1 Logistics
1.1 Meetings
In Person lectures will be held Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in SIG (Sieg Hall) room 134 at 9:40am-10:40am.
Lecture attendance is optional, but definitely encouraged. In the event you are unable to attend a lecture, recordings of lectures are automatically posted to Canvas under the Panopto tool.
1.2 Contact
| Info | Instructor | TAs |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Michael Whitmeyer | Profiles |
| Location | Allen Center (CSE) 216 | See Calendar |
| Office Hours | WF 10:50am-11:50am or By Appointment | See Calendar |
| mdwhit@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 Michael Whitmeyer is preferred. If you email, include either CSE 332
or 332
in the subject line to prevent your email from skipping my inbox and never getting read.
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. We will use a set of free online notes for the material on parallelism and concurrency. Over the last few quarters we have also been developing topic summaries which will hopefully eventually replace the textbook.
1.4 Lectures
I will be trying my best to make lectures valuable for as many students as possible! For a schedule of lecture topics, please see the calendar. I will make a best effort to post all lecture materials (recordings, slides documents, etc.) on the course webpage, including video recordings of lectures. Be advised that there are occasional technical difficulties which sometimes cause the recordings to fail.
1.5 Tasks
All assignments will be posted and submitted either in class (for exams) or on Gradescope. All grading will be conducted on Gradescope. You will be asked to perform three kinds of evaluations:
- Exercises: These will sometimes be written assignments and sometimes 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 you will have roughly one week to complete them.
- Concept Checks: These are intended to help you to identify conceptual gaps or misconceptions on course content early so that they may more easily be corrected. Each concept check will relate to just one course topic. Each course topic may be covered in one or across several lectures. Each concept check is due on the first Friday after we finish discussing the topic in lecture. For example, if we finish discussing a concept on a Friday, the concept check for that topic will be due on the following Friday, but if we finish a topic on Wednesday, the concept check will be due in two days. The intention is that you are able to attempt the concept check, then ask questions in section before the deadline.
- Exams: These are timed and proctored in-person and close-resource exams. Lists of topics and links to past exams will be provided in advance of each exam.
2 Grading
We will consider the grade assigned by the following weighted average (of percentages) to be a guideline for calculating grades.
| Task | Weight | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Exercises | 31% | There will be 13 total (weighted equally) with the lowest two exercise grades being dropped. |
| Concept Checks | 4% | There will be 17 total, each counting for 0.25%, with the lowest two being dropped. |
| Exams | 65% | There will be 2 total, a midterm (counting for 25%) and a cumulative final exam (counting for 40%). |
This numerical calculation is to be considered a guideline on your score in the course. Final grades may take other factors into account so that your grade is the most accurate reflection of your understanding of course materials.
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 Deadlines
To facilitate timely feedback, exercises will not be accepted late. That being said, we will consider any request for a deadline extension.
To submit an extension request, fill out this google form, providing either:
- The hardship experienced (a high-level description like
ER visit
is fine, details are unnecessary), as well as the approximate amount of time lost due to the hardship and a suggested replacement deadline. - A description of when you started the assignment, how much progress you’ve made, where you’ve gotten stuck, and a suggested replacement deadline.
To ensure that we can respond to these requests before the deadline, please submit the requests no later than 24 hours before the deadline whenever possible. Requests made after this time should include additional justification for why the request was delayed.
2.3 Regrades
Mistakes when grading happen. For this reason, you are able to request regrades on exercises and the midterm within either one week of your grade being returned or August 21, whichever date is sooner. You will only have 24 hours to submit regrade requests for the final exam.
Please only submit a regrade request if you believe the rubric was misapplied to your submission or if you believe the answer key is incorrect somehow. 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/people 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 and Programming Projects 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.
3.3 Personal accommodations
3.3.1 Special Circumstances
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.
We have some standard practices for certain DRS accommodations. When you reach out it will be helpful if you can let us know whether these practices satisfy your accommodation needs:
- Alternative Testing: students with any kind of alternative testing accommodation (e.g. extra time, reduced distraction environment, breaks excluded from timing, typed answers) should plan to take all proctored assessments at the DRS facility.
- Flexible Deadlines: For deadline flexibility, follow the standard procedures for requesting extensions. For justification of the request, simply indicate
DRS Accommodation
. For accommodations relating to quick turnaround assignments, be advised that most of our assignments will not qualify for quick turnaround (typically defined to be an assignment in which there is less than 1 week between when the course provides everything needed to complete the assignment and the assignment’s deadline). - Recordings and Course Materials: For accommodations relating to access to course materials and lecture recordings:
- Lectures will be recorded using Panopto, recordings will be posted on the course calendar
- Lecture slides will be made available in both a pdf and pptx format prior to the start of lecture
- Section slides and worksheets will be posted on the course calendar
3.3.2 Religious observances
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 Safe Environment
It is extremely important to me to provide a safe learning environment and equitable opportunities for everyone in the class. As your professor and a human, know that I care about you and your well-being and stand ready to provide support and resources to the best of my ability. If you or someone you know has been affected by power-based personal violence, I encourage you to use Safecampus as a resource.
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
Bad things happen. People forget things and make mistakes. Bad days coincide with due dates. Etc.
If you believe that circumstances warrant a change in deadline, a second chance, or some other accommodation in order to more accurately synchronize grade with knowledge, come talk to me and we’ll resolve the situation as best we can.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or isolated, there are many individuals here who are ready and wanting to help. The University of Washington Counseling Center offers short-term counseling students and crisis service for urgent situations. Call 206-543-1240 (or 866-427-4747 for after hours and weekend crisis assistance) to get started and schedule an appointment.