Students are expected to be familiar with all of the information below. Read it fully and carefully.
We have also prepared an inductory video, available here (as "cse311-24sp-pre-quarter"), which discusses the goals of the course and highlights some important items from below. Please find time to watch that before the first lecture on Monday, March 25th.
The goals of this course are to:
The formal prequisites of this course are MATH 126 and CSE 143. Informally, we will assume familiarity with basic mathematical objects like integers and functions and with the basics of how computers perform calculations. For example, we will assume students are familiar with how non-negative integers can be written in binary.
For students who are in their first quarter at UW: You are strongly encouraged to take CSE 390z concurrently with CSE 311. CSE 390z is a 1-credit workshop that gives extra hands-on practice with the material from CSE 311. Anyone who thinks they might need extra support is welcome to register, subject to available space.
The course content can be grouped into three parts:
There is no required text for the course. For the first 6-7 weeks of the course, the following textbook can be useful: Rosen, Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications, McGraw-Hill. (Course materials will reference problem numbers from the 8th edition, but older versions largely include the same material.) It should be available through the bookstore and on short-term loan from the Engineering Library.
On occasion, there may be required readings during the course when there is insufficient time to fully cover the material during lecture. If this occurs, the readings will be posted on the web site and students will be notified of the reading via email or the message board.
Lectures will be given in person, at the locations and times shown on the time schedule. The afternoon lecture will also be recorded for the benefit of students who are sick or otherwise unable to attend.
(This paragraph is new as of March 26, 2024.) To help check your understanding of the concepts introduced in lecture and to provide an incentive to attend lecture and keep up with the material, we will be using concept checks this quarter. These are short multiple choice assignments administered on Gradescope about the material presented in lecture. There will be one concept check per lecture. They are intended to be completed before the next lecture, but the absolute deadline is 11:59pm on the Thursday immediately after the lecture. Concept checks are autograded and can be attempted as many times as you wish before the absolute deadline. You only need to get 80% of the available concept check points over the whole quarter to receive full credit.
Each week includes a TA-led quiz section. These will not be recorded, but the printed material used will be posted on the section list and calendar.
Each quiz section will be focused on preparation for the next homework assignment. A substantial portion of the time will be spent on practice problems similar to those appearing in that homework. It is very important that students take the time to work through the practice problems before attempting the homework, not only to make sure they understand how to solve them but also to understand how to communicate their solution in writing in a way that will be clear enough to receive full credit.
Past experience indicates that section attendance is extremely important for being successful in the course. For that reason, participation in section will be included as part of the course grade. Those who are sick or otherwise unable to attend can complete the practice problems on their own and submit their solutions in Gradescope by 5pm on Thursday.
Homework will consist of several assignments, normally with one due each week (except for the week of the midterm). As noted above, each quiz section will include practice problems similar to those on that week's homework assignment.
For students who are in their first quarter at UW: Note that most of the work in this course happens outside of the classroom. The university standard is two hours of outside work per hour of instruction. With four hours in the classroom, you should expect 8 hours of homework. Furthermore, there has historically been wide variation in how long it takes students to complete assignments in this course, with some fraction of students needing far more than 8 hours.
Homework assignments will usually be posted shortly after 5pm on Thursday so that students have six full days to complete it (“one problem per day”). Occasionally, we will discover errors in the assignment after it is posted (typically, just small typos). We will maintain a log on the website with all changes made to the assignment. If (and only if) we believe there is potential for students to submit correct solutions to the earlier version, we will also email all students about the change. In particular, we will not send email if the earlier version is obviously nonsensical. (Most typos fall into this category.)
Homework assignments will often have extra credit problems. They will be scored separately from the regular problems, and they will have little to no impact on course grades. The main incentive for doing the extra credit problems is for the additional challenge.
There will be a midterm exam held in class and a final exam during finals week. See the Exams section below for further details.
Students can also ask questions at any time on the message board. During normal working hours, they should receive a response within a fairly short period of time.
Each member of the course staff will also have an office hour every week, where students can get one-on-one help. See the home page for times and locations.
More information on the staff will be added here during the first week of class...
Students are not required to type their homework solutions. However, solutions are required to be legible, and typesetting is one way to ensure that they are easy to read.
Students who would like to try typing their solutions can see the resources page for advice on how to do so. However, students should be warned that the software is not always easy to use. In the past, some students have spent several hours trying to make their solution look the way they want, which is neither necessary nor advisable.
Students will receive an email invitation, during the first week of the course, to a course web page in GradeScope, where they can submit their homework solutions. To do so, they will first need to scan their solutions into a PDF. Portions of the scans that are not readble by the TAs (either due to the quality of the scan or the legibility of the handwriting) cannot be graded or receive credit.
If grading mistakes occur, students are encouraged to bring them to the attention of the course staff and see that they are corrected. They can do so by requesting a regrade in GradeScope, with these caveats:
We will only entertain regrade requests for one week after the grades are initially are posted. In particular, students searching for extra points late in the quarter by requesting regrades of problems from early assignments will be ignored.
While regrades can (and should) be used to fix mistakes where a correct solution is mistakenly marked incorrect, they cannot (and should not) be used to request changes to amounts of points deducted. Deductions are applied consistently to all students. We will not give one student a smaller deduction than others who made the same (or very similar) mistakes, so do not ask us to do so.
If two students feel that they made the same error but received different deductions for the error, both students must submit a regrade request. Note that we may resolve the inconsistency by increasing the smaller deduction to the larger amount.
Students should expect and demand to be treated with respect by their classmates and the course staff. All students belong here, and the staff is here to help them learn and enjoy a challenging course. If any incident occurs that challenges this commitment to a supportive and inclusive environment, students should please let the staff know so the issue can be addressed. You can use the anonymous feedback tool if you would like to tell us something anonymously.
Homework assignments are designed to be completed by the due dates listed. Situations may arise, however, where students are unable to complete the assignment by those dates. For that reason, we will allow students to submit assignments one day late with no penalty, provided that the following conditions are met:
Students use no more than one late day per assignment. A “day” means 24 hours from the original due date/time.
Students use no more than three late days total during the quarter.
Late work not meeting these conditions (i.e., more than 24 hours on one assignment or more than two assignments) will only be accepted after a discussion with course instructors.
Students do not need to take any special action when submitting an assignment late. The course staff will note the late submission and keep track of how many late submissions have occurred.
In addition, please note that:
Anything more than 10 minutes late is just as late as something submitted the next day.
Late days are intended to cover any emergencies that arise. We do not grant extra late days beyond the free ones just for emergencies — those are intended to cover most emergencies.
Students are encouraged to help each other learn the course material. However, we must disallow collaboration that aims to avoid learning (a.k.a. "cheating").
With that in mind, students are encouraged to work together on homework problems subject to the following constraints:
When working on solutions with others, we require that:
Since they cannot list "ChatGPT" or "The Internet" as one of their collaborators, students may not consult ChatGPT or the Internet for problems or key-phrases. This includes Google, MathOverflow, reddit, and any other website. However, students may consult the internet for ideas, definitions, and understanding general concepts.
Each student should keep their own solution (the one they plan to or have submitted) private until after the assignment due date. Under no circumstances should they give a copy of their solution to another student, as that would clearly violate the rules listed above.
As noted above, even when students work together to initially solve a problem, we expect each student to write their own solution, independently and unassisted. Attempting to misrepresent another student's solution as their own would be unfair to the other students in the course and constitute academic misconduct in violation of the Allen School policy. Any such violation will be reported to University, and the instructors will make every attempt to ensure the harshest allowable penalty.
If a student is ever unclear about whether their collaboration went over the line, they should (a) ask and (b) describe their collaboration clearly on their assignment. If they do, the worst that will happen is losing some points. That is much better than the alternative.
Please refer to university policies regarding disability accommodations and religious accommodations.
Students are responsible for making sure that they submit solutions to the final version of the problems posted on the website. (As noted above, the initially posted versions of assignments sometimes contain errors.) Students should confirm that they have solved the final version by consulting the change log on the website before submitting their solutions.
Correctness determinations will be based on the intention of the problem. As long as we believe that the intention was clear, we will deduct points from solutions that do not solve the intended problem. We will not listen to legalistic arguments about why poor solutions should be considered correct.
We may also deduct points for the following, additional reasons:
Legibility: We cannot give credit to solutions that cannot be read. Furthermore, we will deduct points whenever the grader has to spend a significant amount of time just trying to determine what the submission says.
Clarity: The goal of writing is to make the ideas clear to the reader, so the grader will deduct points for solutions that are unclear to them. (Note that we will not give points back just because the writing was clear to the writer. It must be clear to reader, and only the reader can say whether that was the case.)
Style: While it is generally better to err on the side of writing too much rather than too litle in this class, we may deduct points for solutions that are overly verbose or hard to follow.
The section solutions are intended to demonstrate solutions that would receive full credit. Solutions shown in lecture will often skip parts that would be expected in a complete solution due to limited time in class and space on the slides.
As noted above, we will not debate the amount of points deducted for mistakes. Those are at the descretion of the course staff.
(Note: These percentages were tweaked slightly on March 26, 2024.) Overall percentage scores for the course will be determined roughly as follows:
| 4% | Section Participation |
| 4% | Concept Checks |
| 56% | Homework (7% per assignment) |
| 12% | Midterm exam |
| 24% | Final exam |
However, since the homework and test problems we will give out in the course have not been tried by students before, we feel the need to leave ourselves room to adjust these weights based on how students perform. If an assignment turns out to be much more difficult (or much easier) than expected, we would want to decrease the weight on that assignment relative to others.
The final weighting for each assignment will be chosen when the grades for that assignment are released. Likewise for the exams. Each student's overall percentage will then be a weighted average using the weights chosen in that manner rather than the fixed table of weights shown above (though we expect the weights we choose will be very close to what is in the table).
Overall percentage scores will be translated into course grades as described in the following table:
| 96.5% | 4.0 | 84.0% | 3.4 | 71.5% | 2.8 | ||
| 94.5% | 3.9 | 82.0% | 3.3 | 69.5% | 2.7 | ||
| 92.5% | 3.8 | 80.0% | 3.2 | 67.5% | 2.6 | ||
| 90.5% | 3.7 | 78.0% | 3.1 | 65.0% | 2.5 | ||
| 88.5% | 3.6 | 75.5% | 3.0 | 63.0% | 2.4 | ||
| 86.0% | 3.5 | 73.5% | 2.9 | 61.0% | 2.3 |
Grades for scores below 60% will be determined by the instructors on a case-by-case basis. In particular, we reserve the right to pass students whose percentages would fall below 2.0 in the table.
As an example, an average of 90% on the homework assignments and 80% on both the midterm and final exam would give an overall percentage score of 86.4%, using the tentative weights in the first table above. Per the second table, that translates to a 3.5 grade as it is above 86.0% and below 88.5%. In a similar manner, an average of 80% on the homework assignments and 70% on both the midterm and final would would translate to a 3.0 grade, while an average of 70% on the the homework assignments and 60% on both exams would translate to a 2.5 grade.
As noted in the syllabus, most homework assignments will also include the opportunity for extra credit. This will be incorporated into the grades, but it will have only a tiny effect, meaning that it will only change grades that are very close to a dividing line. Generally speaking, a student who completes a reasonable amount of extra credit would expect to see an 85.9% score bumped up to 86.0%, which would become a 3.5. However, in no circumstances will extra credit increase a student's percentage score by more than 0.3%.
The midterm exam will be held in class. See the course calendar for the date and time. The exam will be closed book and closed notes. However, we will include any reference sheets that might be useful (e.g., the inference and equivalence rules) with the exam.
The midterm will include topics from lecture up to the end of ordinary induction (but not strong induction). The instructor will discuss the exact number and types of problems before the exam, so that there are no surprises about what is covered.
If you would like additional practice, the problems in the following materials should be similar enough to our own to be helpful preparation:
a set of practice problems and solutions with these additional notes:
There may be a TA-led review session beforehand. More details will be forthcoming later in the quarter.
The final exam will be held in person on June 3rd from 12:30-2:20pm in KNE 120. Note that this may not be at the time and place listed in the UW final exam schedule. If you have a conflict, please contact course staff as soon as possible and at least a week in advance of the exam.
Students must bring their UW ID and have it ready to be checked during the exam.
The final exam will be comprehensive but will emphasize the material not covered on the midterm. As a rough guide, you can expect two thirds of the final to cover the post midterm material. As with the midterm, the instructor will discuss the number and types of problems before the exam, so that there are no surprises about what is covered. Like the midterm, the final exam will be closed book and notes.
If you would like additional practice, the problems in the following materials should be similar enough to our own to be helpful preparation:
Note, however, that these tests may include some material that was not discussed in our class, as the course content does change somewhat from quarter to quarter.
There may be a TA-led review session beforehand. More details will be forthcoming later in the quarter.
Start each homework assignment early. As noted above, it is hard to know how long any assignment will take you, so you need to leave time available in case the problems are more difficult than you expected. We strongly encourage you to consider a schedule of completing “one problem per day”, rather than all the problems in one or two days.
Prefer the message board to office hours. Office hours get very busy, especially in the last 48 hours before assignments are due. (Yet another reason to start early is that you can attend office hours that are less busy.) Even just before assignments are due, however, questions on the message board are usually answered within a short period of time.
Create your own study groups. By working with others, you will reinforce each other's understanding. If you work with the same group of people consistently, you will also build a shared group vocabulary that will allow you to communicate more effectively than you would with course staff at office hours. In all cases, be sure to follow the collaboration policy. You should never share any written work with other students.
Do not skip class to work on homework, not even late in the quarter when you are more tired and busy. Doing so often seems like it will save you time in the short run, but it will cost you time (and learning) in the long run.
Remember that your grade in this course matters much less than how much you learn. Your success in future classes (and job interviews) will depend on how well you learned the topics we cover, not what grade you received. (Employers, in particular, do not care that your instructors say, via your grade, that you learned the material. They want to see you demonstrate your knowledge directly in the interview.)
Remember that making mistakes is part of learning. The only people who do not make mistakes are those who don't try new things. People who push themselves to do new things make mistakes all the time, even if you don't notice them. As Kevin Kelly said, "professionals are just amateurs who recover gracefully from their mistakes."
Try to find the parts of computer science that excite you. To quote Kevin Kelly again, "being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points".