CMPSCI 240: Reasoning About Uncertainty

David Mix Barrington

Fall, 2009

Course Requirements and Grading

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

Changes in green made 11 September 2009. Further changes are possible. The University has asked faculty to be more flexible in grading to deal with the potential of lots of flu cases, and I will do this to the extent that I can.

Typo corrected 27 October 2009.

• Midterm Exams (30%): There will be three midterm exams each counting 10% of your grade, on Wednesdays 30 September, 21 October, and 18 November, each using both the lecture and discussion period. I will write an exam intended to be finished in an hour, and give you from 10:10-12:05 to finish it. (Over the years my students have accused me of overestimating what they ought to be able to finish in an hour.) These exams will be fairly similar in length and content to the exams from last spring's course, listed on this page from last spring's web site.
• Final Exam (25%):This will be during the December 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 25% of your final grade, except that I will count it for 50%, and reduce the weights of all other components proportionally, if this is to your advantage. Previous final exams, from this course in Spring 2009 and from CMPSCI 291b in Spring 2008, can serve as practice for this final.
• Homework (15%): There will be eight homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 15% of your final grade (only the best six of the eight will count, for 2.5% each). Late homework will in general not be accepted -- we'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.
• Discussions (10%): About four of the Friday discussion periods will have in-class writing assignments, usually based on "Excursion" sections of the text. You will be divided randomly into groups of two or three and each group will hand in a response to the assignment. These will be graded "check" (B) or "check-plus" (A), and the best three of your four will count for 10% of your total grade.
• Programming Projects (20%): Each section of the course will have a programming project for which you will hand in code. The first project will be individual, and later ones may allow (student-chosen) pairs to work together. Note that exam and homework questions may refer to the body of code in the projects. The four assignments will count for 5% of your grade each. Note that some of the Friday discussion periods are devoted to introducing or working on the programming projects.

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.
• For work on the programming projects, almost anything goes as a source of information, including the instructor, TA, and your classmates, but anything you present as your own work must actually be yours.
• With homework the situation is in between and the rule harder to specify. You may discuss homework 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 I will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and will give you a stern warning that could lead to formal action the next time.) 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 27 October 2009