Ross McConnell
Phone: (970) 491-7524
Office: 466 Computer Science Building
Office hours: TTh 10:45-11:45; My office hours for CS320 are Tuesdays, 4:45-5:45 and Thursdays 11:45-12:45. If you come to CS320 office hours, I can help you after I've helped the CS320 students. If have the same deal with them about your office hours. If I'm not at my office on Tuesday at 4:45, check in CSB130. Email: my three initials (my middle initial is M) at cs.colostate.edu

• Introduction to Algorithms, Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein, McGraw-Hill, Third Edition (2009)
• Data Structures and Network Algorithms, Robert E. Tarjan, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1983. The book is on back-order; I will bring photocopies of readings to class until it comes in.
• Readings I will bring in about computational geometry and advanced design and analysis of data structures.

CS420 or permission of the instructor

9:30-10:45 Tuesdays and Thursdays, ENGRG B 101

You are expected to do the readings before the corresponding class and come to class with questions that you've gotten stuck on. Bring your textbook to each class. Learning how to read texts and other literature of our field fluently is one of the skills that we want you to develop throughout your career. It takes practice, but once you get good at it, it's surprisingly easy. Come to each lecture with the high-level ideas from the readings and questions from the reading you hope to have answered. Try to spot the answers during the lecture, and ask questions if you aren't satisfied. An important step is then to re-read the corresponding reading and figure out, with the benefit of hindsight, how you could have gotten un-stuck without the help of the lecture.

Revisit the same material many times over many days, refining and simplifying your understanding of it each time, asking yourself questions about it.

The grading will be determined as follows:

• Midterm 30%
• Final 30%
• Homework 40%

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 lowest homework grade. Even if you give me a legitimate reason for turning a homework in late or missing a quiz, I will tell you to use this "freebie". Granting exceptions to this rule raises fairness issues. The need to miss more than this is a reason for a grade penalty even if it was caused by illness, since the grade must reflect the work you did during the semester. The freebie is an effort to protect you from being hurt by routine illnesses, family issues, compute crashes at the last minute, etc. My advice is to keep the freebie in reserve for as long as possible.

Homework and exam grades are curved to give a distribution of grades that is consistent with those in other senior-level undergraduate classes at CSU.

Each assignment or exam is assigned a letter grade from A+ to F. In computing grade averages, I use the following scale: A+ is a 12, A is 11, A- is 10, B+ is 9, B is 8, ..., D+ is 3, D is 2, D- is 1, F is 0. Your semester grade is the numerical average of the homeworks, quizzes, and exams when they are weighted as described above, and rounded to the nearest integer.

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 so that the grade distribution is similar to what it is for other graduate courses in our department, 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 of the amount of work required to grade proofs, after assignments are turned in, I will announce a subset that will be graded. The subset will consist 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:

I encourage you to talk with other students about your assignments and questions, but make sure you write up your actual homework assignments independently. Use your friends as a resource only; using them as a crutch will hurt you on the exams. Any blatant fraud will result in an F in the course that you will not be allowed to remove from your transcript by dropping the course.

Please familiarize yourself with the departmental policies on academic integrity.

In accordance with departmental policy, I am posting the Departmental Code of Conduct on this page.

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