IBC233 Course Standards

Course Structure:

1 Weekly Lecture
1 Weekly Lab

Course Evaluation:

4 Tests 40% of final mark.
10 of 11 Labs10% of final mark.
3 Assignments20% of final mark.
Final Exam30% of final mark.

Passing the Course:

To obtain a credit in this subject you must achieve the following:

55% on the overall course
55% weighted average on tests and exam
55% on the final exam.

All assignments must be completed in a satisfactory manner:

i.e. submitted with source code and compiled objects as per specifications

Course Web Site:

Tests:

Tests may be given during the lab or lecture periods.

If you miss a test due to an emergency you must EMAIL your professor IMMEDIATELY in order to receive consideration for your absence. Leave an email message where you can be reached. You will need to provide documented evidence (e.g. Doctor's note) of the emergency. Tests missed without prior notification or proper documentation will receive a grade of zero.
If you cannot attend a test due to religious observance, you must EMAIL your professor within 24 hours after the test is announced in order to reschedule your test. Be prepared to write the test earlier than the rest of the class. Insufficient notice is equivalent to missing the test without cause and a grade of zero will be assessed.
Given adequate notice and documentation, tests may be taken in the Test Centre for Special Needs students and students with special circumstances noted above.
Ensure you sign the attendance sheet during a test. It is the only way you can prove you were there. Please retain the original of your test until the end of term. If there is any problem with your recorded mark, the original test is the only thing that can be used to change it.

Assignments:

There will be three assignments worth a total of 20% of your final grade. The weighting of the assignments will be announced when they are assigned. Assignments will be due either in printed form, electronically, or by demonstration as determined by your professor. Assignments are a course requirement. You must submit all assignments to pass.
An assignment completed in a satisfactory manner includes all objects and source members described or required by the assignment specifications, where objects and members are named according to assignment specifications, and all objects have the required security authorization. Otherwise, the assignment has not been properly submitted and will not be accepted for marking.
Assignments must be completed by the end of regular classes.
The assignments are INDIVIDUAL assignments, not group assignments. Anyone handing in work that looks like someone else’s will be charged with plagiarism.
Assignments submitted late will lose a percent of the assignment value for each working day late according to the following chart.

Working Days Late / assignment value charge
One / -10%
Two / -30%
Three / -50%
Four / -70%
Five / -90%
Six or more / -100%

Remember Murphy's Law. If anything can go wrong, it will. Plan for the unexpected. That is, plan to be early. That way, you can deal with the inconveniences in life that slow us all down. As is often said in business, "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an automatic emergency on mine."
A warning: most people who submit assignments very late, fail the course.
Be aware that your assignments are graded differently now than they will be after you graduate. In business, a program is either all right or it is all wrong. There are no "part marks". An example: go to Tim Horton's and order a large coffee, black with sugar, along with a plain donut. You are served a small decaf-coffee with triple cream, no sugar and a Timbit. You ordered coffee and a donut, you got coffee and a donut. It even costs less than your original request. Would this be OK with you? Now imagine a client spending one hundred thousand times more ... how will they react if the software is not exactly what they asked for?

Policy on system availability:

Please do not assume the system will always be available for you to complete your work at any time. Seneca provides high availability but does not guarantee 99.999% uptime (known in the industry as "five nines" reliability).
Temporary system outages and longer response times at peak periods (e.g. in the hours before an assignment is due) are a fact of life in our industry. Build in some buffer time to recover from Murphy's Law.
Automatic extensions to labs and assignments will be granted only when the system is not available:
in the LearningCommons and Labs (i.e. on campus)
within 48 hours of the due date/time
for a total of 8 hours or more per 24 hour period
A one working day extension will be given for each day the system is unavailable according to the above conditions

Lectures:

Lectures will explain and demonstrate the skills and concepts you need to complete a Lab assignment.
Formal attendance will not be kept, however, frequent absence will be noted. You are responsible on all tests and assignments for any material covered or assigned in class or contained within noted sections of the text. The people who do not come to class generally have significant problems completing their assignments and labs.
Classes will start on time and late arrivals must not disturb the class. Enter quietly and take a seat. Do not disturb the class by asking questions about what took place before your arrival.
If you missed a class, please ask a colleague, not the instructor, to know what was covered. Email to an instructor about what was covered in class will get a response along the lines of "that was covered in class".
After the lecture, you are expected to work on the lab in preparation for the Interactive Lecture.

Interactive Lectures (Labs):

Each week there will be a 2 period interactive lecture in a lab. The first period is a teaching period where the professor will complete or review lecture material, demonstrate key concepts of the lab, and answer general questions. You will be required to complete lab exercises during the remaining portion of the lab period. Labs are available from the course home page: You are expected to print them off ahead of time and bring them with you.
Each lab will have a component to be marked. Labs will be marked on a pass/fail basis. Labs must be handed in or demonstrated during the lab period – they will not be accepted afterward. The late penalty for labs is 100%. Doing the labs on time is an easy 10/10 marks.
It will be difficult to complete the entire lab during the allocated time, therefore, it is strongly recommended that you make a serious attempt to complete the lab beforehand. The time in the lab is to solve problems and complete (not begin) the lab tasks.
Many labs build on previous labs. If you skip one lab, you may have to do it anyway to complete the next lab. If you have to do it anyway, do it on time and get the mark for it.
Labs are not a course requirement. You do not have to complete them all to pass. However, the practice you obtain by completing the labs is crucial to your successful completion of the assignments and the course itself. Most people who skip a lot of labs find it difficult to complete the assignments on time and then they usually fail the course.

Disputes regarding marks:

A student may dispute the marks awarded on a test, assignment or exam in writing and in detail. The student must document the details of what was awarded and why the student considers it incorrect. This might be a simple as photocopying a test and illustrating that the marks were totalled incorrectly. Simply saying, "you added up my marks wrong" or "you charged me a late penalty when you should not have" is insufficient reason for me to re-evaluate all my documentation already provided on a test or assignment.

Academic Honesty

It is expected that everyone proceeds in an honest manner with regard to all aspects of academics at Seneca. Students are to submit their work with integrity.

When submitting assignments, students must submit a signed statement that the work being submitted is their own. See

The value of your own work is held very highly at Seneca. In the educational experience, producing the right answer is not as important as learning the answer for yourself. Tests and assignments are your opportunity to demonstrate that you have learned the material yourself. Your marks indicate the results of your own work. If you copy someone else’s efforts and present them as your own, then there is no work of yours to be marked.

Cheating or plagiarism is an extremely serious academic offence and carries penalties varying from failure in an assignment to expulsion from the college. Please see the College website on Academic Policy, section 8.8, at for further information.

Cheating or plagiarism is passing off someone else's words or thoughts as your own. This applies to labs, assignments, tests, and exams in whole or in part. Copying even a small part is dishonest and affects the entire submitted work.

Students who collude in cheating or plagiarism will also be guilty of academic dishonesty. If one student copies from another, both will be charged.

Cheating is construed as misrepresenting oneself (or being misrepresented by another) at a test/exam, talking during a test, use of aids that are not permitted (e.g. notes on paper hidden on your person or written on part of your body), peeking at another student’s test paper or any other clandestine method of acquiring information during a test or exam.

Plagiarism is the copying of another person’s work. You may not submit an assignment that contains material – in whole or in part – which is copied from another student, a web-site, a textbook or any other source. This includes material obtained from students who have previously taken this course and the "official" answers which may have been issued in the past.

How not to cheat:

Helping each other is one of the best ways to learn. To avoid copying from each other in this situation…
Talk all you want. Don't write anything down.
If you are the helper: sign off all your terminal sessions. Close your books, put away all your notes, printouts and similar materials. Then, go to your colleague's screen or printout and work with them on their problem using their approach. Help them debug their code. Do not show them how you did it. Your job here is to ask questions, not offer answers.
If you are the person being helped: do not look at your colleague's solution or answer to a question. Your objective is to get help understanding the problem. Don’t just ask for the answer. It's too easy to end up copying it and thereby risking a charge of plagiarism. You will also need a good level of understanding when you write the tests and exam.
Simply rewording someone else's answer or changing the field names in their program and presenting the work as your own is still copying – you are copying the solution. Trivial differences in the code or the wording do not change the solution being copied.
In test situations, it is recommend that you sit far away from your friends.

Text Book:

The textbook for this course is Mastering the AS/400, third edition by Jerry Fottral. It is required for some of the labs.
The textbook is available on-line through Books 24X7. Note that Seneca has a limited number of licenses for on-line viewing so access is not guaranteed.
Photocopied textbooks are a violation of copyright and are illegal. To avoid any complications, photocopies (in whole/or part of) will not be allowed in the classroom or the labs. Anyone found in possession of even a single photocopied page will be asked to remove it from the class/lab immediately.

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