COMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

Marius Minea and Swarna Reddy

Spring 2019

Course Requirements and Grading

Your grade in COMPSCI 250 will be based on the following:

• Midterm Exams (30%): There will be two midterm exams each counting 15% of your grade, on Wednesday 20 February and Thursday 4 April, each 7-9 p.m. in Goessmann 20 and 64. The exams from Fall 2018 and from other semesters may be used as practice exams.
• Final Exam (35%):This will on 3 May from 1-3 p.m. in the regular classrooms (Goessmann 64 and Herter 227), and will be cumulative, though with greater emphasis on the last third of the course. The Fall 2018 250 final (with solution here) may be used as a practice exam.
• Homework (20%): There will be six homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 20% of your final grade. 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: Latex, 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. Cell 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 (7%): Attendance at the Friday discussion sections 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 ten of your twelve will count for 7% of your total grade. There will also be a "virtual discussion" at the end of the term in which you answer (on Moodle) a set of "essay" questions for course evaluation, and this will be another discussion writing assignment (every serious response gets an A).
• Moodle Quizzes (4%): These short true-false exercises will occur once a week, normally due on Tuesday. They will cover the material of the previous week's lectures. Some small number of these will be dropped -- the remainder will count for 4% 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 completely right.
• Clicker Questions (4%): During most lectures there will be questions to be answered on a clicker device to be purchased or rented by you. (This is the only sense in which lecture attendance affects your grade.) The first clicker questions that count will be on Monday 28 January, the third lecture, so that you should have time to arrange to get a clicker. All answers wrong will get a C-, all answers right will get an A, and the five lowest results will be dropped.

Calculation of Grades

Every graded component of the course will be assigned a score on a scale from F (0) through C (200) to A (400) and possibly higher (beyond the requirements for an A). 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 (within 5 points of the grade boundary).

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 is linear, but will in general not take 0 to 0. A typical scale for a homework assignment might take 60 points to a C (200) and 90 points to an A (400). This means that any raw score less than 30 would convert to a zero; otherwise, your Moodle score will result from the linear formula (raw - 30)*200/30. On each assignment or exam, we'll decide after grading what raw score constitutes a C (200), and what score an A (400), which determines 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.
• You may discuss homework with other students, in fact this is encouraged encourage 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 this will be reported 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. You should be working individually on Moodle quizzes.

Last modified 21 January 2019