CMPSCI 187: Programming With Data Structures

David Mix Barrington

Fall, 2011

Course Requirements and Grading

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

• Midterm Exams (36%): There will be three midterm exams each counting 12% of your grade, on Thursday 29 September, Tuesday 18 October, and Monday 14 November. Each exam will be 7-9 p.m. in rooms to be chosen by the University. I 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 me of overestimating what they ought to be able to finish in an hour.)
• Final Exam (20%):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 quarter of the course. You will have two hours. This exam will count for 20% of your final grade, except that I will count it for 40%, and reduce the weights of all other components proportionally, if this is to your advantage.
• Programming Assignments (24%): There will be seven programming assignments over the term, the first six counting 3% of your grade and the last 6%. These are to be handed in using your EdLab account in a manner to be described later.
• Homework (10%): There will be four homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 10% of your final grade, each counting 2.5%. Late homework will in general not be accepted -- I'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.
• Discussions (10%): 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 will be divided randomly into groups of two to four and each group will hand in a response to the assignment. These will be graded "check" (B) or "check-plus" (A), and the best ten of your twelve will count for 10% of your total grade.

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 homework and programming assignments the rule is a bit harder to specify. You may discuss homework and 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 homeworks 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 the homework, 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 30 August 2011