Announcements

Course grades were submitted to the UW Registrar earlier today, meaning we are now done with the quarter! Your grade should be visible on MyUW within the next 24 hours. We calculated grades according to the policies in the syllabus, factoring in everything from the quarter (including grades for EX4 and Exam II) and incorporating post-lecture optional reviews as extra credit to round up when grades were very close.

Grades and feedback for EX4 and Exam II have also now been published, and we’ve posted sample solutions for Exam II on the course website. Exam II had a mean of ~82%, a median of about ~85%, and a standard deviation of about ~13%. Although course grades have already been submitted, it’s extremely important to us that you get the grade you deserve – and if we made a mistake anywhere, it is still possible for us to submit a grade change. Regrade requests for both EX4 and Exam II will be open for 1 week until 9/1, though please note that regrades will only be considered if they have the potential to change your final GPA (so a few points here or there won’t make an impact). If you are currently involved in an ongoing academic misconduct case, your grade will show up as an “X” until that case is resolved.

As you contemplate what comes after 373, we’ve compiled all of our answers to your fantastic questions on Exam II. There are great tips in there about classes to take after 373, additional resources you can use to prepare for technical interviews, and even languages and projects to explore now that the quarter is done! You can also check out the playlist we played before lecture for a little inspiration. Aaron will also have 1:1 meeting availability for the next two weeks if you’d like to chat about next steps!

Congratulations on making it through the quarter! I hope you learned a lot, got a decent amount of sleep, and maybe even had a little fun. It was my honor to be your instructor this summer, and I thoroughly appreciated all of your excellent questions, your hard work toward the assignments, and of course your tolerance of my terrible jokes in lecture. Please stay in touch! I would love to hear how you go on to use the skills you learned in this class, even if you decide you never want to solve another recurrence for the rest of your career. ;)

Now, from all of us on the CSE 373 course staff, take a well-earned break and have a fantastic rest of your summer!

Exam II has been released and will be available for the next 48 hours until 11:59pm PDT on Saturday, August 22 (no late submissions accepted). You can find the exam here, with more detailed instructions:

https://www.gradescope.com/courses/141341/assignments/608174

Notes:

• All clarifications will be posted in a single Piazza post
• In case you find them helpful on the exam, solutions for Exercise 4 have been published and are accessible on Canvas
• Logistics for this exam are just like Exam I: the exam is open-note and open-internet, you can work in groups up to 8, and lecture on Friday 8/21 will be totally optional office hours where you can chill, work on the exam, and ask clarification questions. During the next 48 hours, course staff will only answer clarification questions in OH and won’t help you review course concepts (just like an in-person exam). We’ll still help you with P4, however!
• Remember that the late cutoff for P4 is also Saturday at 11:59pm, so plan ahead if you intend to submit late!

Just like before, please reach out on Piazza or via email to ask us if you’re uncertain what you’re being asked to do – we don’t want anybody to lose points because you don’t understand what a question is asking! Have fun on the exam, and remember to take a minute to celebrate all the learning you’ve done this quarter!

Course evaluations are currently open for CSE 373, and as mentioned in lecture today, they make an enormous impact toward improving the course. We take your feedback very seriously, especially in these unprecedented remote quarters – we spent weeks poring over last quarter’s evals to decide on the course policies for this summer, and I assure you that your feedback will be used the same way next quarter. All insights are helpful, but these become far more useful when we can get a 90-100% response rate. So far, you all have done an amazing job giving us feedback throughout the quarter – please help us out by keeping up the streak and finishing strong!

Evals close on Friday, 8/21 at 11:59pm, but I encourage you to fill them out right now if you can! If this takes you longer than 10 minutes, feel free to stop where you are and submit so you can get back to P4 :)

Lecture: https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228731

Sections:

• AA (12:00, Leona & Keanu): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228950
• AB (1:10, Keanu & Siddharth): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228937
• AC (1:10, Farrell & Melissa): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228940
• AD (2:20, Joyce): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228943
• AE (10:50, Leona & Eric): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228941
• AF (12:00, Farrell): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228944
• AG (1:10, Eric): https://uw.iasystem.org/survey/228948

Thanks so much everyone!

We hope everyone’s week 9 is off to a good start! As we approach Exam II, we’ve updated the course website exams page with a number of resources to help you review. Just like with Exam I, we’ve released a 20su-specific Practice Problem Set [and Solutions] to approximate the style you can expect on Exam II, and the section 9 worksheet for this week’s review-focused section so you can look it over beforehand. There are additional resources and important logistical information on the exams page as well, so make sure to read through it before the exam. As a reminder, Exam II will be released at 12:01am PDT Friday, 8/21 and due strictly at 11:59pm PDT Saturday, 8/22. Saturday evening is also the cutoff for all extra credit and for P4 (if using all 3 late days), so even though you have the option of submitting P4 late for the sake of flexibility, if you choose to do so we strongly urge you to plan ahead to avoid a conflict with the exam.

We know the last week can be a little stressful, and it’s really important to us that you have support as you finish up the quarter. Therefore, this week we’re adding 7 additional office hours and 5 additional hours of 1:1 meeting availability – please take advantage of these resources to ask all your P4 and Exam II questions!

You’re so close! Good luck finishing up P4 and your assignments for other classes, and don’t forget to take care of your physical and mental well-being too :)

Feedback for Exercise 2 has been published and is now accessible on Gradescope! As with EX1, solutions for the exercise can be found embedded in the rubric (instead of being published separately), and regrade requests will be open until Friday, 8/21.

As mentioned in lecture today, logistics and the topics list for Exam II have been published on the Exams page of the course website so you know what to expect and can get a headstart on reviewing. Exam II will be released on the last day of class (8/21) and is due 48 hours later at 11:59pm PDT on 8/22. Just like with Exam I, we’ll publish additional 20su-specific review materials as we get closer to the exam.

In other news, Exercise 4 has also been released! Problems 2, 3, & 4 are solvable now, but problem 1 will require content covered on Wednesday in LEC 21: Sorting II. Remember that P4 and EX4 are both due in the last week of class, so it’s especially important to start early on both of them.

Finally, grades for the P2 Writeup have been published on Gradescope.

We’re in the final stretch everyone. You can do this!

We’ve just published feedback for Exam I! You can find your grade and feedback on Gradescope, and Sample Solutions & Explanations on our course website. In general, everyone did well! We were so impressed with the skills and learning you all demonstrated. However, we also want to emphasize that this exam is just one piece of feedback about your learning this quarter (e.g. we didn’t test you on writing code at all, but that’s clearly an important outcome of the course). As you view your results, remember that there’s so much more that you can get out of 373 beyond what we’re able to test on an exam, and that any exam grade is an inherently incomplete signal, even for the concepts it covered. If you didn’t get the score you were hoping for, also keep in mind that Exam I is only 15% of the course grade, and that your score itself is so much less important than what you do with it going forward.

Statistics: Mean: ~85%. Median: ~87%. Standard Deviation: ~10%.

Next Steps:

• Please take a look at your score on Gradescope, and then review the Sample Solution & Explanations document! The process of reviewing what you got wrong is one of the most important parts of the exam process, and where so much learning happens! Note that we used a positive rubric for each question so you can see the exact breakdown of how we graded everything – if you lost points on a question but don’t see a deduction, make sure to look at the rubric items that weren’t applied.
• If it looks like we made a mistake, you’ll be able to submit regrade requests for each problem independently starting Tuesday (8/4) at 10:00pm PDT. We want to make sure everyone gets the score they deserve, but please check with the explanations presented in the Sample Solution first. Regrades will be open for 2 weeks and will be available directly on Gradescope.
• If you’d like to talk about your exam, you can always come to office hours or schedule a 1:1 meeting!

Good evening/morning!

The P4 Partner Sign-Up Form is now available, at https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse373/tools/20su/partner/p4/! Please make your selection before lecture ends (2:10 PM) on Wednesday, August 5, so that the project could be released later that evening.

As a reminder, do make sure that both partners make a selection if you are pre-selecting your partner, otherwise unconfirmed groups will be assigned random partners and the situation has to be manually unraveled later. Thank you for your understanding!

Hope your weekend was amazing, and have a great week ahead!

After my router took an unexpected vacation in yesterday’s lecture (LEC16: Dijkstra’s Algorithm), the re-recorded version is now available and linked from the course calendar. We’ve also published the original live version in case you’d like to refer to any specific questions that were answered. Thanks as always for putting up with our technological hiccups :)

As a reminder, there are two options for watching lecture recordings in general: our 373 20su Panopto folder (recommended), which is publicly available and linked from the website, or the Zoom cloud recordings page, which is a section of our Canvas site. You can use whichever service you prefer, but note that Zoom doesn’t allow uploading new videos so any re-recorded lectures can only be found on Panopto.

In other news, Exercise 3 was published last night and can be found on the course calendar. If you missed the announcement in lecture, we also published a series of resources for technical interviews on the course calendar (under Wednesday, 7/22) for anyone who’s considering applying for tech internships or jobs after this class! We recommend starting with A+ Advice for Getting a Software Job (recording), and then taking a look at the Job Guide & Resume Guide. You’re also more than welcome to schedule a 1:1 meeting if you’d like to talk about getting started!

Exam I has been released and will be available for the next 48 hours until 11:59pm PDT on Saturday, July 25 (no late submissions accepted). You can find the exam here (with detailed instructions):

https://www.gradescope.com/courses/141341/assignments/569908

Some reminders:

• The exam is written to take about 1-2 hours.
• You can work in groups up to 8 and submit a single exam.
• The exam is open-note and open-internet, but don’t ask for help from anybody not enrolled in 373 20su.
• During these 48 hours, course staff will only answer clarification questions – we won’t help you review course concepts or give hints (like an in-person exam).
• Lecture tomorrow (Friday 7/24) is totally optional: we’ll just have extra office hours where you can chill, work on the exam, and ask clarification questions.
• As mentioned in a previous announcement, we want you to be able to focus on the exam even if you haven’t finished P2. Therefore, we’re extending the late submission cutoff for P2 to Monday 7/27, and the exam days (Friday and Saturday) both count as “free late days” – you won’t be charged a late day for either one. Submitting Monday night will cost 3 late days.

Remember to breathe, stay calm, and walk away for a bit if you get stuck. If you’re uncertain what we’re asking you to do, please reach out on Piazza or by email to cse373-staff@cs.washington.edu – we don’t want anybody to lose points because you don’t understand what a question is asking!

Good luck everyone! You’ve got this :)

We have sent out P3 partner assignments and released the spec on the website. When you do catch a break, please start getting in touch with your assigned partner and discussing how to tackle the assignment. Please note that this assignment will not have a write up component, and the experiment code is mostly for your own measurements.

To help you focus on studying for and taking the exam, we are also extending the late cutoff for P2 to next Monday 11:59pm. Submitting from Saturday to Monday all counts as using 3 late days.

You’re doing great!

To help you prepare for Exam I, we’ve updated the Exams Page on the course website with a bunch of resources you may find helpful. In particular, we’ve released a 20su-specific Practice Problem Set [and Solutions] intended to approximate the style you can expect on Exam I, and we’ve published the Exam Review worksheet for this week’s section early so you can look it over beforehand and discuss questions with your TA. Make sure to review the Exams Page thoroughly for the full list of review materials, a list of relevant learning objectives, and important logistics reminders. Most importantly, note that the course staff will only be answering clarification questions while the exam is out (starting 12:01 am PDT on Friday and ending 11:59 pm PDT on Saturday); we highly recommend studying beforehand so you can clear up any confusion about course concepts in office hours! Section this week will devote substantial time to Exam I review.

We’ve also released feedback for P1 and EX1, so you should have received emails from Gradescope earlier this evening. Note that solutions for all assignments will be embedded directly in Gradescope rubrics this quarter, rather than distributed separately. Please take a look at your feedback when you get a chance – working to understand what you got wrong is one of the best ways to solidify your understanding of the material! We also want to make sure you get the grade you deserve, so if you think we made an error in grading, you can submit a regrade request directly on Gradescope for the next 2 weeks.

Good luck finishing up P2, and happy studying!

The Project 3 Partner Form has been released! Please fill it out ideally before lecture on Wednesday, July 22 1:10pm, so that the course staff has enough time to generate partner pairings and send them out to everyone.

Just like the previous projects, we will drop you into the partner pool if you don’t fill it out, but we would really appreciate that you take 30 seconds to fill out the form so we have clarity on how we can assign the random pool.

It’s really important to us that you get the most out of your experience in this class. We need your help with this anonymous mid-quarter survey to let us know what’s working well and what we could improve! It will take less than 8 minutes. If you find it taking longer, stop where you are and submit – we don’t want this to take up too much time! It’s open until Saturday 7/18, and we’ll give extra credit for completing it. Trust us: we’re already aware that exploding laptops is something we could improve in lecture :)

As mentioned today, we’ve also published the Exam I logistics and topics list so you know what to expect and help you start reviewing. Additional review materials will be released as we get closer to the exam. Finally, we’ve added some extra office hours and 1:1 availability this week.

Project 2 (Maps) has been released, due 7/22! In this project you will be exploring one of the most useful data structures out there, the Hash Map – and you will build your very own Separate Chaining version as described in lecture today! If you filled out the P2 Partner Form, you should have just received an email with your partner assignment (if not, let us know ASAP). Exercise 2 (Algorithmic Analysis II) has also been released, due 7/17 – this exercise builds on EX1 by applying our analysis tools to recursive code!

We’ve also updated the optional post-lecture review questions in response to your feedback! We will continue to publish optional review questions for most lectures on Gradescope (and linked from the course calendar), but we will now also publish solutions and explanations for you to check your work. Each post-lecture review also has a reflection component – we encourage you to fill that out for your own metacognitive benefit, but also so we know where to focus our review at the beginning of the next lecture.

Finally, as mentioned in lecture this week, we want to acknowledge the stress caused by the recent federal announcement concerning online classes for F-1 visa holders in the fall. We are blindsided and greatly disturbed by this policy, and have been assured that UW and CSE leadership are working frantically to put together a response. In the meantime, we want to let you know that we are here to support you however we can. As announced in lecture today, we are giving 2 extra late days to everyone in the class, and we are extending the late cutoff for P1 and EX1 to 5 days after the deadline. Our intention with these changes is to provide flexibility; if your ability to work has been impacted, this can give back some of the late days you’ve used, and if you’ve already finished the assignments you can always save these late days for later in the quarter. However, this is just a start. We know that this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, so we ask that you please reach out if you would benefit from further accommodations. We can absolutely work with you, and we do not want this class to be a burden as you handle more important things in your life.

The P2 Partner Sign-Up Form is now available! Since P2 will be released on Friday, please make a selection before Thursday, 7/9 at 11:59pm PDT. You and your partner are welcome to sign up and work together again for P2, but we also want to encourage switching things up and meeting new people in the class for those interested. Therefore, just like in P1, the default will be entering you into the random partner pool if you don’t fill it out.

Additionally, we’ve made a few tweaks to the Office Hours schedule to better spread out our coverage across the week. Keep up the great questions everyone!

Exercise 1 has been released and will be due July 10^th! You can find the homework under the Exercise tab on the course website. This homework is meant to give you more practice with Asymptotic and Case Analysis. Remember that unlike projects, exercises are intended to be completed individually, although you are welcome to collaborate on the high-level concepts.

Additionally, section 2 review videos have have been posted. You can find links to section review on the main course page under Thursday section where section handouts are posted. Review videos go over concepts and problems that we cover in section. We will have section review videos posted by Friday night each week!

Keep up the good work and have a good weekend!

The P1 Partner Sign-Up Form is now available! Since P1 will be released on Wednesday, please make a selection before next Tuesday, 6/30 at 11:59pm. As a reminder, all projects in this course starting with P1 are designed to be completed with a partner, so we highly encourage either finding a partner and signing up together or entering the random partner pool (which is the default if you do not complete the form). While we don’t recommend it, you may also opt out of working with a partner by filling out the form accordingly. You will have the option to change your partner situation for each project going forward.

Additionally, the review video for section 1 has been published on the course calendar.

Have a good weekend!

P0 Released: The first programming project of the quarter (P0: CSE 143 Review) has been released, due 11:59pm on Wednesday, July 1^st! This is intended to get you up to speed with course infrastructure and refresh your memory of 143 material. Unlike the rest of the projects in this course, P0 is completed individually.

Discord Server: We’ve created a 373 20su Discord for our office hours queue and an optional space to build community. Office hours start this Friday, June 26^th, but you can join the server starting now.

Check the Office Hours page to learn more about joining Discord. Remember to be respectful, considerate, and inclusive of your fellow classmates! TAs will not necessarily be available on Discord outside of their scheduled OH times.

Note that the CSE 373 Discord is a 3^rd party application. Course staff will never release your personal information on Discord without your permission. If you choose to create a Discord account, you have the option of putting in personal information such as your real name or email address, but doing so is not necessary to participate in office hours.

Missing Permissions Form: If you’re enrolled in the course but missing access to any course tools, fill out the Missing Permissions Form to let us know and we’ll add you as soon as we can. If you aren’t registered but want to follow along, check out our public materials instead.

373 Prerequisite Knowledge Refresher: Feeling a little shaky about 143? To help you prepare for the quarter, we’re providing an optional 373 Prerequisite Knowledge Refresher, an in-depth guide to the topics we’ll build on this quarter that’s intended to help bring you up to speed.

As we continue adapting 373 to this strange online quarter, we’d like to hear from you about your background, your excitement/concerns about this quarter, and your circumstances as you complete the course.

To help us plan, it’s important that you complete this fully anonymous survey by Thursday, June 25. Completing the survey will take you less than 3 minutes, and the aggregated information will have a big impact on how we run the course, from lectures/sections/office hours to the types of accommodations we’ll be able to offer.

You can find the survey linked on this Piazza post.

Thanks for your help everyone!

We’re excited to be working with you this quarter, even as we navigate teaching this course online! This is our course website, which will be constantly updated throughout the quarter and where you’ll be able to find most information pertaining to the course.

All lectures this quarter will be held over Zoom (MWF 1:10pm–2:10pm PST), with recordings available if you cannot make that time. If you are enrolled in the class, you can find the Zoom link on our Canvas page or in your email.

To prepare for the quarter, we recommend familiarizing yourself with the Syllabus to learn about how the course will run online. You can also check out the Staff Page to meet the instructional team, or the Calendar to get a preview of the topics we’ll cover. Other content such as projects and exercises will be published here as they are released during the quarter.

We’re looking forward to meeting you! Please reach out to the staff email, cse373-staff@cs, if you have any questions or concerns about the quarter.