By the end of this course, you will be able to:
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.
Assessments are on a continuum from formative to summative. Formative assessments are meant to form your skills. That is, the main focus is not whether you get it right the first time, the focus is helping you gain the skills to get similar problems correct the next time you see them. Summative assessments are designed primarily to evaluate: to see if you can sum-up what you've learned into doing problems. It is very rare to understand the content of this course just by watching someone else explain it. It's expected that the first few times you try a problem, you may not get it right, but you'll be able to improve. The formative assignments are designed to give you chances for improving and feedback.
The list below is ordered from purely formative to purely summative.
This course is designed to introduce concepts in lectures and give you practice with them in sections. As a result, trying the problems associated with each section is extremely important for success in the course.
Each week, TAs will keep a record of who came to section and participated. "Participated" doesn't mean you ever have to get questions correct, or answer questions to the whole class. It means you're working on the problems (forming your skills!), and talking with those around you.
You are expected to attend the section which you are officially registered for. If you cannot attend your section for a specific week, you may attend another with permission of the section's TAs.
If you cannot attend any section in-person, you may do the section problems on your own and submit them to a TA for credit. The problems to do will be posted on the course calendar each week, and must be submitted by the Sunday after the section.
There are 10 sections during the quarter. Your section participation grade will be: min(9,number-participated)/9. I.e., you can miss one section without penalty (or doing the replacement problems), but do not get extra credit for participating in more than 9.
Associated with every lecture will be a "concept check" due at the start of the following lecture. The goal of a concept check is to expose any misunderstandings you might have from lecture and get very quick feedback before we build on the concepts in the following lecture.
As the goal of a concept check is quick feedback, concept checks are graded automatically. On a submitted attempt, correct answers produce an explanation of why the answer is correct. Concept checks can be resubmitted as many times as desired until the deadline (the grade recorded is the final submission).
You can (and ideally should!!) submit concept checks until you get answers correct. Concept checks are formative; their goal is to help you recognize that you didn't understand something and review or ask for help.
At the end of the quarter, your concept check grade will be: min(.8*total CC points available, your CC points) / [.8*total CC points available]. I.e., you get full credit by getting 80% of the points available, but do not get extra credit for getting more than 80% of the points.
Because there are so many concept checks (and so many students), it's not logistically possible for the staff to manage extensions on concept checks. We will not accept late concept checks (but see the late policy for how unused late days can give extra concept check points).
After the deadline, Gradescope shows the correct answers to anyone who has submitted at least one attempt at that concept check. Gradescope does not show answers to students with no submissions. We therefore strongly encourage you to submit something on each concept check (or be prepared to ask other students to see the questions/answers of missed checks if you would find them helpful).
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. You are not permitted to use artificial intelligence systems (e.g., Chat-GPT) on homeworks. More details (including limitations around collaboration, and instances where LLMs can be legitimately used for learning course content) are included in the collaboration policy.
We will have two in-person midterm exams in the evenings (exact time TBD) of Thursday October 23rd and Monday November 17th. The exams will be individual, but you will be allowed a small amount of your own notes to use on each exam (details will be announced closer to the exam dates). We will have makeup exams for students unable to attend the main exam (see the Exam Conflicts section for more information).
We will have an in-person final exam 12:30-14:20 on Monday December 8th. The exam will be individual, but you will be allowed a small amount of your own notes with the exam (details will be announced closer to the exam date). We will have makeup exams for students unable to attend the main exam (see the Exam Conflicts section for more information).
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, and will affect a course grade by at most 0.1. They are graded separately from the main homework and factored in only after grade cutoffs have already been determined.
The course staff is made up of people, that means we sometimes make mistakes! When those mistakes happen in grading, we want to correct them.
Office hours are a chance to talk to the course staff (TAs or instructors) about course content. We'll have a schedule on the website to start week 2 of the quarter. You can go to anyone's office hours (not just your section TA's). You don't have to have a specific question to come to office hours, but it can make things easier. We will answer questions about homework at office hours, but there are some things we can't answer:
These are conceptual questions:
Your course average will be a combination of your scores on the homeworks and exams. We will weight those categories as follows:
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 or exam 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.
In order to give you a sense of how you are doing during the quarter, we offer the following minimum guarantees. These are minimum guarantees, not predictions. If your course average (calculated as described above) meets these thresholds, we guarantee that you will get a GPA of the grade shown or higher. Most quarters, at least a few of the actual gradebreaks are more generous than these.
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 |
| 65% | 2.0 |
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 Friday could be turned in at 10 PM on Sunday with no penalty by using two late days. However, you cannot submit at 12:01 AM Tuesday 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).
Concept checks are due at the start of the next lecture (in quarters with multiple lectures, that time is the first of the lectures that day, which might not be your lecture time). You may not submit concept checks late.
If you have extra late days after all homeworks are turned in, we will convert any remaining late days into a full credit concept check (adding the most points to your total score that we can). You do not need to do anything extra in this process, we will calculate it at the end of the quarter.
Part of the reason for only requiring 80% accuracy on concept checks is as a late policy.
You may not use late days on section participation. We drop one section in part to ensure unusual circumstances don't have undue effects on grades.
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.
We want to make sure that you fully understand and internalize the approach to the materials. So, we take academic integrity very seriously. We refer violations of our policies to the Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct.
You are allowed (and encouraged!) to discuss homework problems with other students currently taking the class. With your classmates, you can discuss the exact problems asked in the homeworks (including brainstorming and solving them together), as long as you:
Note that the individual writeup portion means that your homework submission and your friends will look different! (with the exception of a few problems, especially on HW1, for which people working independently will produce identical responses)
You may ask other people you know (e.g., friends who have already taken 311) for help on concepts and for high-level discussions, but they may not do a problem with you.
You are strongly encouraged to seek out resources beyond official course resources, with the following caveats:
AI systems (including large language models, like Chat-GPT) are powerful tools in the right hands, but can be harmful to learning when misused. The goal of the staff is to help form you into capable computer scientists. One of the major goals of this course is to teach how to think clearly about CS topics and communicate clearly with other computer scientists. This skill will continue to be a critical one, regardless of the existence of AI systems (even if your code and an explanation of how it works comes from an LLM, you'll have to see if you believe it, and have to convince other programmers whether it is correct or not).
You may not utilize artificial intelligence or machine learning systems (e.g., Chat-GPT) on any assignments (including homeworks and concept checks). There are a variety of reasons for this policy, but the main one is to ensure that you learn the skills you need to from this course. Systems that do problems for you slow down your learning. Our goal is that you learn to be better computer scientists at the end of this course; we accomplish that goal in part by having you practice writing proofs (which are theoretical computer scientists' main tool for verifying a claim and communicating that justification to others). Students sometimes think that because they are unlikely to write proofs in industry jobs that they can take shortcuts in writing proofs, but this view is shortsighted. You can think of reading and writing proofs a bit like lifting weights at the gym with the hope of someday being able to carry all your groceries up to your apartment in one trip. You may not have dreamed of lifting weights all your life, you might not even have to lift weights once you're strong enough to carry your groceries. But right now it will be very beneficial to lift some weights that get progressively heavier until you are comfortable carrying your groceries. If on arriving at the gym you have a robot lift all your weights for you, you wouldn't expect a benefit! In the same way, if you have an AI system write your proofs, you won't learn the skills we're trying to build up in this class.
Specifically, the following uses of AI are prohibited
The following uses of AI are allowed, but are discouraged. The main reason they are discouraged is because they are likely to trip up at least a fraction of the people who try them (and in a class this large, a fraction of the class can be a non-trivial number of people). Many of these tasks would be more reliably done by asking a TA or looking things up in lecture slides or a textbook, even if an AI system might be quicker.
For all of these instances, you are still responsible for the content taught in official resources (if an AI system generates an incorrect example, or an example that uses different style, you're still responsible for learning the correct information and style for this course). AI systems can give these to you fast, but often a TA or an old-fashioned google search might give you something more reliable. If you do use AI systems, please consider these warnings (the first two of these also apply to any other outside resource---say other textbooks---but the issues are worse for AI-generated text)
| What happened? | Is it a violation? |
|---|---|
| While working on a homework problem asking you to prove that, if x is odd, then 5x + 1 is even. Unsure of where to start, you ask Chat-GPT to provide a proof of the claim that, if x is odd, then 7x + 1 is even. | Violation! This is an example of superficially altering a problem - this very close to just asking the AI system to solve the problem for you! |
| 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. |
| While working on a homework problem, you remember that there was a specific example from lecture that would be helpful to reference. To save time, you ask Chat-GPT summarize the content from all of the lecture slides (pasting in links to the pdfs) and search for the example you're looking for. | Violation! This constitutes putting staff-written content into an AI system, which is prohibited. |
| 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). |
| 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. |
| While reviewing for the first midterm exam, you remember mention of 'vacuous truth', but don't recall the exact circumstances where it applies. You ask Chat-GPT what 'vacuous truth' is, and when it applies. | Not a violation! This would be considered a 'purely conceptual question', not directly tied to any graded work in the course. Though we'd encourage you to verify that Chat-GPT's answer is correct! |
| After writing up your answers for a homework problem, you ask Chat-GPT to take your answers and 'polish them up' to ensure you don't miss any of those all-important style points - then submit the 'polished' work that Chat-GPT responds with as your own. | Violation! The work that Chat-GPT answers with is no longer your individual writeup, even if the original prompt included your own work. |
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 unexpected happens or you are worried you may have accidentally violated the policy, please tell us! 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.
Announcements will be made via Ed Discussion Board; important announcements will also be sent to your email (via the discussion board), but you are expected to regularly check the discussion board.
If you need to contact the staff:
We will be recording lectures and posting to panopto so you can keep up/catch back up when you're healthy.
If you think you're in a situation where extra late days or other accommodations might be appropriate, please contact the instructors as soon as possible. Late days are intended to handle "normal" issues during the quarter. In some cases, we are able to offer extra accommodations.
| What's happening? | What can the course staff do when you contact us |
| You have a significant illness: lasting 3+ days or likely to last that long | Depending on the timing, we might be able to give you some extra late days, give you an extension to turn in an assignment beyond the normal late deadline, or "drop" the assignment for you. |
| You have an illness that lasts a day-or-two. | This situation is what your late days are for! We don't give extra late days in this situation, even if your illness hits at an inopportune time. |
| You have a planned family responsibility that's going to take up a substantial amount of time for the two days right before a deadline | This situation is what your late days are for! We don't give extra late days in this situation, even if your family responsibility hits at an inopportune time. |
| You have a family emergency that means you're unexpectedly finding it difficult to work. | Depending on the timing and type of emergency you're dealing with, we might be able to give you some extra late days, give you an extension to turn in an assignment beyond the normal late deadline, or "drop" the assignment for you. |
| You are part of an RSO that is putting on a big event. You'll be focused on that event right around a deadline. | This situation is what your late days are for! We don't give extra late days in this situation, even if some event falls at an inopportune time. |
| Your WiFi cuts out at 11:56 PM as you're uploading to gradescope. Your upload goes through, but at 12:03 AM. | We don't give extra late days; we do have a (secret) grace period when we count late days. That grace period will mean a few minutes to reset your router won't lead to using an extra late day. We will not tell you exactly how long it is though, because we don't want you to treat the end of the grace period as "the real deadline" and then have your router need a reboot. |
| You have (or think you might have) a disability or condition that makes meeting deadlines or taking exams difficult. | We are happy to implement accommodations assigned by UW DRS. We can only implement accommodations like this when assigned by DRS; we recommend you contact them as early as you can in the quarter. |
| Something is happening that isn't covered here. | An email to the instructors or a private post on Ed is a good place to start. We can't list out every possibility, and with 300+ students someone is going to have something happen that we didn't write down a rule for. |
Don't come to an exam if you're sick! Contact the instructors once you know you're too sick to attend (before the exam starts), and we'll schedule a makeup exam for when you're ready to return to campus.
If your illness hits for the final and you cannot take a makeup exam by the end of the week, we may utilize other options like temporarily giving an incomplete until you're well enough to return and take the exam. We will work with you to decide which accommodation is appropriate to your illness. More details are contained in the exam accommodations policy.
Depending on who is sick (and how sick they are) we may find a substitute or convert an in-person meeting to zoom. In extreme circumstances, we may cancel a section or office hour, but we do not expect that to be common. Any such changes will be announced via Ed.
If Miya and/or Robbie has an extended illness, we may switch to zoom lectures for a short time.
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).
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.
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 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 contact the instructors. Only you and the course staff can see a private question on Ed.
Gradescope is the tool to turn in completed assignments (homeworks and concept checks). 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 the first concept check is due.
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.
Please don't message the course staff using Canvas (as we don't use Canvas heavily in this class, messages can easily be missed) - make sure to email or use the Ed discussion board if you want to get in contact with us.
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.
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. In some prior quarters, DRS has become overwhelmed with new requests and were slow to process them. 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.
The midterm exams will be in the evenings (exact time TBD, pending finding room(s)) on these dates.
The final exam will be on Monday December 8th 12:30-2:20 PM. This is a specially-scheduled combined exam (for both sections), which does not match the default schedule.
There are some circumstances for which we offer conflict exams (exams scheduled at different times than the main exam). However we don't offer these for every possible situation (with 300-plus students, logistics limit what we can do).
A "hard" conflict is one which is unavoidable, and which is important enough that it takes precedence over an exam. Generally, these would be important family or academic responsibilities that you cannot reschedule. We will ask you if you have a hard conflict about a week before the exam. Please be sure to fill out the form on-time. If you fill out the form by the deadline with a hard conflict, we guarantee we'll find you a conflict exam (or other appropriate accommodation).
Examples of hard conflicts include
A "soft" conflict, is one which would make it difficult---but not impossible---to attend the main exam. We hope to give conflict exams to students with soft conflicts, but don't guarantee we can do so.
Examples of soft conflicts include
We will tell you before the main exam whether we can accommodate your soft conflict, and the time of the conflict exam.
If you are sick on the day of the exam, we will treat it as a hard conflict. Just let us know (contact the instructors) before the exam starts to let us know you're sick. Similarly, we will accommodate family or other emergencies that come up at the last second. In all cases, please notify the instructors of the situation as soon as you can (and before the exam begins).
There are some things we don't accommodate---in a class of our size, logistics require us to draw a line somewhere. If you have one of these, we expect you to attend the exam at the usual time. Examples of things which don't qualify for a conflict include:
A few days before the exam, everyone who has filled out the conflict form will get an email saying whether we think they have a hard conflict, soft conflict that we can accommodate, or non-conflict.
We schedule conflict exams in phases. We generally have one within a day-or-two of the main exam that we schedule a few days in advance. Once we know everyone who needs a conflict, we will finalize a schedule of conflict exam(s) (we can generally do that scheduling starting the day after the main exam, since we don't have the full list of who was sick until just before the exam happens).
Exams are always scheduled within a week of the main exam. Generally they will be during daytime class hours (8:30-4:30 Monday through Friday), though we may schedule at unusual times if it works better for staff and for the students involved.
In some instances, it isn't possible to make any of the scheduled conflict exams. Extended illness (e.g., contracting COVID shortly before the exam) or an extended family emergency (e.g., death in the family) and similar emergencies sometimes cause this to happen. In such instances, we usually don't offer remote exams.
If a midterm is missed, we may decide to use the other exam grades (other midterm and final exam) to count in place of the missed midterm.
If the final is missed, we may decide to give you an incomplete and take the final exam in the next quarter. Note that incompletes are not guaranteed (in instances where we aren't confident you will pass the course, we might suggest withdrawing instead of taking an incomplete; an incomplete likely won't be converted until the end of next quarter, so if you don't pass the class with that exam, you'd have to retake 311 after that, which can majorly impact your course plan).
We may also offer some other different accommodation if that is more appropriate. In any of these cases, we'll work with you to find something that makes sense.
Washington state law requires that UW develop a policy for accommodation of student absences or significant hardship due to reasons of faith or conscience, or for organized religious activities. The UW's policy, including more information about how to request an accommodation, is available at Religious Accommodations Policy (/staff-faculty/religious-accommodations-policy/). Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form (/students/religious-accommodations-request/).