CS 241, Spring 04, Lab 4 Submission Guidelines
The back page of the lab assignment itself says what you
should submit. Below is a list of items that make
the labs hard to understand and for which point deductions
can be made if the TA is having trouble understanding your lab.
- Do not make any assumptions without stating them. The TAs have
read the lab assignment and know the material in class. But they cannot
read your mind. For example, we will assume that the root of your
binary heap is stored in index 0 of your heap array. If you do
something differently, then you should clearly indicate this.
- Don't leave in any commented out code. We don't want a history
of all of your debugging and mistakes. We want clean and easy to read
code with out extra stuff in the way.
- Put classes and methods in the order that we need to read them
in order to understand your code. The TAs would like to be able to
read your submission in the order in which things appear.
- Put a comment at the start of each method so they are easy to
find.
- Use proper indentation. If you aren't sure what is meant by
proper indentation, come see someone. If you've made this mistake
in the past, we would have told you and so those of you guilty of
this should know who you are.
- Choose your variable names carefully and make them meaningful.
For example, in Lab 3 many of you used "max level number" and "size"
interchangeably. However, the size is one more than the max level
number.
- Use meaningful comments for the variables. For example, having
a variable count1 with a commment "this is a counter" serves
no purpose. Tell us what it is counting unless you think it is so
obvious that we should know in which case no commment is needed.
- Put line feeds and blank lines in the output so that it is easy
to read. This doesn't mean to fill the output with unnecessary white
space. Think about if you would want to look at your output. If not,
make it easier to read. Also annote the output if it is not clear.
The TAs should not have to expend any effort to find and understand
your output.
- Check your output for both correctness and also readability.
Did the printer cut off the end of your lines? If so, we can't
see them. Most IDEs and editors have an option to print in a way
that will look good.
- Your write-up should be short (perhaps even not needed) for this
lab. However, if there are things you did that are not standard, then
include this in the write-up. Discuss each item in a separate paragraph
so it is easy to find. The write-up should be more of a list of
things we should know than one paragraph. This way we can look back
and find things easier.
Return to the CS241 Labs Page