1 Logistics

1.1 Meetings

In-person lectures will be held Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in CSE2 (Gates Hall) room G20 at 12:30pm-1:20pm and room G10 at 3:30pm-4:20pm.

You should plan on attending the lecture you are registered for, although occasionally attending the other lecture will be fine as long as there is space. Attendance at lecture is strongly encouraged. If you are unable to attend a lecture, both lectures will be recorded (and live streamed) on Panopto and recordings will be posted in Canvas. Slides for lecture will be posted on the course calendar, generally before lecture.

Sections will be held on Thursdays in rooms indicated on the course time schedule. Section attendance is strongly encouraged. You should plan on attending the section you are registered for. Occasionally attending another section should be fine as long as there is space. If you do this, please ask permission from the leading TA(s) and let them know you are present. Slides, and handouts for section will be posted on the course calendar. Sections will NOT be recorded as we want students to feel comfortable asking and answering questions in the smaller classroom environment.

Office Hours will be held throughout the week both in person and on Zoom. You may attend the office hours of any staff member, not just the TA who leads your section. A schedule of office hours and more information can be found on the office hours page.

Both A and B sections of the course will share the same assignments, deadlines, TA office hours, etc. I will do my best to cover the same content in lectures on the same days, but there may be occasional drift.

1.2 Contact

Info	Instructor	TAs
Name	Ruth Anderson	Profiles
Location	Allen Center (CSE) 558 and on zoom	See Calendar
Office Hours	M 1:30pm-2:30, W 4:30pm-5:30 or by Appointment	See Calendar
Email	rea@cs.washington.edu	use Ed Discussion Board

For communication about course content, the Ed Discussion Board is preferred to email. For communication about personal circumstances, email to Ruth Anderson is preferred. If you email, include CSE 332 in the subject line to prevent your email from skipping my inbox and never getting read.

Our TAs are students too, with duties and work outside of their TAing. Please do not ask them to act as your TA except in section or at the scheduled times they have listed as their office hours. They are also kind people; please don’t put them in the position of having to say no or (worse) being nice to you at the expense of their own schooling.

1.3 Readings

(Optional) Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in Java 3rd Ed., Mark Allen Weiss, Addison Wesley: 2012, ISBN-10: 0132576279. Our course calendar will list sections of the textbook that are most relevant to the topic discussed in class that day. You may find the textbook useful to clarify topics and find more examples as well as to examine Java implementations of the data structures and algorithms discussed during lecture. We will not be assigning problems from the textbook. A copy of the textbook is available at the Odegaard Library Reserves Desk. A copy of the second edition of the text will also work for most of the material we will cover. We will use a set of free on-line notes for the material on parallelism and concurrency.

1.4 Assessments

Your learning in the course will be assessed via individual exercises, an in-person midterm exam, and an in-person cumulative final exam. We will also have a few surveys and other in-person activities that will contribute to a participation portion of your grade.

• Exercises: There will be a total of 13 individual exercises, which you will complete individually. These are intended to help you to gain experience and familiarity with course concepts by applying them to novel scenarios beyond those presented in lecture and section. These will sometimes be written assignments, but many will be programming tasks (perhaps paired with written activities). You will have at least one exercise due per week. Several weeks will have two exercises due. In all cases the exercises will be released as soon as you can reasonably begin making progress on them, and you will have roughly one week to complete them.

• Exams: There will be an in-person midterm and an in-person cumulative final exam. These are intended to evaluate the quality of your learning of the most important topics in the course, and to motivate you to study, review, and retroactively reflect upon all that you’ve learned. The midterm exam is set for Monday November 9, 2026 5:00-6:00pm in SMI 120 and SMI 205. The final exam will be Thursday December 17, 2026 12:30-2:20pm in BAG 131 and BAG 154. More information about the midterm and final exam will be posted on the exams page.

1.5 Participation Activities

A small part of your grade will be determined by your participation in various parts of the course. These include:

• Completing course Surveys: We will have 2-3 of these in total.
• Meet the staff: Attending one staff office hour (in person or on zoom) during the first four weeks of the quarter.
• In class activities: Participating in activities, in person, during lectures. There will be an activity most but not all lectures, and participating in at least 10 of these is enough to get full credit for this portion of your participation grade.

1.6 Late Policy

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

An exception is made for weekends, which count as a single late day. That is, if an exercise is due at 11:59 pm on Friday, submitting before Sunday at 11:59 pm counts as using only ONE late day (submitting by 11:59 pm on Monday would count as using TWO late days).

Regardless of how many late days you have, you cannot submit an exercise more than 2 days after it is due without prior permission from course staff.

If you run out of late days, you may still turn in an exercise late, at a penalty of 10% per day (but still may not turn in an exercise after the 2 day-late-deadline without prior permission from the course staff).

At the end of the quarter, we will apply late days to the first exercises turned in late, and late penalties to any remaining late submissions. Late penalties are applied before dropping exercises.

Late days are intended to help you manage your time and unexpected life circumstances; please save them for this purpose! Leftover late days will not contribute to your grade in any way. If there are extenuating circumstances that prevent you from submitting an exercise on time, you should discuss this with the instructor (preferably in advance).

2 Grading

Course grades will be computed approximately as follows (weights may be modified):

Task	Weight	Comments
Exercises	42%	13 total, each worth the same amount, with the lowest exercise (other than EX121) being dropped.
Participation	3%	Surveys, Meet the staff, In class activities
Exams	55%	A midterm (counting for 20%) and a cumulative final exam (counting for 35%).

2.1 Gradepoint Guarantee

To help you to keep track of your standing in the course and to interpret grades as they are returned, we will provide the following Gradepoint Guarantees. If your score in the course using the weighted average above is at or above the thresholds below, we guarantee you will receive a course GPA that is at least the amount shown. At the end of the quarter we may adjust these thresholds in order to maintain consistent grading with past offerings of the course, but we guarantee we will only relax them. That is, your final GPA may possibly be higher than those given, but will definitely not be lower.

If your grade is	Then your course GPA will be
≥92%	≥3.5
≥85%	≥3.0
≥65%	≥2.0

2.2 Regrades

We acknowledge that professors and TAs are people (glad to get that confession off of my chest!), and people make mistakes. For this reason, you are able to request regrades on exercises and exams within one week of your grade being returned.

Please only submit a regrade request if you believe the rubric was misapplied to your submission or if there was a keying error for the task. In the case of a misapplication of the rubric, identify specifically what in your submission demonstrates the misapplication and suggest how you believe the rubric should be correctly applied. In the case of a keying error, state and justify why you believe your answer should be considered correct. Rubrics are produced and revised throughout the grading process to ensure they reflect the learning objectives of the course and can be applied equitably to all submissions. As such, disagreement with the existence or weighting of a rubric item is not considered a valid reason for a regrade request.

3 Miscellanea

3.1 Professionalism

Behave professionally.

Never abuse anyone, including the emotional abuse of blaming others for your mistakes. Kindness is more important than correctness.

Let our TAs be students when they are not on the clock as TAs.

Lack of professionalism has an overall detrimental impact on our community of learning.

3.2 Honesty

I always hope everyone will behave honestly. I know we all are sometimes tempted by the easy path that dishonesty can enable; if you do something you regret, the sooner you tell me the sooner (and more leniently) we can correct it.

3.2.1 No plagiarism (nor anything like it)

For Exercises (graded work) you may use external materials with the following restrictions:

• You must attempt each task individually first, you should not consult other resources until you are stuck.
• You must understand everything you submit. Do not submit anything you could not explain to a member of the course staff.
• You may not collaborate or seek help from any interactive source except for members of the course staff or other currently-enrolled CSE332 students (this means you may not seek assistance from former CSE332 students, online forums like Chegg or Stackoverflow, or generative AI systems like Chat-GPT or CoPilot).
• You must cite any and every source you consult beyond officially-provided materials (i.e. the optional course textbook, the course webpage, the course staff, or any resources provided through official course channels). Included in your citation, you must identify which components of your submission came from each source (it will be understood that content with no citation is your own exclusive work). Your collaborators are considered to be sources, and so should be cited. An example citation might look like: I collaborated with Brett Wortzman on the implementation of the peek method, I consulted for help with java print syntax, Miya Natsuhara helped me to debug the for loop that begins on line 107 of my code.
• All collaborations with classmates must be whiteboard only (defined below).
• Do not seek hints or entire solutions to the problems. Limit your searching to background information only. (For example, do not consult a GitHub repository posted by a former student.)

3.2.1.1 Whiteboard Only Collaboration

Whiteboard Only collaboration is meant to convey the type of discussion where participants gather around a whiteboard to solve a problem together, without taking any notes from their discussion, and then erasing the whiteboard before they disperse.

In particular, you may discuss tasks and their solutions, but the only thing you may take away from your discussion is your brain. This means you may not produce any records or artifacts from your collaborations, including: notes, screenshots, photos, figures, code, audio/video recordings, documents (including google docs), links, or any other digital or tangible thing. Nor may you share any files, links, etc. with other students outside of a collaboration session. Any substantially similar expression of the same solution can only occur if collaboration extends beyond whiteboard only, and so will be considered as evidence of a policy violation.

3.2.2 Course AI Policy: AI as a Reference Tool

In this course we will follow the Allen School’s AI as a Reference Tool Policy. AI may help with general questions and ungraded work, but not graded assignments or assessments. Please read the full policy linked above and ask if you have questions about how the policy applies in CSE 332.

3.3 Personal accommodations

3.3.1 Disability Resources

The University of Washington strives to provide accessibility to all students. If you require an accommodation to fully access this course, please work with the Disability Resources for Students (DRS). If you are unsure if you require an accommodation, or to learn more about their services, begin by visiting the DRS website. For this course, we ask that students with special circumstances let us know as soon as possible, preferably during the first week of class or as soon as accommodations are approved.

3.3.2 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. Accommodations must be requested within the first two weeks of this course using the Religious Accommodations Request form.

3.3.3 Extenuating Circumstances

We recognize that our students come from varied backgrounds and can have widely-varying circumstances. If you have any unforeseen or extenuating circumstance that arise during the course, please do not hesitate to contact the instructor in office hours, via email, or private message board post to discuss your situation. The sooner we are made aware, the more easily these situations can be resolved. Extenuating circumstances include work-school balance, familial responsibilities, military duties, unexpected travel, or anything else beyond your control that may negatively impact your performance in the class.

Additionally, if at any point you are made to feel uncomfortable, disrespected, or excluded by a staff member or fellow student, please report the incident so that we may address the issue and maintain a supportive and inclusive learning environment. Should you feel uncomfortable bringing up an issue with a me or another staff member directly, you may consider contacting the Office of the Ombud.

3.3.4 Life

If you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or isolated, there are many individuals here who are ready and wanting to help. In the Allen School you may set up a meeting with John Rumney. The University of Washington also provides many resources. The Counseling Center offers short-term counseling for students and crisis service for urgent situations. Call 206-543-1240 to get started and schedule an appointment. There are many resources for 24-hour support as well. The Husky HelpLine provides 24-7 support in multiple languages (call (206) 616-7777).