Policies and support#

These rules apply to every assessment in the course. An individual brief may add to them, but it cannot quietly relax them.

Late work and extensions#

Work submitted after its deadline loses five percentage points per day, to a floor of zero at five days late. If something outside your control gets in the way, ask Alec for an extension before the deadline rather than after. A good reason in advance is an extension; the same reason a week later is an appeal, and appeals are harder for everyone.

Attribution and forked configuration#

Ricing runs on forked dotfiles. Copying a stranger’s config, adapting it, and making it yours is the normal way the craft is learned, and it is allowed here. What is not allowed is passing off borrowed work as original. Every setup you submit must credit the sources it grew from: the theme you started from, the config you lifted a keybinding out of, the palette you did not invent. Credit lives in your repository, in a form a marker can follow to the original.

The line the course cares about is simple. If a marker cannot tell which decisions were yours, the work has not been documented well enough to grade, and that is a failure of the Dotfiles Repository, not a matter for the integrity process. If credit has been deliberately removed to make borrowed work look original, that is the integrity process.

AI assistance#

You may use AI tools to write config, debug a compositor, or draft prose. Declare where you did, in the same place you credit forked config. The judgement being assessed is yours, so a setup you cannot explain is a problem whether a person or a model produced it.

Getting help#

Bring anything about a specific piece of work to the weekly lab; that is what it is for. For course-level questions, email Alec. For a problem that cannot wait until Monday, email Shelly. If you are stuck for more than an hour on something that is not the interesting part of the work, stop and ask. The hours are being counted.