Course Information¶

CSE 373 covers the theoretical and conceptual foundations of common data structures and algorithms. We emphasize the importance of creating and defending design decisions. Then, we apply these decisions in larger programming projects.

Specific technical topics we will cover include:

• Data Structures and ADTs: lists, stacks, queues, sets, dictionaries, linked lists, arrays, trees, balanced trees, AVL trees, hash tables, priority queues, binary heaps, and disjoint sets.
• Graphs and Graph Algorithms: graph search, shortest path, and minimum spanning trees.
• Algorithm Analysis: asymptotic analysis, and P and NP complexity classes.
• Sorting: insertion/exchanging and divide-and-conquer approaches.

This course is also designed to have a practical component to help you gain basic familiarity with techniques used within industry. In particular, you’ll be asked to:

• Work on programming projects and integrate your work in an existing codebase.
• Learn how to use an industrial-strength IDE.
• Learn techniques for checking correctness: writing unit tests with JUnit, designing and checking invariants, etc.
• Learn how to collaborate on a single code base using source control repositories.

Taken together, all of the above skills are chosen to set you up for success in a software-related role. In fact, this course is typically regarded as useful preparation for industry and technical interviews.

Course Staff¶

Instructors: Kasey Champion, Hunter Schafer

Instructor Email: cse373-instructors@cs.washington.edu

Registration Questions: CSE Advisers (ugrad-adviser@cs.washington.edu)

Course Staff and Support Hours: Course Staff and Office Hours

Components¶

Projects¶

There will be five programming projects (P0 through P4). This quarter, these projects are autograded, and you can resubmit on Gradescope until you get to the grade that you want.

For the programming projects, you have the option to work with a partner and submit your work together. You will share a GitLab repo with your partner, and once you submit to Gradescope, there will be a mechanism for you to add your partners to a group.

Starter code is distributed on the CSE GitLab and you will make changes there. Afterwards, everything is submitted on Gradescope. We will discuss how to use the technology for the course in the first project, so don’t worry if those tools don’t sound familiar to you!

Exercises¶

There will be seven individual written exercises (EX1 to EX7). They focus on mechanical, theory, and basic application problems to reinforce content from lecture, and are explicitly designed to provide practice for the exams.

Exercises are distributed via Gradescope. They should take an hour or two to do. In each Lecture Kasey will cover a problem that is extremely similar to a question from the current Exercise assignment. Each Exercise will be made of 4 questions, 3 of which will be discussed directly in Lecture and 1 that will require a bit more of your own thoughts. This 4^th question will give you practice in answering design or short answer questions like those that will be present on the Exams. Questions 1 - 3 will be automatically graded and Question 4 will require TA assessment. You can submit your answers to the Exercises as many times as you wish, we will grade the latest submission. You will only know your grade on the Exercise once we return the grades to you, we do not release the solutions to the Exercises.

Exams¶

This quarter, we will have one midterm exam and one final exam. Both exams will be held during lecture time on the following dates (also on the course calendar):

• Midterm: Friday, February 7^th
• Final: Wednesday, March 5^th

There will be an opportunity to revise your answers after you receive feedback. The “exam revision assignment” goes towards the same exam category and is worth the same amount of points as the exam. This effectively means that you can earn back up to half of the points lost on the original exam with that exam’s revision assignment. The exam revision assignments will be due approximately one week after the exam feedback is returned.

We will announce more details about the exam as we get closer to them.

Lectures¶

Lectures are on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays exempting holidays and in class assessments. Lectures are designed to introduce you to the conceptual topics and provide an avenue for discussion amongst your peers. However, please note that while lecture is designed to introduce you to topics, to fully master the ideas you will need to do practice on your own which we hope Section, Exercises, Projects and Exams will provide.

Each lecture will include an interactive PollEverywhere question, if you interact with the vast majority of these polls to indicate lecture participation Kasey will round your GPA up to the nearest 10^th of a point (eg 3.44 to 3.5). Each Lecture Poll will open just before lecture starts and stay open until just before the start of the next lecture if you choose to participate asynchronously.

Lecture will also cover at least one problem that is extremely similar to a question on the current Exercise.

Section¶

Sections are on Thursdays and lead by your individual TA or TAs. Section is designed to give you practice with topics introduced in lecture, walk you through problems similar to what you will see on your Exercises and help prepare you conceptually for the Exams.

Section attendance is not graded, but can be counted towards your extra credit for the quarter. Your TA will record your in person section participation. If you are unable to attend section in person you can email your TA the weekly set of problems by Sunday at 11:59pm and your section participation will be recorded. If you are experiencing further issues that prevent you from either attending in person or submitting your answers to your TA before Sunday please email Kasey & Hunter for further accomodations.

Extra Credit¶

Extra credit will be awarded for various forms of participation throughout the quarter. Participation includes completing the in-class poll activites and participating in the weekly quiz sections. Participating in most of the lectures and quiz sections will result in at most a 0.1 grade point increase. This will not make or break your grade, but does allow you to influence it through effort. Lecture polls and quiz section problems are not graded on correctness, but instead on effort.

Policies¶

Grading¶

Your percentage grade in this course will be weighted using these categories:

When converting percentage grades to GPAs, we guarantee minimum grades using the table below. If you achieve the percentage specified in the left column, we start with the corresponding minimum grade on the right column. Then, we adjust your grade upwards, taking into account of your trajectory through the quarter.

The table shows absolute minimums and are meant to be helpful for planning around strict cutoffs, like for a scholarship or a major distribution requirement; however, they are on the low side and your final grade tends to skew higher:

What we will not do is to put you on a curve, which is a process of assigning course grades so that there is a fixed, pre-determined mean or median. This would discourage collaboration and create unnecessary competition.

Lateness¶

You have five late days to spend throughout the quarter. You may use late days on projects and exercises. Each late day allows you to submit up to 24 hours late without penalty. Lateness is calculated by rounding up to the next full day.

Once you use up all of your late days, each successive day that an assignment is late will result in a loss of 10% of the assignment’s point value. The deduction will not be immediately applied on Gradescope but will be reflected in the final grades you see on Canvas.

You cannot submit an assignment more than three days (72 hours) late without permission from the course staff. This means there is a practical upper limit of three late days usable per assignment. If unusual circumstances beyond your control prevent you from submitting an assignment, you should discuss this with the course staff as soon as possible. If you contact us well in advance of the deadline, it would be much easier for flexibility to be arranged.

To use a late day, just submit late and we will keep track of late days used and lateness deductions for you. Note that late days are individual, so a late submission of a partner programming assignment will use a late day from each group member, and lateness deductions will apply to each partner separately according to the current state of their late days.

Late days are intended to give you flexibility for “normal” situations that take up your time, like a birthday or prioritizing study time for another class. If you have extenuating circumstances, please contact the instructor as soon as possible to discuss accommodations. See the Extenuating Circumstances section.

Collaboration¶

Learning anything can be challenging. In general, we encourage you to discuss course activities with your friends and classmates as you are working on them—ask questions, answer questions, and share ideas liberally.

We do impose some restrictions on the information you may share with your classmates. They all amount to some form of “share strategies and thought processes, but not final answers.”

For programming projects, you are allowed to fully collaborate within your project group. But if you are working with students outside of your group or on the written exercises, you must observe these guidelines:

Additionally, when you receive help from someone, please cite any help that you receive as a method comment in code or as a footnote in writeups. There is no penalty for working with too many classmates. When in doubt, you should always err on the side of giving credit.

The Allen School has a longer guide on over-collaboration and cheating. If you are in doubt about what counts as cheating, create a private post describing the situation and we will be happy to clarify it for you.

Regrades¶

If you feel that we have graded something incorrectly, you can submit a regrade request on Gradescope directly under that question (tutorial here). You can submit a regrade request for every question that you’d like us to take a look.

Unless we mention otherwise, you can begin submitting regrade requests 24 hours after the grades are published for an assignment. The regrade window remains open for 7 days afterwards. After regrade requests close, we expect to get back to you within a week; you will get an email from Gradescope once that happens. The regrade window means you should address any grading concerns as they arise, and we cannot accept them later in the quarter.

When writing a regrade request, please address the rubric items and briefly discuss why they were applied incorrectly. If you are unsure about why you have been marked down, please ask us first—and you should feel free to do so, because mistakes in grading absolutely happen.

Getting Help from Staff & Peers¶

Having questions or getting stuck on something is entirely expected in the learning process. If you find something challenging with your studies, that is a sign you are learning! Learning is not something that you need to do alone though! In fact, connecting with your peers or asking a member of the course staff for help can add extreme depth to your knowledge.

• Synchronous Help (Office Hours): One place to go to get help is our Office Hours hosted throughout the week. TAs staff office hours for many hours a day to provide you the help you need when you need it! This is a great place to go if you want to review a particular course concept, work on a practice problem with the help of a TA or your peers, or get help on a Creative Project or Programming Assignment if you are running into difficulties.

  Tip

  A common misconception is that you can only go to office hours with specific homework questions. That is not true! If you have any questions about course concepts (e.g., from class that day), you are super encouraged to go work on that concept with a member of the course staff at office hours! Getting help with a concept earlier, when you first are feeling unsure, is much better than saving it until you need it on the homework.

• Asynchronous Help (Ed Discussion): With a class of our size, directly emailing a member of the course staff is not always recommended. There are many of you and only few of us, so if you email one person directly we can’t make a guarantee how quickly we can respond! To alleviate this one-on-one communication of email, we have a course discussion board that will be a much more lively place for discussion and a way to make sure you can are helped more quickly. The message board is set up so that all of the course staff can help you, which will make it more likely for you to receive a quicker response!

  Ed Tips

  • If you are asking a general question about the course logistics or content, you can make a public post. This way other students can benefit from seeing your question, and you can even answer each other’s questions to share your perspectives!
    • If you want, you can choose to post anonymously so that other students in the course can’t see your name. Note that anonymous posting does not hide your identity from the course staff.
  • You’re encouraged to answer each other’s questions as well! Explaining a topic to someone else (even on a discussion board) is a great way to help you better understand the material. The course staff will still look over student answers and can nicely point out some misconception if there is one so that everyone benefits.
  • If you have a question that’s pretty specific to your homework solution, or, is about some personal details that you would not want to share with the class (e.g., DRS accommodations), you can make a private post on Ed that is only visible to the course staff. This way, any member of the staff can respond to get you the help you need!
  • For sensitive matters that you only want to discuss with Kasey & Hunter, you can instead email Kasey & Hunter if that makes you feel more comfortable. Note that the response time for the instructors’ email is longer than posting on the Ed board.

Course Climate¶

Extenuating Circumstances: “Don’t Suffer in Silence”¶

We are dedicated to the proposition that you are a human being first and a student second. If anything arises during the course, please do not hesitate to contact the course staff or the instructor to discuss your situation. Our simple rule on extenuating circumstances: keep an open line of communication, and the sooner we are made aware, the more easily we can provide accommodations.

Typically, extenuating circumstances include work-school balance, mental health needs, family responsibilities, health concerns, or anything else beyond your control that may negatively impact your performance in the class. Additionally, while some amount of “productive struggle” is healthy for learning, you should ask the course staff for help if you have been stuck on an issue for a very long time.

Life happens! While our focus is on providing an excellent educational environment, our course does not exist in a vacuum. Our ultimate goal as a course staff is to provide you with the ability to be successful. We want to work with you so that this can happen.

Accommodations¶

On Requesting Accommodations¶

This section covers the accommodations that federal and state laws require the university to provide. However, we understand that the approval process for accommodations requested through the university can be time-consuming, and processing times sometimes extend beyond the current quarter. Additionally, we acknowledge that the accommodations offered through these channels may not cover all circumstances.

Our Extenuating Circumstances policy applies equally in requesting class accommodations, and you should contact us at any time to see if we can help directly. We are reasonable people and want to make sure that you have all the tools you need to be successful.

Disabilities¶

The Disability Resources for Students (DRS) office is tasked with ensuring that you are not negatively affected by any disabilities that you may have.

Religious Accommodations¶

The University Registrar handles accommodations related to faith and conscience, for all three campuses.

Inclusion & Incident Reporting¶

We welcome students of all backgrounds. You should expect and demand to be treated by your classmates and the course staff with respect.

The computer science and computer engineering industries have not traditionally been very diverse due to a lack of sufficient past efforts towards it. We want you to feel like you have a place in this class. The Allen School is also working to create a more inclusive and equitable environment for our community and our field.

If you are made to feel uncomfortable, disrespected, or excluded by a staff member or fellow student, you can:

• Report the incident to the instructor directly. We can resolve issues within the course or help you navigate resources.
• Send anonymous feedback to the course staff or Allen School leadership. We cannot see the author of a feedback e-mail (sample), unless you disclose your identity in some way in the message.
• Use the College of Engineering incident reporting tool. You can ask to be contacted by an engineering advocate, a member of the trained staff who can connect you to additional resources and help you articulate next steps.
• Contact the Office of the Ombud. The Ombud is a neutral third party to whom you can tell your story and get informal resolution help. This is a good option if you don’t want to initiate an official process just yet.