve the problem, how to organize the solution, and so on).

The easiest way to determine whether you've crossed the line is whether your work was driven by someone else's existing solution. Here are some examples:

If you ask someone to help you resolve a compile-time or run-time error in your program, so you would understand what the error meant, that's fine.
If you ask someone for help on a project and they responded by giving you a copy of their work, you already have one foot on the line the moment you receive it. If I were you, I would delete it, or not ask for it in the first place.
If you ask someone else to help you understand a concept like recursion or the use of pointers, and the other student suggests a way you might think differently about the problem you're solving, that's fine.
If you ask someone else to help you understand how to solve part of the project, and the other student brings up a copy of his or her solution and walks you through it — even if you don't look at it yourself — you've crossed the line.
If you obtain a copy of someone else's solution to a project and you refer to it and use it to drive the work you're doing — in whole or in part — you've most definitely crossed the line. Copying someone else's code, typing in someone else's code, taking someone else's code and cosmetically changing it to make it appear superficially different are all (obvious) examples of academically dishonest behavior, yet upwards of 10% of my students are caught doing this — and sanctioned for it — every quarter. Please don't be one of them.
If you provide someone with a copy of your work and they submit it as their own, you are also involved in academically dishonest behavior, and you should be aware that you can also be sanctioned for this, just as the other student can. Your best bet is not to share your work with other students, yet a not-insignificant percentage of my students are caught doing this every quarter, as well.

In my view, this really isn't that complicated. We require you to do your own work, because that's how the learning is done in this course. A large part of what you're learning to do is to design and write programs, a skill that can only be built by designing and writing programs. You have to make the decisions about what to do next, how to organize your program, and so on. If someone else is making most of those decisions for you, you're not building the skills necessary to be ready for the courses that follow on from this one. And, from the standpoint of academic honesty, if someone else is making most of those decisions for you, that's plagiarism.

The lesson

Okay, so the moral of the story is that it's wise to avoid cheating. I believe that it's relatively rare that students enter a course with the conscious intent to cheat their way through it; why come to UCI if you're not planning to get something out of the coursework? So why do people cheat every quarter in every course? The answers vary, but here's the easiest way I can boil down the numerous conversations I've had with students caught cheating in my courses over the years: I fell behind and couldn't figure out how to catch up. Things happen and ten-week quarters are unforgiving. You might get sick, you might have issues crop up in your family, you might have misunderstood one of the earlier topics in this course (or one or more important topics in previous coursework) on which later topics depended, you might have an off-campus job that's demanding too much of your time, you might be trying to decide whether you're on the overall life path you want to be on... Any of those things (and many others) can make it hard to keep up. You fall a little behind, you fall a little further behind, and pretty soon the situation seems hopeless. You're under pressure, temptation gets the better of you, and suddenly it seems better to submit someone else's work than to submit nothing. As upwards of 10% of my students (who have cheated like this) can attest, it's not.

If you feel like you're beginning to slip off course or things are getting beyond your control, the best thing to do is to talk to us sooner rather than later. We're here to help; we understand. But the reality of taking large-sized courses at a large-sized institution is that we're not going to know you're in need unless you tell us. If things are happening in your life, tell us; you don't have to be specific if you're not comfortable with it. Before the fact, there's often a way to work things out. After the fact, it's usually too late.

And, in general, some students won't pass this course with a C or better this quarter, and won't be ready to take follow-on courses yet. And that's not as disastrous as it sounds. Most students who get less than a C in ICS 46 take the course again; most of those who take the course again pass it the second time around, with their feet firmly underneath them and ready to move forward.

Sharing your own solutions online

Some of our past students have wanted to post their own solutions to their projects online, with the goal of helping others or just showing off work that they were proud of. This is also problematic from an academic honesty perspective, because many or all of the projects you're working on will be reused in a future quarter; good problems are good problems, and I don't rebuild five new projects every quarter. Given that, posting your prior work online will absolutely lead to other students finding it and plagiarizing it — this is now one of the more common root causes of plagiarism cases that we find.

I can appreciate, of course, that you might want to build a portfolio of work to demonstrate your skills as you build them, and I'm not unsympathetic about that. However, the reality is that posting solutions to first-year coursework is very unlikely to be of use in job searches or other professional scenarios. I've asked a number of hiring managers over the years, including ones I've worked for in my industry career, and have universally received the same response about it: Hiring managers generally aren't interested in seeing prior homework. Projects in courses like this one are sanitized, in the sense that they're problems that have been designed to be solved using techniques just taught, with the requirements clearly spelled out, and with few enough rough edges that a large number of students can solve them without encountering roadblocks that can't be overcome. Real-world work isn't like this, as it turns out. Figuring out what needs to be built is as important as figuring out how to build it. Building a portfolio is best done with your own solutions to your own problems, containing things you've written to scratch your own technology itches or explore concepts that you wanted to learn more about on your own.

So, in general, despite the fact that you may be proud of the work you've done, you need to understand that there is a very strong likelihood that the only thing you'll be doing is enabling future students to plagiarize your work — and quite possibly becoming embroiled in the investigation yourself and being reported to AISC — while not accomplishing much of anything positive for youself.

Do not share your prior solutions online.