By the end of this course, you will be able to:
There will be approximately seven 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.
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 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 (and without doing the replacement problems), but you do not get extra credit for participating in more than 9. Sections with quizzes will still have time for a problem or two of practice after the quiz, and so will count for participation like the others.
We will have an in-person midterm the evening of Wednesday February 19th. 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). 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 combined exam will be Monday March 17th from 12:30-2:20 PM.
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.
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 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 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 |
|---|---|
| 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 may refer violations of our policies to the Office of Academic Affairs.
You are allowed (and encouraged!) to discuss homework problems with other students, as long as you:
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.
You are strongly encouraged to seek out resources beyond official course resources, with the following caveats:
You may not utilize artificial intelligence or machine learning systems (e.g., Chat-GPT) on any assignments (including homeworks and concept checks). That means you may not plug the homework problems into these systems (even if you later put the response in your own words), nor can you put a draft submission into the system to use the system for editing purposes.
There are a variety of reasons for this policy
| 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 a permutation to a combination in your final answer. You wait 30 minutes, then return to your writeup, decide the changes would be improvements, and incorporate them. | Not a violation! Minor rewordings and technical changes done by you after discussion (and a break!) 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). |
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 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.
Remember to follow the university policies (which include rules on reporting positive tests if you've been on campus, restrictions on when you can return to campus, and some times when masking may be required for you, even if not for everyone).
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 your TA(s) once you know you're too sick to attend, and we'll schedule a makeup quiz for you.
Don't come to the exam if you're sick! Contact Robbie 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.
Lectures will be recorded; we won't track in-person attendance for lectures.
If you have a health condition (mental or physical) that means you should not be in a large lecture hall, you should contact DRS (see Accomodations) to investigate accommodations.
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 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.
Quizzes will be given in regularly-scheduled discussion sections. Except in cases of illness or other emergencies, students are expected to be able to attend their officially-registered section for quizzes.
We will have a form before each quiz to request switching times or 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 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 (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:
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 the midterm is missed, we may decide to use the final exam grade to count in place of the midterm (and still count for the final exam portion of the grade).
If the final is missed, we may decide to give you an incomplete and take the final exam in the next quarter.
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.