News
ALA Submission Guidelines & Points Update
Written on 27.04.2026 17:05 by Pascal Held
Dear students,
ALA Submission Guidelines
As there seems to be some confusion regarding ALA and what constitutes a valid submission, we would like to clarify this.
We aim to encourage healthy and meaningful use of LLMs and chatbots. ALA was designed with this goal in mind. To assess whether you have actively worked with ALA, we are interested in seeing your thought process and a clear progression toward solving the exercise.
What we are looking for:
- your thought process
- whether the chat meaningfully covers the exercise
- evidence that you worked toward a solution
- your own ideas and intermediate steps
What we are not looking for:
- a perfectly correct final solution
- whether ALA flagged your submission as correct
- perfectly formatted or error-free LaTeX
Regarding LaTeX:
You are not required to use LaTeX to solve the exercises. Plain text, informal notation, or partially correct mathematical expressions are completely fine as long as your reasoning is understandable. Modern LLMs are generally able to interpret your intent, and this is sufficient for us as well.
What will be rejected (non-exhaustive list):
- chats that only present a final solution, even if you arrived at it on your own
- chats in a language other than English
- chats that are unrelated to the exercise
- chats where only hints are requested but no own reasoning or follow-up work is shown
- chats that do not demonstrate any meaningful engagement with the task
If in doubt, ask in the forum. Our tutors will happily help clarify any remaining questions.
Please also note that ALA chat submissions are mandatory for exam admission. You must participate in 9 out of 11 units, including both the exercise sheet and the ALA submission. Partial participation (only the exercise sheet or only the ALA chat) is not sufficient.
Points & Status Updates
Points have now been published for:
- Mini test unit 1 & 2
- Exercise sheet unit 2
- ALA unit 1 (test run)
Due to illness, not all points have been entered yet. These will be added soon, and your personal status page will update automatically.
For all students, a "passed" or "not passed" status is now shown for unit 1, depending on whether you participated in tutorial 1. For the remaining units, this status will be displayed once the results for the exercise sheet and the ALA submission of the respective unit have been published.
Best regards,
Your StatLab team