COMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

Marius Minea and Ghazaleh Parvini

Fall 2020

Course Requirements and Grading

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

• Midterm Exams (32%): There will be two midterm exams each counting 16% of your grade, on Thursday 1 October and Thursday 29 October.
• Final Exam (24%):This will in the week of 30 November - 4 December and will be cumulative, though with greater emphasis on the last third of the course. The public pages of previous course iterations have exams with solutions; links can be found on Moodle.
• Homework (30%): There will be six homework assignments during the term. Together they will count for 30% of your final grade. The lowest-score homework will only count 50% of its normal weight.
  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: 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 Wednesday 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). The lowest two scores will be dropped and the remainder will count for 7% of your total grade.
• Moodle Quizzes (5%): These short true-false or multiple-chouce 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 5% 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.
• Lesson Questions (2%): Most recorded lectures will incorporate a few questions to check your knowledge. The questions during the first week are for practice and don't count. 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.

Last modified 12 November 2020