Graded work for this course includes homework, exams, mini-homeworks, and quizzes.
We will be using moodle for online grade posting.
There will be two midterm exams and one final exam, held in class, roughly 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the term. The dates will be indicated on the Lectures page. Details and review materials will be available on the Exams page.
You will need to prepare for each lecture by doing the posted readings and then an on-line quiz based on these readings. The quiz will be due at 1am during the night before lecture. The quizzes are intended to be straightforward if you've made a good-faith attempt to do the reading. You should do the reading quizzes on your own. You may use other textbooks and the internet to help find answers, but be aware that some details vary from author to author and you must follow the conventions of our textbook.
We will drop your lowest two quiz scores in computing your quiz average.
Each week, there will be a "mini-homework" due 3pm on Monday. These are on moodle, superficially like the reading quizzes, but the problems are intended as homework and may be difficult. You are expected to do them on your own. You may not ask other people for the answers to those questions (or minor variations of them). However, you may freely discuss the concepts and general issues involved in the questions.
We'll drop your lowest mini-homework grade when computing final averages.
There will be problem sets roughly every week, typically released about a week before the due date and due 3pm on Wednesdays.
Your homework submissions must follow the homework style guidelines. We hope to use on-line submission for all homeworks this term. However, if we have you submit any in hardcopy form, they must follow the homework format guidelines.
Some harder homework problems may be marked "bonus." Scores from these problems are added into your homework average like scores from regular problems. (See below for details.) However, these are the problems to skip if you're having trouble finishing the entire homework.
In this course you are allowed to discuss homework problems with your classmates, and to work together in small groups (e.g. 2-3 people). Read the cheating and collaboration policy for details of what is and is not allowed. In particular, notice that each person in a homework group must write up and turn in their own solutions, in their own words.
The goal of homework problems is to understand the material and the goal of working in groups is to help all of you understand the material. If you merely copy someone else's solutions, you will do poorly on the exams, which are worth much more than the homeworks.
When computing final grades, we will drop your worst homework score. This is intended to cover all manner of minor reasons why you might have trouble turning in a homework on time or completing it well. These include minor illnesses, car trouble, collisions with work due for other courses, and the like. See below for our policies on excuses for major problems.
There's two sorts of homework points: regular and bonus. Some bonus points come from problems marked "bonus." Some bonus points come from extra (above 100%) credit for normal problems, given when an exceptional solution goes above and beyond our expectations for full credit. Your average is the total number of regular and bonus points you accumulated, divided by the total number of regular (non-bonus) points available. So, bonus points could increase your homework average above 100%. In practice, however, bonus points are typically offset by the occasional small mistakes that even A+ students make on this material.
If you need special accomodations such as extra time on exams, bring us your note from DRES well in advance. These arrangements are normally not hard, but often require some lead time e.g. to book rooms.
If you have some other sort of disability or special circumstances which might impact your participation in the class, please tell us. It's not mandatory, but it will allow us to help you.
The basic policy is that late homeworks will not be accepted. Homeworks that are submitted only a few minutes late may be accepted. But this is at your own risk. And, if we accept them, we will deduct sufficient points to discourage such behavior.
Our policy of dropping one homework is designed to cover the usual, common range of minor problems (e.g. minor illness). In the rare cases where you have some problem that is out of the ordinary, please contact us about appropriate arrangements. This would include, for example, serious illness or injury, family emergencies, major snowfall blocking roads between your home and campus, and the like. We expect to hear about such issues promptly and to receive delayed work as soon as reasonably possible. Depending on the circumstances, we may ask you to provide documentation (e.g. a doctor's note).
We occasionally have outages in campus networks, power, or CS departmental servers. We sometimes extend deadlines or make other arrangements when there are long or awkwardly timed outages. However, we expect that you will download critical documents (e.g. homeworks, exam study materials) in a timely manner and that you realize that support is very limited at night. We will not be sympathetic if it becomes clear that, for example, you didn't even download the homework until 2am on the day it is due.
Sometimes a student has finished the homework but there is a compelling reason why they can't submit the homework in the specified way (e.g. moodle, hardcopy dropboxes). In this case, a suitable backup plan is to email an electronic copy to your section leader along with a an explanation of the circumstances. We may ask you to later submit the homework in the normal way, e.g. if you send us a scan but the original hardcopy is easier to read.
If you have a conflict with an exam, or are too sick to reasonably take it, please contact us. Similarly, contact us if you had a major problem while taking an exam, e.g. you turned out to be sicker than you thought. Depending on the circumstances, we may offer a makeup exam, excuse you from the exam (basing that part of your grade on the other exams), or simply make a note of the issue. When we compute your final course average and letter grade, we'll make the appropriate adjustments to the grading formulas.
If you miss an exam without a good excuse, e.g. you didn't wake up on time, you are at our mercy. Makeups may sometimes be possible, but whatever score you get on the makeup will normally be discounted 20%.
If you notice major problems with our schedule (e.g. our midterm conflicts with an exam in another course that many of you are taking), please tell us promptly so that we have the best chance to work out a solution.
We try to grade with perfect accuracy. But, of course, we are only human. Mistakes happen and need to be corrected.
If you have a question or complaint about the way a homework or exam problem was graded, or your moodle grades don't match what's written on your homework or exam, contact any one of the course staff to get it straightened out. If it's purely clerical (e.g. misadded points), any of us can normally fix it. If it's a matter of judgement (e.g. why was this mistake worth 2 points?), it's best to start with the person who actually graded the problem. If this isn't feasible, speak to the TA who leads your discussion. If that doesn't work, contact Margaret.
We will keep track, somewhat informally, of how much and how helpfully you participated in the life of the class. This includes, in particular, attendance at discussion sections. This information is primarily used for advising purposes: students who don't participate regularly tend to do poorly. Attendance does not affect your final grade, but it often affects what we can say on your behalf in recommendation letters, to academic advisors, etc.
Your final average is a weighted combination of your exam scores, quiz average, and your homework average. Specifically
Because raw numerical scores are somewhat unpredictable and tend to run low in theory classes, the mapping from numerical averages to letter grades must be done by hand. In previous terms, this course has given about 20% A's, 30% B's, 30% C's, 15% D's, and 5% F's. We expect to be at least this generous. As the term progresses, we will try to keep you informed about where we think you stand in terms of letter grade.
We expect A students to have shown consistently strong performance and mature mathematical style.
A grade of C- or above indicates that a student's grasp of a material makes them adequately prepared to succeed in later CS courses, especially CS 225 and CS 373. Getting a C- in the course requires getting a C- on the final exam and demonstrating ability to write an inductive proof.
Most F's are given to students who have stopped attending, doing homeworks, and the like. Only a small handful of students make a good-faith attempt to do all the work, but finish with such a low average that we have to give them an F. Ideally, we'd like everyone either drop the course early on, or else pass it.
We reserve the right to make appropriate adjustments to individual final grades to ensure that grades are appropriate in unusual circumstances. Unusual circumstances include e.g. performance that gets dramatically better or worse over the course of the term, extreme mismatches between exam and homework averages, sickness affecting an exam, lost homeworks, disabilities that affect the fairness of the standard formulas, etc. Adjustments are typically made directly to the final letter grade rather than to the numerical averages.