| 35%: | Technical Material |
|---|---|
| 30% for Exams (two @ 15% each) | |
| 5% for Hands-ons (six total, dropping the lowest score) | |
| 40%: | Design Project |
| 5% for the DP prep assignment | |
| 10% for DP preliminary report + DP presentation | |
| 20% for DP report | |
| 5% for the DP peer review | |
| 25%: | Participation |
| 20% for recitation participation | |
| 5% for communication participation |
Exams: Exam 1 is held during the term. Exam 2 will be scheduled during finals week. Each exam will focus on half of the class' material, but keep in mind that later topics in 6.1800 build heavily upon the earlier topics. The exams will test material from lectures, recitations, and the assigned reading.
Hands-ons: During some weeks, you will be expected to complete a hands-on experiment that requires a computer and sometimes the Internet. These assignments reinforce some of the abstract concepts from the lectures or papers that week, and let you find out how things really work.
Design Project: This project is where the students get to design their own system, which is the primary objective of this course. The DP requires you to develop a detailed system design to solve a real-world problem. This project will extend over most of the semester, and will be done in teams of three students, all of whom attend the same writing tutorial (with exceptions only for extenuating circumstances). Real-world systems are not built individually; it's always a team effort. Part of the DP is to learn to work productively and effectively in this setting. We will give you tools for doing so in the writing tutorials. Because the DP consists of multiple deliverables, it gets its own page on the website.
Participation: Our recitations and tutorials are
discussion-based, and we expect you to be engaged and
participate. There are many ways to participate: coming to class
prepared, paying attention during class, participating in group work,
volunteering to answer questions, etc. We will assign your
participation grades at the end of the semester, but so that you know
how you're doing throughout the semester, we will you three
preliminary participation grades for recitation participation. We know
that getting graded on participation can be stressful in some ways,
which is why patricipation gets its
own page on the website.
How We Calculate Your Final Grade
Your exam and hands-on grades are reported as numbers (out of 100%),
but you'll receive letter grades for all other assignments. To
calculate your final grade in the class, we do the following:
Policies
Late Policy: If you're unable to hand in an assignment on time, reach out to your TA. As long as you let your TA know before the deadline, you can assume that we will give you at least a 24-hour extension on the assignment. If you feel that a longer extension is necessary, we'll work with you (and perhaps S3) to come up with a plan. Note that some of the design-project materials have more detailed late policies, which will be explicitly posted on each assignment.
Collaboration: You may not collaborate on exams. On hands-ons, it's okay to discuss ideas with your classmates, but you should not be collaborating on the actual answers. Take the UNIX hands-on for example: it's okay to talk to your classmates about what pipes are, it's not okay to work together to come up with a command that gives a long listing of the smallest give files in the /etc directory whose name contains the string ".conf", sorted by increasing file size (i.e., the solution to one of the first questions). On all writing assignments you are welcome to discuss ideas with others, but your writing should be your own and you should acknowledge all contributions of ideas by others, whether from classmates or from papers you have read.
AI: ChatGPT-generated (or other AI-generated) text is not permitted on assignments. The communication deliverables in 6.1800 are such that ChatGPT will limit your learning, and probably not produce a good result anyway.