CS 125 Fall 2017 Syllabus

From the official catalog description:

CS 125 works on both conceptual and skill-based levels. We teach you how to think, and we teach you how to do.

Some students in CS 125 have no experience with computer science. Others have been programming for years. We will do our best to accommodate both groups.

CS 125 meets the University of Illinois General Education Requirements in the Quantitative Reasoning 1 category.

There are two primary sources of information for CS 125:

If you have a question about the class, first look on the main course website—the one that you are currently browsing. Then, search the forum—maybe another student has asked your question and we’ve already answered it. If you still can’t find an answer, post your question on the forum.

As a student at the University of Illinois you are responsible for email sent to your @illinois.edu email address. We will occasionally use a course email list to send important announcements. So messages in your inbox might say things like: "There’s a quiz tomorrow" or "There’s a fire alarm in Siebel and class is canceled." We all get too much email, but learning to manage it is a fact of modern life. Feel free to talk to the course staff if you want tips.

As a student in CS 125 you are responsible for messages posted in the announcements category of the forum. These announcements are important and we will frequently post in this category in lieu of using email. You can configure Discourse to send emails each time a topic is created in a specific category. We would suggest that you do that—or plan on visiting the forum each and every day. In fact, both are good ideas.

This is not because we don’t like you or don’t like email. It’s simply because there are a lot of you, a much smaller number of us, and many of the questions that you have are shared by other students. If you email us, we can answer your question to one person: you. If you post on the forum, we can answer your question to the entire class. And you may find that your question has already been answered, or that another student can answer it for you.

Here is a general guide about how to contact the course staff:

Can you see a pattern emerging here?

In contrast, here are some cases where you can and should contact the course instructors:

The CS 125 MPs are designed to take a significant amount of time. So you should arrange your schedule so that you can devote a significant amount of time on them. Do not start the night before. Not only will it be unlikely that you will complete the MP, but you will also be unlikely to be able to get help when you get stuck.

Learning to program is like learning other skills—how to play an instrument, throw a perfect spiral, cook the perfect omelete, or learn another human language. You have to do it every day. You can’t expect to complete a marathon or perform at Carnegie Hall if you start practicing the night before. As soon as each MP is released, sit down and spend a few hours on it. And then do that the next day, and the day after that. If you start early and work often, you will have no problem completing the MP before the deadline. If it turns out to be easy for you, you’ll be done early and can relax and help other students. If it turns out to be more difficult, you’ll know early on and be able to budget your time according to complete it on time. Nothing correlates more strongly with success on the MPs than starting early.

This semester we will use two different MP regrading policies—one for MPs 1–3, the second for MPs 4 and onward.

The CBTF is located in the basement of Grainger Library. You can use this link to sign up to take each quiz. Using the CBTF allows us to provide you with flexibility in scheduling your weekly quizzes. You can take each quiz over a range of dates and times, usually Friday through Tuesday.

Quizzes focus on material covered that week, but all material covered that semester is fair game. The best way to prepare for a quiz is to participate in class that week. Attend lectures and participate, attend labs and participate, work on the assigned MP (if any), and ask and answer questions on the forum. If you engage with the course content on a daily basis, you will not need to cram material right before you take the quiz.

Because you have a several day window to complete each quiz, we expect that you will be able to work around most other commitments and even short illnesses. As a result, if you miss a quiz you will be subject to the following penalties:

Your total score in CS 125 is broken down as follows:

Letter grades in CS 125 are assigned based on how well you do, not based on your performance relative to other students. We have an unlimited number of A grades that we can hand out. If everyone in the learns all of the material to our satisfaction, everyone in the class will make an A.

Inevitably the difficulty of various parts of the course varies from semester to semester. So we do not determine the final grading scale until we examine all scores at the end of the semester. During the semester, do not ask us to estimate your grade or tell you how well you need to do on an assignment to make a certain grade. The fact that the final exam is worth 25% of your grade also makes it pointless to try to project your final grade midway through the course.

Instead, focus on learning the material to the best of your ability. Programming in particular is a skill—the more you do, the better you get at it. So you should focus on doing as much as you need to get good at it, rather than the minimum necessary to make a particular grade.

However, the following table can be used to provide you with a rough approximation of the letter grade that you will receive:

We do not continuously maintain course grades on Compass. We will post final letter grades there at the end of the term.