Graded work for this course includes
We will be using Moodle for online grade posting.
There will be NO midterm exams. There will be a comprehensive final exam (covering all the topics covered in the course). We will also have examlets (short exams) roughly every other week in class, during lecture hours.
You will need to prepare for each lecture by doing the posted readings and then an on-line quiz based on these readings. These quizzes may also contain questions that review earlier material (including material from course prerequisites). The quiz will be due at 1am during the night before lecture.
The reading quizzes are intended to be straightforward if you've made a good-faith attempt to do the readings and are up-to-date with course material. These quizzes give you immediate feedback on your total score and can be submitted as many times as you like.
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 quiz score in computing your reading quiz average.
Moodle will not allow you to submit quizzes late. Moreover, moodle will not let you review answers to an activity that you never submitted. So, make sure to submit at least once before the deadline, even if your submission is incomplete (or even blank). If you were unable to submit a quiz on time for reasons beyond your control, or if you ran into technical issues with your submission, contact the course staff for help.
Each week, there will be a "mini-homework" on moodle. Mini-homework problems are computer-graded, but more difficult than those on reading quizzes. Although you may submit answers as many times as you like, you won't receive feedback on your score until the deadline closes.
You are expected to do the mini-homework on your own. You may not ask other students 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, and you may get help and hints from course staff e.g., at office hours.
We will drop your (one) lowest mini-homework grade when computing your mini-homework average.
The policies and warnings about late submissions are the same as for quizzes.
Long-form homeworks will assigned on certain weeks, typically in weeks where there is no examlet. These contain longer problems, such as proofs, which must be typed up neatly and submitted via moodle. Detailed information about style, formatting, and submission is posted on the homework page
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), for the long-form homework problems. 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.
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 may deduct whatever amount of points are required to discourage such behavior.
When computing your long-form homework average, typically all homeworks are weighted equally. Otherwise put, we translate the grade for each homework into a percentage and then average these percentages. Your lowest homework grade will be NOT be dropped. If we have two small homeworks, we may treat them as one unit when computing averages.
We occasionally award bonus points, either for doing optional bonus problems or performance well beyond expectations on the regularly assigned problems. These points will contribute to the numerator, but not the denominator, of the corresponding average. (E.g. homework bonus points contribute to the homework average.) These can, in principle, increase an average above 100%. In practice, however, bonus points are typically offset by the occasional small mistakes that even A+ students make on this material. So, even in terms with a lot of bonus problems, even the top homework average would likely not get higher than 100%.
If you need special accommodations 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 a disability that might cause you to need extra time, do speak to DRES to get this officially certified. This includes not only physical disabilities but also problems that impair your ability to concentrate such as ADHD and test anxiety.
If you have some other sort of disability or special circumstances which might impact your participation in the class, please tell us. We can't give you extra time without DRES approval, but there may be other ways we can help.
Most common minor problems are covered by the fact that we drop the lowest item from the categories of reading quizzes and mini homeworks. In the rare case where you have some problem that is out of the ordinary, please contact us about appropriate arrangements. This would include, for example, serious or prolonged 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).
If the work is done but you are unable to submit in the intended way, it is often helpful to get us a copy of your work in some other way (e.g. a scan of your handwritten version) to establish that it's done while we work out whether and how you can submit it in the right format (e.g. typed into moodle).
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.
If you have a conflict with an exam or examlet, 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 by 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 good solution.
We try to grade with perfect accuracy. But, of course, despite the appearance, 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 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 and/or your instructor. Note, however, that regrading or corrections should be requested at most three weeks after the grading has been completed. So, you need to regularly check your graded work (including examlets) and make sure there are no issues--- do not postpone this.
Your final average is a weighted combination of your exam scores, quiz average, and your homework average. Specifically
Since 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.
Furthermore, a score of more than 90 guarantees at least an A-, more than 80 guarantees a B-, 70 at least a C-, and 50 at least a D-. If everyone gets more than 90, we are happy to assign everyone an A- or above!
We expect A students to have shown consistently strong performance and mature mathematical style.
A grade of B- 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 B- in the course requires getting a B- 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.
Curving the grade ensures some uniformity of rewarding grades for effort across different offerings of the course--- across sections, across semesters, across different instructors. The top 20% of each class gets A's, etc., independent of the course offering. We will post regularly during the semester a curved grade estimate for you, so that you can track how well you are doing in class.
Last time this section of the course was offered (Spring 2016), we gave unusually high grades: 37% of the class A-grades (A-, A, A+), and 32% of the class B-grades (B-, B, B+), significantly larger than what was promised. However, do not expect this high a distribution, as this depends on how the class does as a whole. It is normally the case that the highest overall score by a single student is above 97%.
We reserve the right to make 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 final average. They almost always involve increasing a grade by one step, e.g. changing a C+ to a B-.