Extensions, academic integrity, the use of coding agents, and how to get help before it is too late to matter.
Policies and support#
Extensions#
Ask before the deadline and you will probably get one. Ask after it and the answer depends on circumstances you will have to explain, which is worse for everyone.
Extensions are granted on the assignment, not on the semester: your target carries across all three, so a late Assignment 1 shortens the time you have to measure things for Assignment 2. If you are far enough behind that this matters, say so early and we will re-scope your target rather than extend you into a corner.
Coding agents#
Use them. Say so.
This course assumes you will have an agent write most of your proofs of concept, because that is what the work looks like now and pretending otherwise would make the assessment dishonest rather than rigorous. Building a prototype is the cheap half. What is marked is which prototypes you decided were worth building, what you measured, and whether your conclusion follows from your evidence — none of which an agent can do for you, and all of which it will happily appear to do.
Two rules, both practical rather than moral:
- Declare it. A sentence naming what you used and for what. Nobody loses marks for the answer.
- You are responsible for every claim you submit. A number an agent produced and you did not check is a number you made up. This is a course about not trusting measurements from hosts that are more permissive than your target; the same scepticism applies to the tool that generated them.
Academic integrity#
The usual rules apply and are not interesting. The one worth stating plainly: your target, your reduction, your measurements and your audit are yours. Discussing approaches with other students is encouraged — the sessions are built on it — and submitting somebody else’s reasoning as your own is not.
If two submissions reach the same conclusion by the same route, that is normally fine. If they reach it by the same mistakes, we will ask.
Getting help#
Ask in the session. That is what it is for, and the person next to you has probably hit the same wall from the other direction.
Between sessions, email works. Include what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead — not because it is a rule, but because the three of them together usually contain the answer.
If something outside the course is making it hard to keep up, tell us early. We can adjust a target, a deadline or a scope. We cannot do any of that in the last week.
Accessibility#
If any part of this course is inaccessible to you — the sessions, the tooling, the way material is delivered — tell us and we will change it. In addition to this website, course material is available as plain text under version control, so it can be reformatted, re-rendered or read aloud without asking anybody’s permission.