We will use Illinois Compass for online grade posting.
There will be several self-evlautions, containing straightforward, quick-answer questions. They would administered via compass. The dates will be indicated on the Lectures page.
Your homework submissions must follow the homework format guidelines and the homework style guidelines.
Some homework problems may be marked "bonus" or "extra credit". Scores from these problems will be added to your homework average just like other problems. However, we anticipate that they are appropriate for only some of you (e.g. very difficult) and the rest of you should not feel bad if you can't/don't do them.
The goal of homework problems is to understand the material and the goal of working in groups is to help your partners 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 trying to solve a homework problem, it is often helpful to study solutions to other problems on the same topic, e.g. examples in the course textbook or the other texts on reserve in the library, problems covered in lecture or discussion section, and worked solutions posted on line. If you get the solution to a problem from somewhere, you must cite your source.
We try to avoid assigning problems whose solutions are readily available. However, if you accidently happen upon a solution to an assigned problem, we would appreciate being told where you found it.
When computing final grades, we will drop your worst homework score (i.e. the one which damaged your average the most). 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.
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 come speak to us about appropriate arrangements. This would include, for example, serious illness or injury, family emergencies, major snowfall blocking roads between your home and campus, major computer systems outages in the Siebel center, 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).
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 fix it.
If you have a disability or other special circumstance which may require special accomodations, please speak to us.
We try to grade with perfect accuracy. But, of course, we are only human (at least most of us). 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 compass grades don't match what's written on your homeworks, contact any one of the course staff to get it straightened out. Normally, it's easiest if you find out who actually graded that problem and speak to them in person at their office hours. When this isn't possible, explain the problem on a separate piece of paper, attach it to the assignment, and give it to one of us. We want everyone happy and satisfied, but we can't do much in the couple of minutes before and after class.
Your final average is a weighted combination of your exams scores, quiz scores, 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 attempted many of the bonus problems and to have shown consistently strong performance and mature mathematical style.
We will give a grade of C- or above to students whose grasp of the material makes them adequately prepared to succeed in the following CS courses (CS 421 and 473).
We only plan to give a handful of F's. Normally, most F's involve students who stopped even attempting to do the work, often very early in the term, but mysteriously never dropped the course. Ideally, we'd like everyone either drop the course early on, or else pass it.
We reserve the right to make appropriate adjustments to ensure that grades are appropriate in rare and unusual circumstances, 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, etc. In cases of doubt, we will try to be generous, within the limits of common sense.