Syllabus

Course Goals

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Convert ideas between logical syntax and natural language.
• Write a proof (that is, a rigorous argument) of simple statements (for example, that your code is correct or efficient).
• Write proofs by induction, contrapositive, and contradiction.
• Identify common mistakes in proofs.
• Understand and analyze mathematical models of computation (including regular expressions and context free grammars).

Communication is a key aspect of this course. A proof is not simply correct or incorrect; it is an act of communication to an intended audience. For this reason, the production of clear, convincing, and unambiguous writing is a key aspect of this course.

Pandemic Changes

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic may affect the modes of interaction for the course. We will closely follow UW policy and recommendations as we go throughout the quarter.

What if I become ill during the quarter?

The most important thing is to not come to (in-person) class if you're sick. We'll have a variety of accommodations available depending on how long and severe your illness is (whether it's COVID or something else).

• Virtual Office Hours, lecture recordings, section recap videos, and late days can handle most minor illnesses.
• We can give extensions to individuals who are sick for an extended period where late days are not sufficient. In particularly extreme cases, we can provide accommodations beyond just extending due dates.
• We'll be prepared to give the final exam at alternate time(s) for students who are unable to take it in-person.
• If you are sick at the end of the quarter, you may be able to take an Incomplete (I) and wrap up any remaining work next quarter.

Contingency plans:

• If Robbie needs to quarantine for a short time (e.g., while waiting for a test result), we'll likely switch to zoom for that day, but could also switch to an asynchronous lecture (i.e., post a video), or find a (synchronous) substitute lecturer. The same applies if Robbie ends up sick for an extended period.
• If a TA for in-person Office Hours needs to quarantine, we will switch their Office Hours to Zoom.
• We have plans in place to make sure sections can still meet in-person even if one of the TAs needs to quarantine (assuming the other students and TA didn't have the same exposure).
• If the university decides to convert all classes to virtual, we will use Zoom for synchronous lectures, sections, and Office Hours.

It is our assumption that the course will be in a primarily in-person mode for the quarter. Nonetheless, we will be prepared to continue virtually if required/recommended by the university. We intend to stick to this syllabus as closely as possible. If we do make changes, we will do our best to make sure it is to your benefit. We may propose changes if there are significant changes to the local or global health situation, or UW significantly changes course.

We are doing our best to learn and teach during a pandemic. But we are still in the middle of a pandemic! If unforeseen circumstances arise during the quarter, please do not hesitate to talk to the course staff. The sooner we are made aware, the more options we will have for designing accommodations. You can also send us anonymous feedback with ideas to improve the course.

Nonetheless, one of the main methods of learning is talking to other students in the course! We strongly encourage you to find study groups you can meet with (remotely or otherwise).

Assesments

Grades will be based off homework assignments, a "mini-midterm" and a final.

Homework

There will be approximately eight week-long homeworks.

Since technical communication is one of the main focuses of the course, we will grade your homework both in accuracy and clarity. More details are included in our grading guidelines.

Homeworks are both a chance for you to improve your understanding and for us to evaluate how well you understand the material. For that reason, although you are encouraged to discuss the problems with one another, you must still write up solutions on your own. More details are included in the collaboration policy.

"mini-midterm"

We will have a take-home "mini-midterm." You will have access to course resources during the exam, but collaboration will be limited. We will release more details as we get closer to the exam. The exam will be available over the weekend of May 6-8.

Final

It is our intention to conduct an in-person final exam this quarter. We are working with the university on what rooms are available; we have not yet been able to determine whether we will have a combined exam (likely at a different time than the exam schedule) or separate exams. We will share this information as soon as it is available.

We will offer at least the following pandemic accommodations:

• We will have a second (smaller) room for students who have reasons that they should not be in the main lecture hall. We encourage anyone who thinks they may need this accommodation to inquire with DRS whether official accommodations may be appropriate, but we will give any remaining seats in the room to students who have compelling reasons to avoid the large lecture hall.
• We will have a conflict exam for anyone unable to attend the exam due to symptoms or quarantining. you should not come to the exam if you think you have COVID symptoms the morning of the exam
• For students unable to attend both the main and conflict exam, we will have other options available. Depending on the exact circumstances, this might involve individual conflict exams, incompletes (if a conflict cannot be rescheduled, say if you're very sick for all of finals week), or other options.

We will continue to follow the course of the pandemic, both locally and globally, and to follow UW guidance on whether in-person exams are safe and allowed. If we are unable to hold the exam in-person, we will instead have a take-home exam. A take-home exam would be spread over a longer time period than just the final-exam slot on the official schedule.

Extra credit

We will have occasional extra credit problems on homework assignments. These problems are intended to allow students who want to dig deeper into the material and work on more challenging problems.

Extra credit will have minimal effect on your final grades. They are graded separately from the main homework and factored in only after grade cutoffs have already been determined.

Assigning course grades

Your course average will be a combination of your scores on the homeworks and exams. We will weight those categories as follows:

In the event of very significant pandemic changes, we reserve the right to modify these weights, but will endeavor not to do so. Just switching the mode of the final exam from in-person to take-home will not cause us to change the weights shown.

Extra credit is incorporated after we have set the grade breaks according to the weights above. Extra credit has a minimal effect on grades (changing GPAs by 0.1 or less).

Students often wonder whether the class is "curved." For example, whether the median course grade must be some specified value, or if we have a maximum amount of "good" grades we can assign. We do not "curve" in either of these senses. We do, though, look at the performance of students this quarter relative to other quarters (especially where homework problems were similar) to try to keep grades consistent between different quarters (that is that similar levels of understanding of the content would lead to similar grades). This process means that before we have collected all the grades, we don't know exactly where gradebreaks will be.

Grade guarantees

In order to give you a sense of how you are doing during the quarter, we offer the following minimum guarantees. That is, if your course average (calculated as descrbed above) meets these thresholds, we guarantee that you will get a GPA of the grade shown or higher. These guarantees are intended to give you a simple way to interpret how you are doing throughout the quarter; we will still decide at the end of the quarter on exact grade breaks as described above. In the event that exams or homeworks (or both) turn out more difficult than intended, we may make grades higher than indicated here, but we will not make them less generous.

Course Grade	GPA guarantee
92%	3.5
85%	3.0
70%	2.0

Late Policy

Homeworks

You will have six late days to use during the quarter for homework assignments. A late day allows you to turn in an assignment up to 24 hours later without penalty. Simply submit late and we will keep track of your usage internally.

Regardless of how many late days you have, you cannot submit an assignment more than 72 hours after it is due without prior permission from course staff.

For example, an assignment due at 11:59 PM on Wednesday could be turned in at 10 PM on Friday with no penalty by using two late days. However, you cannot submit at 12:01 AM Sunday as it would be more than 72 hours.

If you run out of late days, you may still turn in an assignment late, at a penalty of 15% per day (but still may not turn in an assignment after the 72-hour-late-deadline without prior permission from the course staff).

Late days are designed to handle the “normal” difficulties in a quarter (e.g. prioritizing different courses, fundraising for an RSO, a minor cold, or attending a relative’s birthday dinner). If your situation goes beyond those “normal” circumstances, you should contact the course staff as early as you can.

Exams

We will not allow late days to be used on take-home exams. If you have extenuating circumstances that interfere with completing these activities on-time, you should contact the course staff.

Academic Integrity

We want to make sure that you fully understand and internalize the approach to the materials. So, we take academic integrity very seriously. We may refer violations of our policies to the Office of Academic Affairs.

Collaboration

You are allowed (and encouraged!) to discuss homework problems with other students, as long as you:

• Do not take away any notes or screenshots during your discussion.
• Take a 30 minute break before writing up your solution individually.
• Cite the names of all of your collaborators somewhere in your writeup.

Collaboration rules will be different on the exams. More details will be released as we get closer to the exams.

If you are confused as to whether or not some collaboration is allowed, ask us! No set of rules will be completely exhaustive.

If something weird happens, please tell us too! We will not consider any action to be a violation of the academic integrity policy if you tell us about it before turning in the assignment.

Resources Outside of CSE 311

You are strongly encouraged to seek out resources beyond official course resources, with the following caveats:

• Definitions and terminology can differ significantly (and in subtle ways) depending on the author. Be careful that other resources are saying what you think they are saying.
• You may not search with the intent of finding a solution to the exact homework problem being asked.
• You may not use commercial tutoring resources like Chegg for the problems we ask, nor post our materials or your answers to those websites.
• You may not publicly post your solutions, even after the course is over. You also must not share your solutions with students taking future iterations of the course.

Scenarios

What happened?	Is it a violation?
When searching for general information, you accidentally find the exact question we asked. You tell the staff, and provide a link to what you found.	Not a violation! We’ll say thanks for letting us know and make sure you didn’t plagiarize. There won’t be a penalty but only a warm, fuzzy feeling.
You and a friend separately write up solutions, then compare. Your friend suggests that your conclusion is a little unclear. You formulate a new conclusion on the Zoom call together.	Violation! That is no longer your individual writeup.
You and a friend separately write up solutions, then compare. Your friend suggests changing \(\exists\) to \(\forall\) and switching the name \(x\) to \(p\). You wait 30 minutes, then return to your writeup, decide the changes would be improvements, and incorporate them.	Not a violation! Minor rewordings done by you at another’s suggestion are fine. The writeup is still substantially yours.
You find a textbook with sample solutions to similar problems. You see that they like to introduce variables with “Consider” and use “hence” instead of “because.” You copy these words, because they seem cooler.	Not a violation! Single words or stock phrases are things you can learn from. It is not a violation to emulate style (but “hence” is a little archaic).

Course Tools

Information will appear here shortly.

Zoom

Zoom is how meetings that must be virtual will be delivered. That includes at least some office hours throughout the quarter. You can find meeting IDs in a pinned post on the Ed discussion board.

You should go to the sections you are officially enrolled in when possible. If you attend another section, please give that TA a heads up.

Office Hours: You can attend any Office Hours, not just the ones held by the TA who teaches your section. They do get busier closer to deadlines, so it is better to attend them early and throughout the week.

Zoom meetings will be restricted to accounts logged in with @uw.edu email addresses. If you have trouble joining a meeting, make sure you choose the “Sign in with SSO” option.

Ed

Ed is our discussion board and the right place to ask any questions about the course.

We will happily answer questions from lecture or about general concepts. We also will answer clarifications about homework (e.g. correcting typos). Students are encouraged to answer each other’s questions on the message board as well.

If you have a question that might reveal your approach or the solution to a homework problem, you must ask the question privately. For accommodations and other private questions, you can ask privately on Ed or email the instructor. Only you and the course staff can see a private question on Ed.

Gradescope

Gradescope is the tool to turn in completed assignments. After grading, you can also find our feedback there and submit regrade requests if needed.

You will get an automatic email with account setup instructions before HW1 is due.

Canvas

We will not be consistently updating canvas. Information on canvas may be partial or inaccurate for large portions of the quarter, you should not rely on it for this course. We may use canvas's gradebook at the end of the quarter, but we will announce which information should be relied on and when.

Accommodations

If you have, or think you may have, a temporary health condition or permanent disability, contact Disability Resources for Students (DRS) to get started with accommodations. Last quarter, DRS became overwhelmed with new requests a few weeks into the quarter. We strongly recommend reaching out as soon as possible, as we are unable to provide certain accommodations (e.g. extra testing time) except as decided on by DRS.

Accommodations for faith or conscience reasons must be requested within the first two weeks using the Registrar’s request form. The UW’s religious accommodations policy is available here.

Your performance in this course should not be affected by circumstances beyond your control. We can still work with you for situations other than the university-wide accommodations. If anything does come up, you should contact the course staff as early as you can.