COMPSCI 575/MATH 513: Introduction to Computation

David Mix Barrington

Fall, 2016

Course Requirements and Grading

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

• Midterm Exams (40%): There will be two midterm exams each counting 20% of your grade, on Tuesday 11 October and Thursday 19 November, each 7-9 p.m. in rooms yet 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.) Since I have not taught this course in a very long time, I will make a practice exam available obout a week before the real exam.
• Final Exam (30%):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 third of the course. You will have two hours. In the past I have sometimes had the weight of the final exam variable, but this term it definitely counts 35%. The Spring 2014 250 final (with solution here) may be used as a practice exam.
• Homework (30%): There will be seven homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 30% of your final grade, with only the best six counting for 5% each. (The lowest grade will be dropped.) Homework must be turned in as PDF files on the Moodle 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 -- I'll deal with valid excuses by giving "excused" grades on particular assignments.

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 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 12 August 2016