General Policies

Academic Honesty

All submitted work should be your own. Please read my guide to Academic Integrity at http://sites.temple.edu/hachadoorian/course-policies/.

Classroom Environment

All persons participating in the course should be respectful of other students and the instructor in order to facilitate a civil learning environment. All persons participating in the course have a right to expect respectful treatment in the classroom.

Statement on Academic Freedom

Freedom to teach and freedom to learn are inseparable facets of academic freedom. The University has adopted a policy on Student and Faculty Academic Rights and Responsibilities (Policy # 03.70.02) which can be downloaded from http://policies.temple.edu/getdoc.asp?policy_no=03.70.02.

Communicating with the Instructor

Please email me at Lee.Hachadoorian@temple.edu. Email is preferable to messages sent via Canvas. You should use your @temple.edu email address. You should include your full name in all emails, as sometimes students have similar names and I need to know who I am talking to. For professional purposes, you should add a signature block to your email which includes your full name and desired contact information.

Please try to be specific in your communication. I have received emails the entire content of which is “What’s the assignment.” This puts the onus on me to figure out which assignment you might be talking about. It is annoying and unprofessional.

Instructor Availability

I will strive to respond to email within one school day. Please keep in mind that if you email me on a Friday afternoon, I might not get back to you until Monday. I will try to let you know in advance (usually by announcing it in class) if I will be at a conference, travelling, or otherwise unavailable.

If I do not respond within one school day (and you have not already seen me on campus or in class), please feel free to send a follow up email.

My courses generally have a significant amount of class time dedicated to individual and team-based work on lab exercises or projects. I also hold on campus and remote office hours each week. I regularly make additional time for individual meetings with students. However, before asking for special appointments, I ask that you avail yourself of class time and office hours as much as possible.

If your work schedule or other responsibilities make it such that you are unable to come to office hours, please let me know early in the semester. I will work with you to come up with meeting times that accommodate your schedule.

Email Support for Technology-Based Assignments

Many of my courses have a programming or computer-based analysis component. Students often email when they are stuck on an assignment. I can provide very limited support on these kinds of assignments via email. Please come to office hours or discuss with me in class.

There are two reasons why providing such support is difficult or impossible. The first is that it is often not apparent what the problem is without reproducing your work up to that point. This is time-consuming, and may not even succeed in reproducing the issue, so it is far simpler for you to show me your work up to that point and demonstrate the problem you are encountering. The more important reason is that I want to lead you to the solution, not just give you the answer. This is possible to do in a dialogue, but not possible to do via email.

If you do email me for support on a code-based assignment, it is usually far preferable to send your code and any resulting error message in the text of the email. Please do not send screenshots of your programming environment.

Keep in mind that Temple’s email service strips out Python files. If you need to email me a Python script, please zip it first and email me the zip file.

Due Dates and Late Assignments

Many assignments are turned in online. For such assignments, due dates mean by the end of the day. Since your day may end later than mine, in practice this means “before Prof. Hachadoorian wakes up the next morning”. More specific rules will be attached to assignments being reviewed in-class, presentations, assignments that need to be turned in in hard copy, etc.