Usually each technical course has coursework, which accounts for 25% of the assessment for the course. Professional Issues has a 15% coursework component, and one or two courses may be entirely assessed by coursework.
A 10 credit course is nominally assigned 100 hours of work, taking a full year's work to be thirty 40-hour weeks. In practice, this probably means around 50-80 hours of time outside lectures; thus you should expect to spend a few hours per week per course on coursework (the rest of the time being taken up by the lectures themselves and by note-reading and revision). Of course this is only a rough guide.
It is important that you organise your time carefully during the year; not only will this help you to do better coursework, but it's a useful skill in itself. Remember that access to machines will be most difficult near deadlines. It is OK to hand in work before the deadline!
All course work must be handed back to the ITO (room JCMB-1502 for CS, and AT-5.03 for AI) late in Semester 2 so that it is available for the examiners to inspect during the assessment process. The ITO will notify you of the deadline nearer the time.
You must read and follow both the University's
Student Guidance on the Avoidance of Plagiarism
http://www.aaps.ed.ac.uk/regulations/Plagiarism/Guidance/StudentGuidance.pdf and the School of Informatics Guidelines on
Plagiarism:
http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/admin/ITO/DivisionalGuidelinesPlagiarism.html.
Coursework will usually be submitted either electronically, or in paper form to the relevant ITO.
The policy for late coursework is currently imposed on us by the University. The normal situation is given by Undergraduate Assessment Regulation 3.8:
Late coursework will not be accepted without good reason, will be recorded as late and a penalty may be exacted. That penalty should be a reduction of the mark by 5% of the maximum obtainable mark per working day (e.g. a mark of 65% on the common marking scale would be reduced to 60% after 24 hours). This would apply for up to five working days (or to the time when feedback is given, if this is sooner), after which a mark of zero should be given. [etc.]
However, under a blanket exemption from College, small exercises (worth 5% or less of the credit for a course) may have a strict deadline policy. Lecturers will advise you if this is the case when such a piece of coursework is issued.
Requests with good reason for extension should be made to the UG3 Course Organiser. `Good reason' includes illness, serious personal matters etc. It does not include failure to organize your time effectively!
Update, Jan 07 As some of you have noticed, the above is internally inconsistent. The situation is under discussion at Informatics and at University level. The current situation is that it is up to individual lecturers whether they will accept up to 5 working days work late, no reason needed, subject to a 5%/day penalty, or whether they will refuse to accept work late without good reason. I have reminded lecturers to make it crystal clear which policy applies to each individual piece of work - if nevertheless you're in doubt about it for some piece of work, ask!
Work will normally be handed back within two weeks (four in the case of the two major projects).
Coursework will be annotated with both a grade and a mark. Please note that these are provisional and may be revised by the Board of Examiners (for example, this might happen if it became clear that coursework had been much more harshly marked on one course than another).