CS161: Object Oriented Problem Solving
Together, the GTA's and I have six office-hour sessions per week so that we can help you in person. You can also ask for help when the lecture part of your recitation is over. You can also attend a recitation you are not assigned to if you bring your own laptop, to avoid displacing someone who assigned to the recitation from the lab machines. If you wait until the recitation lecture is finished, or come after it is finished, you can call the GTA over for help. Finally, many of the lab attendants are knowledgeable about programming, so you may be able to get help from them at odd hours.
You can email me if you have a confidential matter other than grades that you can't discuss in front of others. If you want to talk about your grades, the GTA's and I can take the discussion out of earshot of others.
I have also tentatively put up a discussion board where questions can be posted to the T.A.'s and me on RamCT. The questions and our answers to them will be visible to everybody. Since there are so many people in the class, please make sure your question isn't answered on the course web pages, hasn't already been answered on the discussion board, and is of interest to others. (Questions about why your program doesn't work should be saved for office hours or recitations.)
Another reason you are expected to do the readings before class is that classroom time is a scarce resource that must be shared by your classmates. We don't want to waste some of it repeating trivial issues, such as basic definitions, that everybody is capable of understanding from the text.
Revisit the same material many times over many days, refining and simplifying your understanding of it each time, asking yourself questions about it.
Each homework assignment will consist of written work and/or programs. On the programs, I often supply a menu and a program body that gets you out of mundane programming chores. The menu allows me to test different modules that need to be completed, so that I can award partial credit for working modules. (Non-working modules don't count.) Don't change the I/O interface that I supply, since I will use an I/O script to test it. Generally, the code that you will have to write in a module is not lengthy, but some of the modules require you to solve a clever algorithms problem.
I will often give a homework quiz on the homework on the due date. These quizzes are worth as much as the homework itself. This is to ensure that people are making responsible use of the permission to talk with other students about the homeworks. When the homework is a programming assignment, it is not enough to have managed to write the program and get it working. Make sure you can pass the quiz by deleting the modules you have written and re-creating them quickly from memory. This will increase your fluency with programming syntax and the thought processes that lead to correct algorithms.
I don't accept late homeworks, since I often give out solutions right after they're due. To get you out of any unforeseen mishaps, I will throw out your two lowest homework grades from each category except the midterm and final. Even if you give us a legitimate reason for turning a homework in late or missing a quiz, we will tell you to use these "freebies." The two freebies are an effort to protect you from being hurt by routine illnesses, family issues, computer crashes at the last minute, etc. We will leave it to you to manage them. We do not have the resources to handle exceptions in a class this size, and granting exceptions to this rule raises fairness issues. Do not ask for an exception even if you have a legitimate excuse. Instead, use your freebie. Our advice is to keep the freebies in reserve for as long as possible so that you aren't stuck without one when you really need it. Some students still have their freebies at the end of the semester, so they use it to skip assignments during the end-of-semester crunch. There is nothing wrong with this because you don't need an excuse to use your freebie. You will still be responsible on exams for material from a homework you missed or skipped.
The grading will be determined as follows:
Homework and exam grades are curved to give a distribution of grades that is consistent with those in other freshman-level undergraduate classes at CSU.
Each assignment or exam is assigned a score, and then the curved grade from 0 to 12. A 12 means you got an A+, an 11 means you got an A, a 10 means you got an A-, a 9 means you got a B+, etc., down to 2 for a D, 1 for a D-, and 0 for an F. Your semester grade is the weighted average of the homework, quiz, and exam grades, after freebies have been tossed out, when they are weighted as described above. I will round this to the nearest integer, and translate this to the grade that it corresponds to.
For example, suppose your sequence of homework grades is (9,7,5,11,0,8,12,10,8). These are codes for your sequence of letter grades: (B+, B-, C, A, F, B, A+, A-, B). After dropping the two lowest, they are (9,7,11,8,12,10,8), which gives you a homework average of 9.29. This is between a B+ and an A-. Suppose your homework quiz averages and quizzes on homeworks and and readings which are computed similarly, are 8.5 (B/B+) and 7.3, (between a B- and a B), your midterm is an 8 (B) and final is a 10 (A-). Summarizing, you got:
The weighted average of these five grades is $9.29 * 0.2 + 8.5 *0.2 + 7.3 * 0.1 + 8 * 0.2 + 10 * 0.3$ $= 8.888$ Rounding this to the nearest integer, we get your final grade for the course, 9.0, a B+. If your average had been an 8.4, it would have rounded down to an 8.0, a B.
The problems I give on homeworks range from extremely easy to extremely hard. A common misconception is that I expect you to solve all of them successfully. You should view each problem as an opportunity to explore a topic, try to come up with your own ideas, and score some points if you're successful at finding a solution. They are not intended to be stressful, and you should try to have fun with them. If you can engage your curiosity, you will be more likely to ask yourself questions that will lead you to a solution and anticipate questions that I might ask about on the exams.
Remember that the grades are curved, and that if you find a problem hard, it is likely that many of your classmates won't get solutions to it either. This will allow you to skip a problem if it is taking too long, but be sure to attempt all of the homework problems, since the posted solutions will be a lot more instructive if you have attempted the problems first. This will help you anticipate exam questions, which are often variants of problems you've seen on homeworks.
Because the attendance is quite large and answers will require detailed study to critique and grade effectively, we will choose a subset of assigned homework problems to grade on each assignment. We will announce the subset after they are turned in. The subset will consist of a mixture of easy, medium, and hard problems. All exam problems will be graded except when there is a widespread misunderstanding or other reason to toss a problem out.
Student Responsibilities:
Please familiarize yourself with the departmental policies on academic integrity.
According to departmental policy, I am supposed to post the Departmental Code of Conduct on this page.