Your grade in COMPSCI 250 will be based on the following:
Together they will count for 20% of your final grade, with only the best five counting for 4% each. (The lowest grade will be dropped.) 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.)
For full credit, homework must be submitted by the deadline. Late homework will be accepted up to 24 hours after the deadline, with a 20% penalty unless (a) the penalty is waived for some reason or (b) this assignment is the best of your late homeworks. Students with Disability Services accommodations may use the late day with no penalty. Work after the late day will in general not be accepted -- we'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.
They will cover the material of the previous week's lectures. You will do them using the "assessment package" of the textbook, so you will need a current version of the textbook. Some small number of the quiz grades will be dropped -- the remainder will count for 6% of the total grade. A typical quiz will be 20 questions, with the grade being F for not doing it, C for half right (the expected result of guessing), and A for all right.
My (Dave's) 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-. Please don't whine about the exact boundaries.
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, we decide after grading what raw score constitutes a 200, and what score a 400, then find the linear function that meets those two points.
All work submitted must be your own in presentation. How much outside help is allowed depends on the course component.
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.
Last modified 20 September 2024