Not all exercises will be graded.
You will have one week to hand in an assignment. (There may occasionally be multi-week assignments.)
Homework should handed in on paper with sample output and and/or screen shots by the beginning of the class one week after the class in which it was assigned. Thus if I assigned a homework on Monday, it is due by the beginning of class the following Monday. Late homework will not be accepted at any time for any reason.
I will not argue with you about grades.
There is no direct communication with the grader(s). If you have a problem with the homework, see me.
It is not enough to hand in correct programs that merely compile and produce the expected output. You will be graded on elegance, design legibility, maintainability, and other such important factors. I will generally not give full specifications of the problem. You are expected not merely to solve the problems, but to make intelligent decisions about how to approach the problems. Getting the low-level syntax right and coding the algorithms and data structures correctly is at most 50% of the grade. The other 50% is based on choosing reasonable algorithms and data structures and presenting it in an elegant, simple, legible, documented, and maintainable fashion. Spaghetti code is severely deprecated.
In the so-called real-world the best estimates are that about 10% of programmer time is spent writing code. Approximately 90% of programmer time is spent on design, testing, debugging, and documentation. So I'm actually giving about 40% too much weight to code writing.
Use spaces, not tabs, to indent for print-outs.
Of course this all depends on the problem. The initial assignments are very simple, and fundamentally easy to understand. There really isn't more than one way to approach them. However as the semester progresses, you should find yourself spending more and more time on design, debugging, testing, and documentation, and relatively less on mere coding.
Later homeworks will be more complex, and thus count more heavily toward your final grade.
Probably one hour.
We will have class on May 4.