Grading Requirements

The assessment has three components: the practical tasks, the report and the final exam. In order to pass this unit, you must perform satisfactorily in each component separately and also achieve a total mark that represents a pass grade.

You must make a significant attempt at each of the practical tasks and the report. If you do not meet this requirement, we may require you to perform additional work in order to complete the unit.

Practical Submissions

Submission instructions for practical tasks will be provided on iLearn. The tasks contain differing forms of automatic assessment and feedback tools that will assist you during the task and contribute to our understanding of your performance in the task.

Late submissions

We will determine the date of submission of your assignment by the last time that you submitted your solution. This means that if you submit the assignment, then discover that you have made a mistake and resubmit it after the due time, your submission will be late.

Each task will specify a particular due date. The due time will be 11:00:00pm on the due date. If the time of your submission shown on the system is after 11:00:00pm then you will be considered late. In order to allow time for marking, we will not accept any submission that is more than two days late except in cases of severe disruption.

The penalty for late submission is 20% of your mark per day for up to two days; after that, submissions will be closed. A submission that is 5 minutes late will be considered to be 1 day late and incur a penalty of 20% unless you have free late days remaining (see below).

If your performance in a practical task is severely affected by disruption, please (1) notify us as soon as possible by email, (2) submit whatever work you have accomplished as soon as possible after the due date and (3) submit a formal disruption request.  A disruption of one or two days' duration, even if it falls at the due date, is not severe because we offer you free late days that you can use in such circumstances.

Free late days

Throughout the semester we offer you three free late days. This means that we will remove the penalty that would normally apply to each of the first three days of late practical submission. For example, if you submit each of the first three practicals two days late, then we would apply two free late days to the first practical so there would be no late penalty, one free late day to the second practical so the penalty would be 20% and you would have no free late days for the third practical so the penalty would be 40%. We encourage you to preserve your free late days (by submitting on time) in case you need them later in the semester.

Text Book

"Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" 2nd edition, R.E. Bryant and D.R. O'Hallaron, Pearson 2011.

You are required to purchase a copy of the unit text and read the set sections each week.

Recommended Text

"The C Programming Language" 2nd edition, Brian W Kernighan and Dennis M Ritchie, Prentice-Hall 1988.

This small book is the classic reference on C programming.

iLearn Web Site

All learning materials will be published on iLearn including lecture slides, practical tasks and tutorial questions.

You are required to check the iLearn website at least once a week to ensure that you are aware of the latest materials available there.

Lectures

Lectures are a core learning experience where we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings and concepts that are essential to this unit. Attendance at lectures will be taken from time to time as an indicator of your engagement.  Attendance at lectures is not required but is highly recommended. Lectures will be recorded on echo360 but some lectures will include interactive components that may not be adequately captured by a recording.

Tutorials

Each week you should prepare your solutions to the set tutorial questions and attend your enrolled tutorial session. Tutorials are an opportunity to ask specific questions related to any aspect of the unit: the lecture content, the practical tasks and the set tutorial questions.

Practicals

Practical sessions provide an opportunity for you to develop your skills in systems programming and your understanding of the key concepts of the unit. Practical work will consist of set tasks, each of 4 weeks duration, which are assessed and contribute to your final mark.  The assessment criteria for each practical task will be explained in the task specification along with the due date. The tasks will be posted on iLearn.

Your practical demonstrator will provide you with individual assistance and may also from time to time address the entire class to provide useful information to assist with the practical task.

The practical tasks are set as individual work and each one is personalised for a particular student. The University's academic honesty policy will be enforced. You may assist your fellow students with general concepts, pointers to resources and useful tools or commands. You may not become involved in any way in helping a fellow student to find the solution to their particular task, nor may you share with them any aspect of the solution of your particular task. Each practical task will include specific instructions to help you understand what is acceptable and what is not.

Each lab assignment must be the sole work of the student turning it in. Any cheating will be handled under the University's Academic Honesty Policy.

The following are guidelines on what collaboration is allowed for laboratory exercises and what is not [adapted from CS:APP website]

What is Cheating?

• Sharing code or other electronic files: either by copying, retyping, looking at, or supplying a copy of a file from this or a previous semester. Be sure to store your work in protected directories, and log off when you leave any lab computer, to prevent others from copying your work without your explicit assistance.
• Sharing written assignments, quizzes or exams: Looking at, copying, or supplying an assignment, quiz or exam.
• Using other's code. Using code that you did not write yourself. You may not use code from courses at other institutions, or from any other non-202 source (e.g., software found on the Internet).  If you find helpful programming ideas on the Internet, you should acknowledge them in comments in your code.
• Looking at other's code. Although mentioned above, it bears repeating. Looking at other students' code or allowing others to look at yours is cheating. There is no notion of looking ''too much,'' since no looking is allowed at all.

What is NOT Cheating?

• Clarifying ambiguities or vague points in class handouts or textbooks.
• Helping others use the computer systems, networks, compilers, debuggers, profilers, or other system facilities.
• Helping others with high-level design issues.
• Helping others with high-level (not code-based) debugging techniques.
• Using code from the CS:APP website or from the class Web pages.
• Reading Unix manual pages, forums, etc in order to find out how to perform particular tasks (e.g. set a breakpoint in a debugger) or use programming language/library features (such as printf).
• Asking for help from the practical demonstrator, tutor or lecturer.

Be sure to store your work in protected directories, and log off when you leave any lab computer, to prevent others from copying your work without your explicit assistance.

Unit Forum

A forum for unit discussions is provided on iLearn. Students are free to post questions, comments or hints in relation to any aspect of the unit, except that you should avoid posting any questions, hints, comments or solutions that could be interpreted as cheating (see Practicals, above).

If you see a post fom another student that appears to be cheating, please notify your demonstrator, tutor or the lecturer as soon as possible and we will remove the offending post.

The detailed unit schedule will be available on iLearn. The following is an approximate schedule and is subject to change. In all cases, refer to iLearn for up-to-date information.

• Introduce module structure with one lab assignment for each module.
• Expand time devoted to introducing C programming, especially pointers and C data structures.
• Customised and new lab assignments.

See also the section General Assessment Information, above.

This unit will be graded Fail, Pass, Credit, Distinction or High Distinction as defined in the Macquarie University Grading Policy.

Detailed achievement levels for each learning outcome are described as follows.