CMPSCI 187: Programming With Data Structures

David Mix Barrington and Mark Corner

Fall, 2014

Course Requirements and Grading

Your grade in CMPSCI 187 will be based on the following:

• Midterm Exams (12%): There will be two midterm exams each counting 12% of your grade, on Tuesday 30 September and Thursday 30 October. Each exam will be 7-9 p.m. in rooms to be chosen by the University. We will write an exam intended to be finished in an hour, and give you two hours to finish it. (Over the years students have accused Dave, at least, of overestimating what they ought to be able to finish in an hour.)
• Final Exam (35%):This will be during the May final exam period as scheduled by the University, and will be cumulative, though with greater emphasis on the last third of the course. You will have two hours. This exam will count for 35% of your final grade. (In past terms Dave has had variable credit for the final, but not here.)
• Programming Assignments (25%): There will be five programming assignments over the term, the first four counting 5% of your grade and the last 10%. (That totals 30%, not 25% -- you may drop your lowest program grade unless it is the double-sized one, which you may count as 5%.) These are to be handed in as Eclipse files using Moodle in a manner to be described later.
• Discussions (8%): Attendance at the Wednesday discussion sections is required and this portion of the course grade will be based on your attendance and participation. Participation will be measured by group responses to in-class writing assignments. You normally submit answers in pairs, with the rule that you may not have the same partner twice over the semester. These will be graded "check" (B) or "check-plus" (A), and all but the lowest two of these will count for 8% of your total grade.
• Moodle Quizzes (4%): These multiple-choice quizzes will be due about once per week and will be taken online using Moodle. We will drop the lowest two.
• Clicker Questions (4%): In each lecture after the first two, there will be five multiple-choice questions to be answered during lecture using the iClicker system. You are responsible for getting and registering a clicker device. (We may be able to use the iClicker Go system which allows you to enter answers on a phone -- details to come.) The lowest four of these scores will be dropped.

Academic Honesty Policy

All work submitted must be your own in presentation. How much outside help is allowed depends on the course component.

• The exams are closed-book and no outside help is allowed. Any cheating on an exam is grounds for an F in the course.
• With programming assignments the rule is a bit harder to specify. You may discuss programming with other students, in fact I encourage this as a learning experience. But again, the writeup must be your work. Copying is not allowed, and collaboration so close that it looks like copying is not allowed. (In general, if I get two identical programs we will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and I will report this action to the Academic Honesty Board.)

  Defining plagiarism is somewhat harder in the case of code, as large segments of a Java program may be completely standard. But we will watch for copying from web sources and from each other, and there are ways of detecting this. In addition, the exams will assume that you are familiar with the details of the completed assignments, so that these will be much more difficult if you have not actually written the desired programs yourself.

  A good practice is to divide your work into an "ideas phase" where you collaborate and a "writeup phase" where you work alone -- enter the writeup phase with notes, but not written solutions.

• If you make use of a printed or on-line source for any assignment, other than specific course materials such as the textbook or web site, please mention it in your writeup. Of course copying a solution to a problem from the web is cheating, and this is easier for us to detect than you might think.

Last modified 18 August 2012