The course-wide rules for late work, extensions, academic integrity and getting help.

Policies and support#

Late work#

Each checkpoint and the final project has a fixed due date, shown on its assessment page. Work submitted after the deadline loses 5% of the available weight per day late, up to five days, after which it is marked at zero. There is no penalty-free grace window — a checkpoint that builds on the previous one’s working code is not useful to mark out of order, so the schedule is designed around the due dates holding, not around students guessing how much slack exists.

Extensions#

Extensions are granted for documented illness or misadventure, requested before the deadline where at all possible. Ask your tutor directly rather than waiting for a lecture; a short email is enough to start the conversation. Extensions on Checkpoint 3 are considered more carefully than the others, because the final project starts from Checkpoint 3’s codebase — a late Checkpoint 3 compresses the final project’s timeline too, and that’s worth discussing explicitly rather than discovering in week 12.

Academic integrity, and the CSNOBOL4 convention#

The interpreter you submit at each checkpoint has to be your own work: your own lexer, your own parser, your own evaluator, written to the brief. That does not mean you write it in the dark. This course explicitly encourages differential testing against CSNOBOL4 — the actively-maintained reference implementation of SNOBOL4 that descends from the original Bell Labs compiler — as a way of checking your own output, not as a source to copy from. If your interpreter and CSNOBOL4 disagree on a program that the language reference doesn’t call out as ambiguous or implementation-defined, that disagreement is a bug in your code, and finding it that way is normal practice, not misconduct.

The line is this: running a program through CSNOBOL4 to see what the correct answer is, and then writing your own code to produce that answer, is legitimate testing. Copying or transcribing CSNOBOL4’s own source (or anyone else’s interpreter, including another student’s) into your submission is not. If you use any AI assistance beyond what’s normal in an IDE (autocomplete, inline diagnostics), declare what you used and how in your submission — a line or two is enough. Undeclared assistance is treated the same as any other undeclared source.

Getting help#

Studios are the first place to get unstuck — a tutor is in the room and has usually seen the exact match exhaustiveness error you’re looking at before. Outside studio hours, email reaches the person named on each people page: course-level questions to the convenor, everything about a specific checkpoint or studio to the tutor. There’s no separate office-hours booking system — an email gets a reply or a time to talk.