Upcoming Deadlines and Events

Recent Announcements

Fri May 22

  • Final exam scores have been released on Gradescope.

    • The maximum score for both the regular and conflict exam is 70. We graded the two choices for the NP-hardness reduction as two separate Gradescope problems, which makes Gradescope think the maximum score was 80.
    • Regrade requests can be submitted until Fri, Jun 12 at 9:15pm. We reserve the right to ignore regrade requests whose positive outcome would not increase any course grade, and we are unlikely to process most regrade requests before Jun 9. (All midterm and homework regrade requests made before today have been processed.)

  • Course grades have been submitted to Banner. Course grades were computed as described in the grading policies with the advertised fixed cutoffs and amended by the Sat May 9th announcement. We also applied the following adjustments:

    • Students received 0.5% extra credit for each of the two education research activities they participated in.
    • For the purposes of computing homework averages, late submission penalties were ignored (this change benefitted the fewer than 24 students who had more than 4 unforgiven late submissions.)

    Here is the distribution of letter grades, excluding the handful of students who are planning to take a makeup final exam early next semester. The overall average "GPA" for the class was 3.11. Future regrades my cause an increase in some of the grades recorded below.

    Letter + ε –
    A 22 (5.2%) 84 (19.7%) 67 (15.7%)
    B 61 (14.3%) 58 (13.6%) 45 (10.5%)
    C 34 (8.0%) 19 (4.4%) 14 (3.3%)
    D 12 (2.8%) 4 (0.9%) 1 (0.2%)
    F 6 (1.4%)
Fri May 15

Solutions for the Final Exam and solutions for the Conflict Final Exam are now available.

Thu May 14

As a reminder, the Final Exam will held today Thursday, May 14, from 7pm to 10pm.

  • The exam will cover all material seen over the course of the semester with some bias toward material not already covered in the midterms.
  • Please read and understand the exam policies. In particular, you are allowed to bring two double-sided 8½"×11" handwritten cheat sheets to the exam.
  • The final exam will be held in the following rooms; please go to the room that matches the first letter of your last name.

Best of luck, everybody!

Sun May 10

Solutions for Practice final exam 3 are available along with a video in two parts (part I, part II) of Emily solving it at her desk.

Please note that the recording of Part I began before the final MASSMAIL confirming restoration of Canvas and final exams, and Part II was recorded after Emily learned that final exams were to continue as scheduled but before there were any discussions on how to mitigate the damage from the disrupted schedules.

Sat May 09

Due to the extreme disruption to the Spring 2026 final exam scheduling caused by the university's response to and communications concerning the Canvas cyberattacks, we are making the following change to the computation of course grades:

Total exam scores for each student are based on either the 17 total midterm and final exam problems each weighted equally as originally established or on only the ten total midterm exam problems, whichever option results in a higher average score.

Exams still count toward 65% of the total score for the semester, meaning each problem will count toward approximately 3.8% or exactly 6.5% of each overall grade depending on which option applies. We will automatically figure out which of the two exam score options are better for each student after grading final exams, so there is no need for students to make a decision about how well one might perform. If a student fails to show up to both the regular and conflict final exam, we will treat their final exam grade as a 0 and otherwise apply the above policy as written.

A single forgiven midterm exam will be treated as if it didn't exist; total exam scores will be based on the better of 12 final and midterm exam problems or the five remaining midterm exam problems, whichever is better.

Two forgiven midterms will result in the whole exam score being based on the final exam as originally established. Students who have two forgiven midterms and cannot take either the regular final exam or the conflict final exam will have to request an Incomplete from their college (Engineering or LAS) and take a makeup final exam early next semester. Sorry, but we cannot assign a grade based only on homework, and we cannot divide by zero when computing exam averages. Please see our established policies for more information on Incomplete grades and makeup exams. There will be no other makeup final exams offered except in extreme unanticipated circumstances.

Explanation: The CS/ECE 374 Section A has no Canvas component at all and has a written final exam assigned to the latest time slot: Thursday from 7pm to 10pm. On the one hand, this combination of circumstances means the Canvas outage has affected the course about as little as can possibly be expected. Everybody should be available on the exam date, and, in theory, they have plenty of time to prepare for the exam and get ready to put on their best performance. Many students will come out of this exam with a higher course average than they began with.

However, disruptions to other classes including rescheduling of CBTF exams will make taking our exam much more difficult and stressful for some students than originally expected. Also, 374 is likely to be the most difficult and stressful course of the semester for many students, meaning anticipation of its final exam may adversely affect how well they adapt to the disruptions in their other courses.

We believe this change to the grading policy will give students a last chance to demonstrate their mastery of the class material, remove much of the risk of this week's disruptions unfairly bringing down their grade in this class, and reduce the adverse affects that worrying about this class may have on their other courses.

We encourage all students to attend their final exam as planned and make their best attempt. This policy change is intended to reduce the undue pressure from this messy final exam period. We hope it won't be treated as permission to disengage early, but we understand each student knows their own needs better than others.

Fri May 08
  • As you can see, we're currently operating under the assumption that the Final Exam will take place as originally scheduled, 7pm–10pm Thu May 14. We will make further announcements as more direction or guidance are given. However things shake out, we will try our best to make sure everybody gets a fair chance and opportunity to get the grade they would have earned had the week proceeded as normal.
  • We will hold a Final Exam review party this Sun May 10 from 2pm–4pm in the normal Sunday party location 0216 Siebel Center. To avoid conflicting with finals that were supposed to occur, there are no party events planned for Saturday or Monday.
  • Homework 12 solutions are available. We apologize for the delay.
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