By the end of this course, you will be able to:
The course is designed with "formative" and "summative" assessments. Formative assessments are aimed at practice. That is, they are supposed to form skills in you. Formative assessments include grades and feedback, but the goal is to learn. Taking shortcuts on formative assessments might not have a grade impact immediately, but shortcuts mean you won't have the needed skills formed when you get to summative assessments (the exams).
For each lecture, there will be a small gradescope quiz reviewing the concepts covered in that lecture. The material in this course builds on itself quickly: concept checks are a good way for you to detect misconceptions and ask questions early. Concept checks are due the morning of the next lecture. For example, a concept check released on Wednesday will be due Friday morning (note that it is due in the morning, even if you attend the afternoon lecture).
Because the goal of concept checks is practice, we count them differently in the gradebook. At the end of the quarter, we will add together your points on all concept checks. Your `average' on concept checks will be min{1, points earned / (.8*points possible)}. That is, getting 80% of the points on concept checks is enough to get full-credit (and you cannot get extra credit by getting a higher score).
The goal is to make these assignments a low-stakes way to get quick feedback on what you don't understand.
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 record everyone who came to section and participated. "Participated" doesn't mean you ever have to get questions correct, or even say something out loud for the whole class. It means you're working on the problems, 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. Each week, the problems to do will be posted on the course calendar for the day of the section. Attempts at the problems must be written and emailed to the TA(s) for your section by Sunday at 11:59 PM following the section. More logistical details will be posted on Ed.
There will be 9 sections during the quarter where we count participation (the final week's section will be a slot for second-chance quizzes, see below). Your section participation grade will be: min(8,number-participated)/8. I.e., you can miss one section without penalty (and without doing the replacement problems), but you do not get extra credit for participating in more than 8.
There will be approximately eight week-long homeworks.
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.
At the end of the quarter, we will add together all points you earned on the homeworks and divide that by the total number of points possible to get your homework average.
We will have 4 quizzes in lecture. The goal of quizzes is to start bridging you from formative assessments to summative. By the time you're taking a quiz, you will have had multiple chances to gain skills (concept checks, section, homework), and should be ready to do problems on your own and with time constraints. If you are ready, you'll do well on the quizzes and are on pace to be ready for the exams. If you haven't solidified those skills yet, the quizzes will help you realize that before you get to the exams.
Quiz dates will appear on the calendar by the start of week 2 of the quarter.
We will drop the lowest of your four quizzes.
Quizzes will last 20 minutes; we will have a short break and then start regular lecture (for the last 25 minutes or so).
We will have an in-person midterm the evening of Monday November 3rd. Exact time and location will be announced once room reservations are confirmed.
Since this exam is being offered outside of "normal" class hours, we will offer conflict exams for immovable important conflicts (that would include things like other class meetings and job responsibilities); we might not offer a conflict exam if your conflict is moveable or optional (e.g., a regular meeting of an RSO). See more details in the Exam Conflicts and Absences section. We will send out a form to request a conflict exam a few weeks before the midterm.
We will have an in-person final exam. The exam will be Wednesday December 10th from 8:30-10:20 AM.
We will offer conflict exams for the final for students taking a course with a final exam in the same slot. Note that conflict exams are often toward the end of finals week, and therefore may affect travel plans if you plan to request one.
Please note that we cannot offer conflict exams early. Students unable to be on campus for finals week (e.g., due to an early internship start date) should plan to take the course another quarter.
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.
Sometimes assessments in the middle of the quarter don't show us what you know at the end of the quarter. Maybe you just had a bad day when the exam happened, maybe the concepts took a little longer to click.
We will offer a "second chance" to try the midterm and (some of) the quizzes at the end of the quarter to try to compensate for those effects.
In all cases, your exam grade will be MAX( first-attempt, MIN(second-attempt, 90%)). I.e., you cannot score higher than 90% on the second-chance exam, but otherwise we take the higher of your two scores.
The second chance midterm will be in the evening of Monday December 1st
The second chance quizzes will be in section on Thursday December 4th. You will be able to retake up to two quizzes (of your choice) in that section.
The second chance exams are optional---if you're happy with your initial grade, you can just skip them.
Your course average will be a combination of your scores on assessments. 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. That is, 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. 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 |
|---|---|
| 90% | 3.5 |
| 80% | 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 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. Depending on the situation, extra late days, dropping assignments, or other accommodations may be appropriate. The earlier you contact us, the more options we will have available.
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. If you are found responsible for violating the policy, the usual penalty is a 0 on the relevant assignment; additionally, if the assignment is one which could be dropped or retaken for an improved grade, students found responsible for violating the policy will not be allowed to drop that grade or use another examination in its place (that is, the 0 will "count").
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! Even if you end up with identical formulas (you often will), you will still show work differently and explain in different words.
You may ask other people you know (e.g., friends who have already taken 312) 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.
Specifically, the following uses of AI are prohibited
The rules above apply to both programming and non-programming questions.
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? | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 you need to divide by 3! in your calculation. You immediately add that to your writeup. | Violation! That is no longer your individual writeup. | |
| You and a friend separately write up solutions, then compare. Your friend suggests that you need to divide by 3! in your calculation. You wait 30 minutes, then return to your writeup. You see that you do need to divide by 3! and update your solution. | Not a violation! Updates based on conversation are fine, as long as you understand why you are making the change. Part of the reason for waiting 30 minutes and having you include an explanation is to create a check for whether you do understand; if you can't write that explanation after a break, you probably didn't actually learn. An even more accurate test of whether you learned would be if you can explain why the 3! is there a week from now (though that's probably after you've turned in the assignment, so isn't practical). | |
| 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). | |
| 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. | |
| 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.
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:
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.
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 email the instructor. Only you and the course staff can see a private question on Ed.
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 Concept Check 1 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.
Late days are intended to handle "normal" issues during the quarter. Additional accommodations (e.g. extra late days or longer extensions on specific assignments) may be possible if you have an extended illness. Contact Robbie as soon as possible if your illness is severe or extends for a long period.
We will be recording lectures and posting to panopto so you can keep up/catch back up when you're healthy.
Don't come to a quiz if you're sick! Contact Robbie and Parker (TA in charge of makeup exam logistics), and we'll schedule a makeup quiz for you.
Quizzes can only be rescheduled for illnesses, emergencies, or things outside your control (e.g., getting in a car accident on the way to campus). If you miss a quiz without a valid reason, that quiz will just be a 0 (though as long as you only do that once, it will be dropped; or it could be a quiz you take the second chance for).
If you're sick for an extended period (and as a result you still aren't able to take a makeup when we're ready to give grades to the rest of the class), we may consider other options (e.g., using an exam grade to also count as the missed quiz).
Don't come to the exam if you're sick! Contact Robbie and Parker (TA in charge of makeup exam logistics), once you know you're too sick to attend, and we'll schedule a makeup exam for when you're ready to return to campus.
If you're sick for an extended period (and as a result you still aren't able to take a makeup when we're ready to give grades to the rest of the class), we may consider other options (e.g., using a second chance exam score instead); if it's the final you're sick for, sometimes an Incomplete is appropriate, but incompletes are only given for students who are solidly on-track to pass (For students not solidly on-track to pass, often withdrawing from the course is a better option, but we'll talk to you and suggest you talk to advising if you're in that scenario).
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 Robbie has an extended illness, we may find a substitute or switch to zoom lectures for a short time.
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.
This section describes how we run conflict and makeup exams---that is, exams for when students can't attend an exam for a good reason (e.g., you were too sick to make it, or had another exam at the same time). Don't confuse this with the "second chance" midterm and quizzes. "Second chance" is open to everyone as a way to demonstrate you have improved over the course of the quarter; makeups are only for people who had an excused absence from an exam.
We will have a form before each quiz to request a conflict quiz. For quizzes, these will only be granted for limited reasons (like illnesses and unexpected family responsibilities).
We will schedule makeup quizzes (e.g. due to illnesses) within a week of the original quiz.
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 a large class, 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 (send an email to Robbie) 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 Robbie 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:
Because second chance exams are optional, and so close to the end of the quarter, we will limit makeups for them. Makeups will be offered at limited time slot(s). To manage logistics, we may be more restrictive on soft conflicts for the second chance exams than we are for the main exams.
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 or makeup 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.
For quizzes and the midterm, if you cannot attend any scheduled makeups within a week, we would use the corresponding second-chance exam to replace your main exam score. In this case, it would count as your first attempt, so it would not have the 90% cap, but you would not have an additional second chance exam. For logistical reasons, in the case of a quiz, this would have to be one of the two that you take in the second-chance slot (you could not take a third as a result).
If you cannot makeup an exam during the main week or the second-chance exams, we might use another exam score as a replacement (e.g., use your final exam to count in place of the midterm grade), but in this scenario, you've had two extended illnesses (or other emergencies) in just 10 weeks, so it's possible you will want or need to withdraw from the course instead---we'd talk about what your options are in this case.
If the final is missed, we may decide to give you an incomplete and take the final exam in the next quarter. Note that we only offer this accommodation when you meet the university listed requirements and we are confident you'll pass the course; if that's not certain, students are usually better off withdrawing from the course (though you should discuss your options with the advising staff before making a decision).
We may also reach some other different accommodation when that is more appropriate. In any of these cases, we'll work with you to find something that makes sense.