Spring 2026
There will be a few small programming projects and a large individual project. Classes will be a mix of lectures and student presentations. To enforce course policy, I will probably take attendance, and may give in-class quizes. There may also be homework assignments. I do not expect to give exams.
The tentative grading scheme is as follows:
Student conduct in CSC 2/458 is governed by the College Academic Honesty Policy, the Undergraduate Laboratory Policies of the Computer Science Department, and the University's Acceptable Use Policy for Information Technology. I helped to write two of these policies personally. I believe in them strongly, and will enforce them aggressively.
The following are details specific to CSC 2/458.
Quizes and exams (if any) must be strictly individual work.
Collaboration on programming assignments among team members is of course expected. Collaboration on homeworks or assignments across teams is encouraged at the level of ideas. Feel free to ask each other questions, brainstorm on algorithms, or work together at a whiteboard. You may not claim work as your own, however, unless you transform the ideas into substance by yourself. Among other things, this means that you must leave any brainstorming sessions with no written or electronic notes—only what you carry in your head.
If you use the work of others (e.g., you download a function from the web at the last minute so that you can get the rest of your project working), then (1) either you must have the author’s explicit permission or the material must be publicly available, and (2) you must label what you copied, clearly and prominently, when you hand it in. Note that you will get points only for the parts of your assignment that you wrote yourself. Written (prose) assignments are similarly expected to follow the strictest standards of academic scholarship, including appropriate citation. Do not use anyone else’s words without attribution.
To minimize the temptation to steal code, all students are expected to protect any directories or on-line repositories in which they do their work.
For purposes of this class, academic dishonesty is defined as
Note that grades in CSC 2/458 are assigned on the basis of individual merit (there is no fixed curve), so there is no benefit—even a dishonest one—to be gained by sabotaging the work of others.
I work under the assumption that students are honest. I will not go looking for exceptions. If I discover one, however, I will come down on it very hard. Last fall I submitted 6 cases to the College Board on Academic Honesty. All resulted in major penalties for the students involved.
Generative AI tools can create or modify source code in useful ways in response to narrative prompts. Using these tools is an essential part of the skill set of any professional programmer. That said, the projects in this course are designed to help you learn. If an AI tool writes your code, you probably won’t learn the part that it wrote as well as if you wrote it yourself. Using an AI will be a net win only if it makes it easier for you to get to—and learn— the material you really want to learn.
Since this is an advanced course, and since some students will be undertaking very ambitious projects, use of AI is explicitly permitted. You are required, however, to clearly explain exactly how you used it in a narrative writeup that accompanies your turn-in. You will receive credit for both the parts you wrote yourself and for the work it takes to understand and integrate the AI-generated content.
Failure to disclose the use of AI tools will be considered academic dishonesty. I reserve the right, whether I suspect you used AI or not, to ask you detailed questions about your code and to reduce your grade if you don’t understand what you turned in.
In accordance with University policy, the law, and simple fairness, the instructor and TA are committed to respecting and welcoming students of all backgrounds and abilities. More broadly, they are committed to the University’s Vision and Values.
Any student requiring accommodation or encountering any barrier to full participation in this course due to a disability should contact the Office of Disability Resources. Email disability@rochester.edu, call 585-276-5075, or visit the office in Taylor Hall.
For more information about the full range of University policies, services, and resources around diversity and inclusion, or to report an incident of harassment, discrimination, or sexual misconduct, visit the website of the Office of University Engagement and Enrichment.
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Last Change:
12 January 2026