This course is taught by
Margaret Fleck
mfleck@illinois.edu
3214 Siebel or 1222 Siebel (inside the CS Undergraduate Office)
Neither office has a working phone, so please use email to contact me or post on our piazza forum
This course will cover a variety of fun and interesting topics related to getting settled in our CS department and making the best use of your time here. This will include:
This course is intended to be informative but not stressful. Grading will be based on attending lecture and doing online quizzes (roughly each week). I'm planning to record lectures and/or post detailed notes, and there will be some drops. So plan to attend lecture most weeks, but you won't have to come every week.
If you have a disability (DRES) accommodation letter that seems likely to affect your participation in this course, please email it to me (mfleck@illinois.edu) so we can make a suitable plan.
This class meets 3-3:50 on Fridays in Lincoln Theater. For full credit, you must attend at least 10 lectures in person. Recordings of lectures and any associated notes will be posted on the schedule page
An office hour schedule (instructor and TAs) will be posted during the first week of classes. Meanwhile, catch Margaret at the end of lecture to talk or set up a time to talk. Office hours will be a mix of in-person and online, depending on the current state of diseases on campus (e.g. Covid 19) and how crowded our building is.
No textbook is required. Any readings will be posted online.
You will need access to a computer to do the homeworks. However, any computer should work fine, including chromebooks and computers found in dorm or EWS clusters.
We will be using two electronic resources: Moodle and Piazza. See links in the top menu on this page.
If you registered at least a week before the start of classes, you should find that you are enrolled in the class on all both sites. The rest of you might or might not be on these sites yet, but you can add yourself. The moodle self-enrollment key is "Hedwig".
On Piazza, please enroll using your illinois.edu email address. If you would prefer not to do this, e.g. for privacy reasons, contact the instructor to be added under an alternate email address.
This course is intended to be informative but not stressful. Grading will be based on attending lecture in person (50%) and doing online homeworks (50%).
Grading questions, including regrade requests, should be posted in the regrades folder on piazza.
The translation into letter grades will be at least as generous as the standard high school scale. That is,
As I said above, this course is not intended to be stressful. If you feel you need cheating to get through the attendance or homework requirements, you are probably overloaded. Talk to me or your academic advisor.
You are expected to do homeworks on your own. Do not copy answers from your friends. However, you may use electronic resources to track down answers, esp. if they are not directly given in the lectures.
It is an academic integrity offense to falsify attendance recording, e.g. sign someone else into lecture.
The standard penalty for an academic integrity violation is the larger of a 10% penalty or a zero on the homework/attendance involved. (This assumes a misdeed of some significance rather than a minor technical mistake or misunderstanding.) A second offense will typically cause you to fail the entire course.
If you need disability accommodations, please send a copy of your DRES letter to the instructor. Usually it's fairly easy to work out something appropriate. Similarly please tell the instructor if you need privacy protections beyond what we normally provide. (See here for the college's official statements.)
You are expected to handle most minor issues (e.g. absent or unable to work for a day or two) using the fact that we drop two homeworks and four lectures of attendance. Also, for planned absences, homeworks can be done in advance.
Obviously, there are situations that cannot reasonably be accommodated using the normal drops. Examples would include extended illness, an awkwardly placed sequence of religious holidays, or a major family emergency. In such cases, please email the instructor (mfleck@illinois.edu) to work out an appropriate makeup plan. You must inform the instructor in a timely manner. The meaning of "timely" depends on the circumstances. For example, planned travel or religious holidays should be reported in advance. On the other hand, there might be unavoidable delays informing us about a serious illness or injury.
For major and extended problems, we expect you to be in contact with the Dean of Students office. That office can help document the problem, help you stay in contact with instructors, and determine if you need significant accommodations such as incompletes, late drops, light load.
Occasionally there are problems affecting a large number of people, e.g. network outages, snowstorms, TA strikes. In that case, we'll make appropriate adjustments. Watch for announcements (e.g. piazza). Do not make unsafe choices, e.g. driving into campus when the roads are dangerous.