Course Policies

1 Using Piazza

Always feel free to ask anything in a private question, which will be seen only by the instructors and TAs. We may choose to lightly edit the question and make it public if it’s instructive for others to see it.

If you ask a public question, make sure not to share code from your assignment. If you find yourself about to copy/paste code from your assignment into a question and submit it, stop. You are about to violate the academic integrity policy of the course to not share assignment code. Either ask the question privately (and let the staff judge what to share), or find a way to write a sample snippet of code that demonstrates the problem but isn’t directly from your assignment file.

Other questions about course concepts, definitions, logistics, tools, handin, and so on are all fair game for public questions.

Note that the Piazza board is shared across three sections, which share the same assignments and due dates, but not exams and lectures. The content is roughly the same, but if you have a question specific to a lecture (e.g. "What did Joe mean when he said the two insertion approaches from this morning have a subtle tradeoff?"), you should prefix the question summary with your section name, and use your sections folder for the post. So you’d write something like "Section C: Question about lecture this morning."

2 Clickers

We’ll be using clickers for in class exercises, and you’re expected to participate (it’s a portion of your grade). You can buy them at the bookstore, and you can use either version.

2.1 Registration

Note that the clicker id may be an A followed by 7 alphanumeric characters; the student id should be one longer. To register your clicker once you have it, go to https://www1.iclicker.com/register-clicker/ and fill out the form. Your student id should look like A12345678 (an A followed by 8 digits), and you should use your @ucsd.edu email address. You don’t need to re-register if you’ve registered at https://iclicker.com before.

2.2 Rationale

There’s evidence that sitting and listening passively to lecture probably isn’t the best way to teach or learn science. I like to ask questions during class, give you a chance to discuss them, and put some stake in your answer. We’ll use clickers to do this.

2.3 Use and Grading

Typically, there will be 1-2 clicker questions per lecture, based on what we’re discussing or working through. Sometimes you’ll have to read some code and pick the code that does the right thing, or choose a strategy for a program, or figure out what’s wrong with a program on the board. All of these are fundamentally about getting you to practice reading, writing, and reasoning about programs. I’m asking for participation, not correctness – sometimes a clicker question won’t have a right answer or will be to stimulate discussion.

Your proportion of the 10% of clicker points is simply the proportion of clicker questions you answer with 5 missed days worth of clicker points allowed. You are not encouraged to miss 5 lectures; this policy is mainly intended to capture in a broad and fair way various issues with logistics, clicker technology, and reasonable absences.

The formula for calculating this is:

You get a clicker point for each day you participate in clicker questions in lecture (usually doing one or two is sufficient). So yourClickerPoints (which is the number reported in GradeSource) is essentially the number of days you showed up and clicked.

The formula above produces a number between 0 and 1, which is the proportion of the 10% of your score you’ll get from clickers. The most likely value for totalClickerLectures is 28, but this could change due to cancellations, altered schedules, etc.

3 Grading

You will be graded on your in-class performance on clicker questions, your completion of reading activities, the programs you write, and on a midterm and a final.

These will be graded as follows:

• Day-to-day work:

  • 10% In class/clicker activities

  • 10% Reading activities

• Programming:

  • 15% ZyLabs assignments

  • 25% UCSDLabs assignments

• Exams:

  • 15% Midterm

  • 25% Final

90% and above is a guaranteed A, 80% and above is a guaranteed B, 70% and above is a guaranteed C, and 60% and above is a guaranteed D. These thresholds may be lowered (so a 78% may become the minimum for a B, for example), and will not be raised.

In addition, to pass the class, you need to get at least half the points on the final.

4 Late Policy

You can turn in UCSDLabs (but no other work) late, with the following penalties:

• 12 hours late - 5%

• 24 hours late - 10%

• after 24 hours - not accepted

5 Honesty Policy

You must do all of your own work, aided only by course staff and course resources. For example, when you work on a programming assignment, you shouldn’t receive help from other students who aren’t on the course staff, Web forums, old copies of assignments, or existing code on the Web. These are just a few examples – all outside help on code and concepts for assignments is disallowed.

If you are working in an assigned group for a project (e.g. a homework is done in programming pairs), this policy applies on a group basis. That is, you shouldn’t receive help from outside your group and the course’s resources.

This page has some more useful examples of violations of the honesty policy:

http://academicintegrity.ucsd.edu/forms/form-scholarship-agreement.html

We may use both automated and manual methods to check for instances of academic dishonesty, and report violations to the Academic Integrity Office. I encourage you to ask before acting if you’re concerned that something you may do might violate the policy.