Syllabus

Course Goals

• Read and write statements involving combinatorics and probability (including conditioning and both discrete and continuous probabilities).
• Model situations with appropriate probability tools (including standard random variables).
• Calculate and estimate probabilities using standard tools (including Bayes Rule, the Central Limit Theorem, and concentration inequalities).
• Understand and use discrete, continuous, and multi-variable probability distributions.
• Write short Python programs to simulate simple random processes.

Assessments

Grades will be based off homework assignments, concept checks, a midterm, and a final. There will also be an opportunity for a small amount of extra credit.

The course is designed with "formative" and "summative" assessments. Formative assessments (concept checks and problem sets) 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).

Concept Checks

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 at 9am on the morning of the next lecture. For example, a concept check released on Wednesday will be due Friday morning at 9am (note that it is due in the morning). We highly recommend doing the concept check as quickly as possible after class.

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). Note that we will not accept late concept checks.

Section Participation

This course is designed to introduce concepts in lectures and give you practice with them in sections. As a result, participating in sections and trying the problems associated with each section is extremely important for success in the course. It will be your loss if you miss attending a section, but we are not assigning grades or extra credit to section participation this quarter.

Homework

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.

Midterm

We will have an in-person midterm. The midterm will be held from 6-7:30pm on Thursday, May 18 (though the exam will be designed to take less than one hour). Exact 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 are unlikely to 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.

Final

We will have an in-person final exam on Wednesday, June 10 from 8:30am-10:20am.

Regrade Requests

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.

Regrade timing

• Regrades will be submitted on gradescope. We will open regrade requests approximately 24 hours after scores and feedback is released, and will remain open for at least 72 hours (except for the last homework and final exam, where grade submission deadlines will limit the amount of time we have---even for these assignments, we will have a window to request regrades, just a shorter one).
• Regrade requests should address the TA feedback and your solution, e.g., "The feedback says my formula is incorrect, but my formula is actually equivalent to the one listed in the solution."
• Please remember that people are reading your regrade requests so you should phrase your regrade requests professionally and respectfully.

Regrade appeals

• TAs will respond via gradescope to regrade requests when they can. Note that this is frequently weeks after a regrade is filed, as TAs are grading the next homework by the time all regrade requests are filed.
• If you wish to appeal a regrade request (because the TA has responded to your request, but you still believe your answer is correct) or you miss the regrade window but still want a regrade, contact Anna (either via private Ed post or email).
• Appeal and late regrades are only granted for clear errors (e.g., your calculation was correct even though a TA marked it incorrect). We do not alter rubrics, switch which rubric item was applied, or change any "judgement calls" at this stage.

Getting help and the 312 Learning Assistant

There are several ways to get help in this class:

• Ask questions in class
• Ask questions on EdStem (our discussion board)
• Come to office hours
• Use our CSE 312 Learning Assistant

The CSE 312 Learning Assistant (312 GPT)

This course provides an AI learning assistant (a custom 312 GPT, linked to at the top of this page) that works like a teaching assistant available 24/7. It can help explain the concepts we are teaching you, walk through section worksheet solutions, generate extra practice problems, and give hints if you are stuck on homework. It will have access to the lecture slides, the section worksheets and the problem sets, so you can refer directly to those when asking questions.

Like a human TA, the assistant will guide your reasoning rather than provide solutions to graded homework problems.

Good ways to use the assistant include:

• asking for conceptual explanations
• understanding solutions to section problems
• checking whether your reasoning makes sense
• getting additional practice problems
• debugging Python and LaTex

You can ask the assistant questions liked "Help me understand the law of total probability", or "Here is how I'm thinking about this problem so far... Does my approach make sense? What should I think about next?" or "I don't understand this part of the solution to Section 3, problem 5." or "Can you explain the reasoning behind such and such?".

Bottom line: The assistant is most helpful when you show your reasoning rather than asking for a final answer.

The assistant will not provide answers or solutions to graded homework problems, but it will be able to give you hints if you are stuck (just like a TA would).

Some final important notes:

• Your interactions with the assistant are not visible to anyone, including the instructor or TAs in this course. We may see aggregate information about how the tool is being used (such as overall usage levels or general patterns in the types of questions students ask), but this information is not tied to individual students.
• Like any AI system, our 312 Learning Assistant may occasionally make mistakes, so you should always think critically about the explanations it provides. If something seems confusing or incorrect, please bring it to office hours or post to Edstem.
• If you find the assistant helpful or confusing, we welcome your feedback.

Assigning course grades

Course Average

Your course average will be a combination of your scores on assessments. We will weight those categories approximately as follows:

• Concept Checks 15%
• Homework 35%
• Midterm 10-20%
• Final Exam 30-40%

The ranges in the midterm and final exam are adjusted by individual student: if the final exam grade shows improvement over the midterm grade, we put more weight on the final (and if the midterm is stronger, we put more weight on the midterm). It might help to think of the midterm as being worth 20%, the final exam as 30%, but know that improvement on the final causes us to move weight from midterm to final exam.

Extra credit is incorporated after we have set the grade breaks according to the weights above. The main opportunity for extra credit will be if you are helpful in responding to questions on edstem (and your responses are correct). Extra credit has a minimal effect on grades (changing GPAs by 0.1 or less).

Grade guarantees

Although we have "curved" the grades in the past, what we have found is that students often get very high grades on the homework, but are unable to back that performance up on tests, in some cases, to an extreme degree.

Therefore, this quarter, we will putting more weight on the tests. However, we will also try to make the tests easier than they were in previous quarters. In particular, 50% of each test will be questions at the level of difficulty of concept checks and the section "content review" questions. 40% of each test will be questions that are very similar to, but easier (and faster to do) than homework and section problems. In particular, they will be such that if you understand how to do the homework problems and the section problems, you should have no trouble solving them on the tests. 10% of the questions will be slightly more challenging. We will also design the tests so as to minimize time pressure.

With all that in mind, the following table provides you with a grade guarantee. In particular, if you meet all of the requirements in a row, 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 below. In the event that exams or homeworks (or both) turn out more difficult than intended, we may make grades higher than indicated here (by making these requirements less strict), but we will not make them less generous.

At the end of the quarter, we decide on the course average requirements for every grade break (the minimum for 4.0, 3.9, 3.8,...,2.0, and some below that), and the minimums for course average and test average for the key gradebreaks listed above (3.5, 3.0, 2.0). You will then get the highest grade for which you meet all of the requirements.

Late Policy

Homeworks

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

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

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

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

Lastly, please do not submit a homework at 12:05am on Thursday and ask for it not to count for a late day. Just plan on gettting it in on time!

Concept Checks

You may not use late days on concept checks during the normal quarter.

Other accommodations

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, the staff can consider whether any other accommodations are appropriate or available.

Academic Integrity

We want to make sure that you fully understand and internalize the approach to the materials. So, we take academic integrity very seriously. We refer violations of our policies to the Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct. Penalties, if you are found responsible for violating the policy, are described at the end of this section.

If we suspect but are not sure about a violation of academic integrity on a problem set, we will probably ask you to come meet with the instructor to orally explain and defend the solutions you submitted. If you cannot explain why a step was taken, you will get 0 points for that problem.

Collaboration (with classmates and other people)

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:

• Do not take away any notes or screenshots during your discussion.
• Take a 30 minute break between discussing the problem and writing down your solution
• Write up your solution individually. Once your assignment is written up, you must not let others see your solutions.
• List the names of all of your collaborators in the feedback problem on the homework.

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.

Resources Outside of CSE 312

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

• You may not look at solutions to homeworks from prior quarters, nor share homework solutions from this quarter with others after this quarter.
• Definitions and terminology can differ significantly (and in subtle ways) depending on the author. Be careful that other resources are saying what you think they are saying.
• You may not search with the intent of finding a solution to the homework problem we've given you (or one that is essentially identical, say by just swapping out numbers). This provision also applies to asking human collaborators about completed solutions and to AI systems other than our 312 Learning Assistant.
• You may not use commercial tutoring resources like Chegg for the problems we ask, nor post our materials or your answers to those websites.
• You may not publicly post your solutions, even after the course is over.

Artificial Intelligence tools (Chat-GPT, Gemini, etc) other than the 312 GPT

The use of AI tools other than the course-approved GPT is strictly prohibited. This includes for studying or learning/clarifying concepts. This is because other generative AI do not have the contextuality of the course and will likely not align with the primary objective: your learning. The course approved GPT has been designed with the contextuality of this course in mind and will assist you better. Still it is not a replacement for in-person interaction with the instructor or TAs.

You are allowed to use the course approved GPT for any conceptual question related to the course material or for answering questions about section problems any time. Ask questions related to a problem on a problem set only after you have (a) worked on the problem for ~30 minutes by yourself or with fellow students or (b) you have met with the instructor or TA of the course for assistance on the problem and have sufficiently ruminated on their assistance.

Academic Integrity Sample Scenarios

Default Penalty

Concluding Thoughts

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 (and therefore will not report a case to CSSC) if you tell us about it before turning in the assignment.

Office Hours

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 as of mid-week 1 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:

• We won't "pre-grade" your answer at office hours. We won't say "that's correct" or "you'd get 3/5 if you submitted that right now" or anything to that effect. TAs might instead ask if you have a specific conceptual question they can answer, or a specific part of your answer you'd like to focus on, or remind you of general course policies (like "it's ok to cite a theorem proven in class, you don't have to reprove it").
• We won't just give you a hint if you ask "can I have a hint?" Usually, if you find yourself wanting a hint, it means you're stuck on a core part of the problem, where you'll learn by getting yourself unstuck. If you find yourself wanting a hint, still come to office hours! Staff are very happy to help---just expect that help to come in the form of questions "what have you tried so far? Have you compared to problem 3 from this week's section? Have you used all the information given to you in the problem?" and so on, until you find the hint you've needed. The 312 GPT will do the same thing.

Course Tools

Zoom

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

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

Ed

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

We will happily answer questions from lecture or about general concepts. We also will answer clarifications about homework (e.g. correcting typos). Students are encouraged to answer each other's questions on the message board as well. In fact, there will be some opportunity for a small amount of extra credit if you are one of the top 20 answerers of questions on Ed!

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

Gradescope

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

You will get an automatic email with account setup instructions before Concept Check 1 is due.

Canvas

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

Illness/Absence Policies

What happens if I get sick?

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 Anna 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.

What if I get sick right before a quiz or exam?

Don't come to an exam if you're sick! Contact Anna, and we'll schedule a makeup for you. More information on that process is in the next section of the syllabus.

What happens if a staff member gets sick?

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 Anna has an extended illness, we may find a substitute or switch to zoom lectures for a short time.

Exam Conflicts and Absences

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).

Midterm and Final Exam Conflicts

There are some circumstances for which we may offer conflict exams. However we don't offer these for every possible situation (with a large class, logistics limit what we can do).

"Hard" conflicts, known in advance

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 two weeks 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 should be able to find you an appropriate accommodation.

Examples of hard conflicts include

• A regularly-scheduled course meeting for another course (e.g., if you're taking an evening class that overlaps with the midterm).
• A work shift for a job (though we do ask that you try to swap shifts or otherwise find someone to cover for you if that is possible).
• Caretaking responsibilities for a family member (though we do ask that you try to arrange your schedule to attend the main exam, if that is possible).

"Soft" conflicts, known in advance

A "soft" conflict, is one which would make it difficult---but not impossible---to attend the main exam. We are unlikely to be able to give conflict exams to students with soft conflicts, but will try if possible.

Examples of soft conflicts include

• Having a very long commute that is difficult at night (for an evening exam).
• Having another exam across campus immediately after our exam (more likely for the final).
• Something that would usually be a hard conflict, but you tell us about after the deadline to fill out the form.

We will tell you before the main exam whether we can accommodate your soft conflict, and the time of the conflict exam.

Conflicts due to illness or emergency

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 Anna) 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 Anna of the situation as soon as you can (and before the exam begins).

Non-conflicts

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:

• Meeting of an RSO
• Travel (unless a family emergency or responsibility is involved). Travel for break or for the start of an internship are things we usually can't accommodate.
• Having multiple midterm or final exams on the same day (where you can physically attend all of them); UW rules specifically do not limit the number of exams you take in a day (see the last clause of rule 4 under this university policy)

Other exam accommodations

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.

If you cannot make up the midterm during the main sitting or its makeups, we might use your score on the final as a replacement (e.g., use your final exam to count in place of the midterm grade).

If the final is missed, we may decide to give you an incomplete and have you 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.

Accommodations

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.

Health, disability, and similar accommodations

If you have, or think you may have, a temporary health condition or permanent disability, contact Disability Resources for Students (DRS) to get started with accommodations. 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.

Religious Accommodations

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 Accomodations Request form on that page.