Expections & Goals

Welcome! We are excited to have you here in class, and are looking forward to the quarter. If you have questions, concerns, confusions, etc. about the following policies, please reach out! Also, please keep in mind that we are here to support you. If for any reason you need help this quarter, please reach out as soon as possible.

Pedagogical goals: This class covers a broad variety of topics (listed at the end of this page). The goal is not for you to become an expert in every topic, but rather to:


Basic Expectations

Weekly Time Commitment: 3 hours lecture, plus about 5-6 hours additional work
Lecture Attendance: In-person attendance is recommended. Recordings are on Canvas under the Panopto tab
Programming Environment / Set Up: You will need to do all assignments via Cancun (see the set up instructions)
Assignments & Grading: 10 Quizzes (30% of grade), 6 homeworks + Set-Up HW (70% of grade)
Academic Integrity: Please see detailed expectations below
Unexpected Circumstances : (i.e. emergencies, changes in health, circumstances beyond your control) Please contact the course staff as soon as you can if you need help or advice, especially if it will be hard to meet deadlines for reasons beyond your control. We'll do our best to work with you
Accomodations: It is extremely important to us that this class be a positive experience for everyone. Please do not hesitate to contact me (nfetsch@cs.washington.edu) for any accomodations

Detailed Expectations for Assignments and Grading

Calcuation: Curve: There is no required curve for this class. If a curve is applied, it will not bring your grade down
Extra Credit: will be via participation-based polls available in lecture and for 24 hours afterward. Extra credit will be applied after a curve if there is one and at my discretion. It is intended to have a small but non-negligable impact on your grade

Quizzes

30% of grade: 10 quizzes (10 points each)

Homeworks

HW0: (5 points) HW0 is a small assignment to check your computing environment is set up correctly. No late days allowed
HW1-6: (25-50 points each)

Minimum Guaranteed Grade

As mentioned, there is no required curve for this class in terms of a specific median or mean grade. You have the minimum guarantees from me.

Minimum Guaranteed Grade
Weighted percent in class Minimum Guaranteed Grade
98.5 4.0
90 3.4
85 3.0
75 2.5
65 2.0

Detailed Expectations for Academic Integrity

I trust you all and expect us to have a great quarter filled with collaboration and without any cheating.

Collaboration is a great way to learn and encouraged. Collaboration includes discussing and helping each other understand topics covered in class, and includes practicing together if that practice is not related to the homework.

Cheating is representing someone else's work as your own. If your homework is too similar to another student's or is based on any other resource, you will receive a failing grade and we will begin the process of creating a cheating case with the university.

For homework, it is OK to:

For homework, it is not OK to:
If you find yourself tempted to cheat, we recommend going to office hours, where our TAs can help get you unstuck.

If you are unsure how to represent work that you have done ask me and describe clearly what your collaboration looked like. If you do, the worst that will happen is you will lose some credit on an assignment.

For further clarification on academic integrity, see the Allen School Academic Misconduct Policy page.


Detailed List of Topics

Topics subject to change. My goal is to have the last week of class be a deep dive on whichever topics you all prefer.