COMPSCI 240: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Summer 2023

Course Requirements and Grading

Your grade in COMPSCI 240 will be based on the following:

• Midterm Exam (20%): There will be one midterm exams each counting 20% of your grade, during the week of 3 July at time to be arranged. We will write an exam intended to be finished in an hour, and give you two hours to finish it. I will try to construct a practice exam closer to the time it happens.

• Final Exam (35%):This will be later in the week of 31 July, at a time to be arranged. It will be cumulative, as scheduled by the University, and will be cumulative, though with greater emphasis on the last half of the course. You will have two hours.

• Homework (30%): There will be four homework assignments during the term, due at 11:59 pm on the following Fridays:
  • HW#1: 16 June
  • HW#2: 30 June
  • HW#3: 14 July
  • HW#4: 28 July

  Together they will count for 30% of your final grade, with the best three counting 9% each and the worst counting 3%. Homework must be turned in as PDF files on the Gradescope site for the course. This will allow the TA's to grade it and give you feedback without the necessity of moving large quantities of paper around. PDF files may be generated in a variety of ways -- I would probably do it using Latex, but Word and other word processing software has options to produce PDF's. (On a Mac, any print command has a "save PDF" option.) You can also scan a handwritten document to produce a PDF which you can then turn in. (But what you submit must be readable -- you are responsible for reviewing your PDF yourself to see that it is. Cel phone pictures of bad handwriting will in general not work.)

  Late homework will in general not be accepted -- we'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.

• Discussions (15%): Attendance at the six Wednesday discussion sections (at either of the two meeting times) 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, usually based on "Excursion" sections of the text. You will be divided randomly into groups of 2-4 people and each group will hand in a response to the assignment. These will be graded "check" (B) or "check-plus" (A), and the best five of your six will each count 3% of your total grade.

  Calculation of Grades

  My system for computing grades is a bit unusual, so I will try to explain it here. I take every graded component of the course and assign it a number on a scale from F (0) through C (200) to A (400) and sometimes higher. These are the numbers that are averaged together by Moodle to get your "course total" at the end of the term, and this is the basis for your letter grade. (For example, if your course total is 342, the closest letter grade to this is a B+ (333) so that's what you get. There is some provision for rounding up in close cases, since a 345 is within five points of the boundary (350) between A- and B+, I would give that an A-.

  For exams and homeworks, there is thus both a raw score, typically ranging from 0 to around 100, and a normalized score on the 0-400 scale. The mapping from raw score to normalized score does not always take 0 to 0. A typical scale for a homework assignment takes 30 (and lower) to 0, 45 to 100, 60 to 200, 75 to 300, 90 to 400, and higher grades above 400 by the same linear function. On each assignment, I decide after grading what raw score constitutes a 200, and what score a 400, then find the linear function that meets those two points.

  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 the rule is a bit harder to specify. You may discuss homework with other students, in fact we 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 we get two identical homeworks we will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and we will report this action to the Academic Honesty Board.) Remember to tell us who you worked with as well.

    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, or from solutions given out in prior semesters, is cheating, and this is easier for us to detect than you might think.
  • You are free (and encouraged) to discuss answers to discussion and clicker questions, and to work together on Moodle quizzes.
  • Lastly, the University has noticed the existence of AI tools like ChatGPT, and the Academic Honesty Policy prohibits them unless an instructor explicit allows them. We don't allow them here. A major goal of this course is to develop your ability to present mathematical arguments, and we want to evaluate your own performance in that regard.

  Last modified 15 May 2023