Syllabus

Technology

Piazza

We will use Piazza as the ‘one-stop shop’ throughout the semester: for a Q&A forum and for official announcements. Enrollment in Piazza is mandatory. If you have questions about anything related to the course, please post them on Piazza rather than emailing the instructor or TAs. Please do not post anything resembling a solution to a homework problem before it’s due. If in doubt, you should make your post private (visible to instructors only). We always welcome any feedback on what we could be doing better. To join the class on Piazza, follow this link.

Gradescope

All homework will be submitted through Gradescope, and all grades will be returned through Gradescope. To join the class on Gradescope, go to gradescope.com and enter this code: ZRX773.

bCourses

Lecture videos will be available from the bCourses site. We will not use bCourses for any other content.

Exams

CS 182 students will have two midterms, and CS 282A students will have one midterm and one final project. The first midterm, for all students, is Wednesday, March 2 from 7-9 p.m in Pimentel 1. The second midterm, for 182 students only, will be scheduled for the last week of instruction, with more details forthcoming. No alternate exams will be offered. Please make a private Piazza post if you have an extreme hardship related to these policies.

Materials

All materials can be found on Piazza.

Discussions

Discussion worksheets are released the day before the first discussions of the week. The discussion sections will give you additional practice solving problems. You may attend whichever, as many, and as few discussion sections you like.Discussion worksheets are released the day before the first discussions of the week. The discussion sections may cover new material and will give you additional practice solving problems. You may attend whichever, as many, and as few discussion sections you like.

Homeworks

There are 4 homeworks for this class, which are released roughly 3 weeks at a time. Grades will be released on Gradescope. Doing the homeworks and reading the solutions is vital for your learning. You are expected to show your work and justify all of your answers. You are given a total of 5 slip days for use only on homeworks. These slip days are intended for emergency use, and as such we employ a strict late policy. There is no additional slack beyond slip days available.

Academic Integrity

Cheating

Ethical behavior is an important part of being an engineer. It is a part of our responsibility to act ethically and honestly, and moreover, ethical behavior is what helps you learn best. Cheating is fundamentally dishonest and antisocial behavior. We have a zero-tolerance policy for cheating. Any unconfessed offense will result in negative points for the category that the offense occurs in, with no bound on how negative it can go, and a referral to the Center for Student Conduct.

You are not permitted to upload any of our problems, solutions, or your own solutions to our problems to any site that is accessible by other people. Use Piazza to discuss content. The only limited exceptions to this are online communication mediums between you and the collaborating individuals explicitly listed on your homework assignment. Looking at online solutions from previous semesters or other students is forbidden, as is sharing of your solutions with others. Furthermore, students all have an affirmative duty to report possible cases of cheating or unauthorized communication to the course staff, immediately. Acknowledgement of and failure to report cheating implicates the bystander since this is academic misconduct. Cheating hurts us all and engineering ethics requires us to point out wrongdoing when we are aware of it.

Collaboration

You are encouraged to collaborate on homeworks with others; however, this collaboration must be limited to high-level discussion. All coding must be done on your own, and you should not discuss specific solutions or look at another’s code. Similarly, you may use books or online resources to help solve homework problems, but you must always credit all such sources and you must never copy material verbatim. You must explicitly acknowledge everyone whom you have worked with or who has given you any significant ideas about the homework.

Grading

182 students will be graded with the following weights: 60% from homework grades, 20% from the first midterm, and 20% from the second midterm.

282A students will be graded with the following weights: 60% from homework grades, 15% from the first midterm, and 25% from the final project.