Homework Policy

All homework assignments are worth 10 points. There will be a variable number of exercises, but at minimum, there will be 10 exercises. You may obtain a score greater than 10, but note that this is not an extra credit opportunity. Points above 10 on homework are considered buffer points. These points do count towards your overall homework grade, however, you may not obtain an overall homework score greater than 100%. That is, buffer points will negate point loss on other assignments, but they cannot negate point loss on the exams.

For each exercise, you may obtain a score of 0, 0.5, or 1.

• To obtain a score of 1, your answer must be correct, contain valid supporting work, and be reasonably formatted up to and including boxing your answer when possible.¹
• A score of 0.5 will be given to solutions which show reasonable effort, but contain errors. A score of 1 may be granted to some solutions containing errors if they are extremely minor.
• A score of 0 will be given to a blank solution or a solution that shows no reasonable progress towards the correct solution. Note that if you do not indicate a page for a problem on Gradescope, it will be considered blank.

Assignments should be submitted to Gradescope by the due date listed.² You may submit up to 48 hours late with a two point late penalty. After that, no late work will be accepted.

Gradescope is excellent at many things, but not late submissions. As such, your late penalty will not be reflected in your grade on Gradescope. Instead, it will be applied during final grade calculations. Be aware! Better yet, just submit on time!

Any grade disputes must be petitioned through Gradescope within one week of receiving a grade. After that, any right to dispute a grade is forfeited.

Please attempt to submit your work as a single PDF. You may need to merge together PDF files from various sources and scans. In order for your assignment to be graded, you must complete the process of indicating which problem is on which page.

It would be a good idea to typeset your homework using \(\LaTeX\). If you don’t know \(\LaTeX\), consider this an opportunity to learn an invaluable skill. To assist in this process, we will provide the R Markdown files that produced the homework assignments.

Homework assignments are meant to be learning experiences. You may discuss the exercises with other students, but you must write the solutions on your own. Directly sharing or copying any part of a homework solution is an infraction of the University’s rules on academic integrity. Any violation will be punished as severely as possible.

You may use any computational tools that you wish, such as a statistical computing environment like R or integral solver like WolframAlpha. The course staff is most familiar with R, so we will be able to best support R users, but you may use any software that you like.³

Footnotes

1. Please do not make the TA hunt for your answer.

2. If you do not yet have access to Gradescope, the access code can be found in the syllabus.

3. Some exercises will contain starter code in R that may be hard to transition to another language.