COMPSCI 575/MATH 513: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Fall, 2020

Course Requirements and Grading

Your grade in CMPSCI 575 or MATH 513 will be based on the following:

• Midterm Exam (15%): There will be one midterm exam counting 15% of your grade, during the week of 28 September, online as we will specify. There are previous exams from the Fall 2016 and Fall 2018 offering of the course here and here. Those courses used a different text, but the type and difficulty of problems will be similar.
• Final Exam (30%):This will during the exam week in late November, as the university will schedule. It will be cumulative, though with greater emphasis on the last half of the course. You will have two hours. The Fall 2016 and Fall 2018 finals (linked to above) may serve somewhat as a practice exam.
• Homework (40%): There will be six homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 40% of your final grade, with only the best five counting for 8% each. (The lowest grade will be dropped.) Homework must be turned in as PDF files on the Gradescope site for the course. 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 -- I'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.
• Discussion Activities (15%) Each student is expected to participate in one synchronous discussion session per week, which will be a group problem-solving exercise. Each group will submit a solution to the given problem, which will be graded on a scale ranging from "A" (400) through "B" (300). The best ten scores from the twelve weeks will be averaged to total 15% of the total grade. Students missing a discussion get 0 (F). The lowest two discussion scores are dropped, and individual discussions can be excused if missed for a qualifying reason such as illness, religious holiday, etc., though I hope the availability of three chances each week to attend discussion will lead to fewer of these.

A Note on Grade Scales

Students are often confused by the fact that I do not use the traditional grade calculation method of averaging the percentage correct in every grade item, and giving an A, for example, if this is over 90%. Instead I convert each item to a number on a scale from 0 (F) through 100 (D), 200 (C), and 300 (B) to 400 (A). (If a particular item is better than the A standard I set, it gets more than 400, which just goes into the average.) These numbers are then averaged using the weights given above, and the final number determines the letter grade for the course. On an individual exam, for example, I will decide after the grading what score deserves an A and what deserves a C, and take the linear function that gives those two results. Normalized grades below 0 are rounded up to 0.

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 open-book, but 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 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, at the very least we will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and I will report this action to the Academic Honesty Board. More serious penalties, up to and including an F for the course, are possible.)

  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 5 September 2020