CS 125 Fall 2018 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.

We suggest that you add our shared calendar to your calendaring program. If you are not using a calendaring program, we suggest that you start using a calendaring program.

We don’t maintain separate calendars for labs, so this calendar is only for collective class events: lectures, office hours, quizzes, MP deadlines, and other events that are relevant to the entire class.

This fall lectures are being held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9–9:50AM in beautiful and historic Foellinger Auditorium 3. Please attend and participate in lecture! And please refer to the information below for our definition of lecture participation. All lecture slides are posted online for use during class and review afterward.

Lecture videos will be posted online. Feel free to view them if you are absent or need to review.

Please attend and participate in the lab that you are registered for. You will not receive credit for participation in the wrong lab.

Office hours are held by our 99 course assistants and our 12 TAs. They are on the calendar and pretty much all day every day, except for Tuesday and Wednesday when we’re busy with labs. See the resources page for more details.

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.

At times, I may even ask you to post on the forum if a good question or observation comes out of a conversation that we have together. That way everyone can learn what you just did, and I don’t need to answer the same question repeatedly. If I ask you to do this, please do.

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:

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

These weights are designed to reflect the amount of time that students spend on each part of the class. They are also evenly balanced between points earned in controlled environments (quizzes, midterms, participation) and uncontrolled environments (MPs and homework). You will spend most of your time completing the MPs and homework problems. That is where you will get the practice that turns you into a computer scientist. The quizzes and midterms give us a chance to evaluate your abilities in a controlled setting.

Details about each grade component are included below.

To account for illness, absence, forgetfulness, mistakes, temporary stupidity, and other normal life events, we will drop a few of your lowest scores for all course components except the midterms. The table below summarizes the drop policy for course component:

So, for example, we will assign 8 MPs and drop your lowest 1 score. We will track participation in 15 labs and drop your lowest 3 scores. We will assign 50 homework problems and drop your lowest 10 scores.

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.

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.

We do not maintain grade components on Compass 6. CS 125 maintains its own grading and statistics interface which you will use throughout the semester.

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. And coming to office hours.

It is extremely important that you keep up with the MPs. CS 125 moves quickly, and if you get behind early you will quickly find yourself lost and unable to complete the later assignments. This is the number one source of student lack of success in the course.

As a result, the late submission policy is designed to reward students that do a fair amount of work before the deadline. Here are the details of the policy:

Before starting the homework you will need to log on to PrairieLearn with your @illinois.edu email address and join the CS 125 Fall 2018 course. Access to the homework is unrelated to forum access and you can begin work on the homework as soon as you register.

Quiz questions are a mix of multiple-choice questions drawn from lecture and small programming problems. Many of the small programming questions that we use on the quizzes will reappear on later homework assignments. Or problems from the homework assignments may appear on quizzes.

You only get one or two attempts at the multiple choice questions. But you will have unlimited attempts at the programming problems without losing credit. At this stage, we want you to practice—and we won’t penalize you for practicing. However, obviously you do not have an unlimited amount of time.

The multiple-choice questions should be easy if you have been coming to and participating in lecture. You may find the programming questions more of a challenge. Programming in the CBTF is quite different from programming on the MPs. You don’t have unlimited time or access to resources such as the course staff or the internet. However, we believe that there are small programming tasks that you should be able to complete as the semester goes on without needing to look up things online or ask for help. That said, generally the programming challenges that appear on the quizzes will be considerably easier than the MP that you are working on at the same point in the semester.

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, starting on Tuesday and ending on Thursday each week. All quizzes are posted on the course calendar.

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.

Do not contact the course staff regarding missed quizzes. 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. However, we will drop your lowest 2 quiz scores when computing the quiz component of your final grade.

If you do miss a scheduled quiz and can retake it within the time window, you can contact the CBTF to attempt to reschedule. There are no guarantees though. The CBTF is busy and they may not be able to accommodate you if you miss your initial appointment. The best approach is to not do that.

The policies of the CBTF are the policies of this course, and academic integrity infractions related to the CBTF are infractions in this course.

Any problem with testing in the CBTF must be reported to CBTF staff at the time the problem occurs. If you do not inform a proctor of a problem during the test then you forfeit all rights to redress.

If you believe that you have spotted a problem with a quiz question, please use PrairieLearn’s built-in issue reporting to report the issue to the course staff. Note that you have to be in the CBTF to access our quizzes and report problems. At that point we will do one of the following things:

We will regularly review the answers to difficult quiz questions in class to ensure that everyone has a chance to learn from their mistakes.

Do not contact the course staff regarding missed labs. We do not excuse individual absences. Instead, any missed labs are covered by the dropped grade policy.

To receive participation points for each lab, you have to do three things:

Before you leave lab you should check your lab participation score on our grading interface to ensure that you received participation credit. TAs will not change lab participation scores after the lab ends.

Do not contact the course staff regarding missed lectures. We do not excuse individual absences. Instead, any missed lectures are covered by the dropped grade policy.

To receive participation points for each lecture, you have to do three things:

The definition of follow along is "to move or proceed in accord or in unison with someone." Following along with the slides means that when the presentation slide changes, you change the one you are looking at as well. Both the amount of time you have to notice that the slide has changed and the overall percent of slides that you need to track are very generous. If you are paying attention, you should not have a hard time earning participation credit for each lecture.

All work submitted for CS 125 must be your own. Cheating in CS 125 may result in a grade reduction, your removal from the CS program, or from the University of Illinois. We have many bright, honest students that want to learn computer science. We don’t need to waste time and energy on cheaters that don’t want to learn.

Specifically, the following activities constitute cheating and will be dealt with according to relevant departmental and university policies. You may not:

We will run cheating detection software on all submitted student work. These programs are extremely accurate, and any evidence of cheating that they uncover will initiate academic integrity violation proceedings. In Spring 2018 we filed 27 FAIR violations almost all of which resulted a letter grade reduction. We are serious about this, and ask you to be serious about learning.

CS 125 is a fast-moving and demanding course. You signed up to learn computer science and programming for 15 weeks, and we do our best to give you your money’s worth.

One of the consequences of this is that it is hard to catch up if you have a significant illness or other problem mid-semester. We will give extensions on the MPs and other assignments to accommodate unforeseen short-term circumstances. But if you are struggling with a larger issue, we may encourage you to withdraw and enroll again next semester.

Note that, to receive an extension you should approach the course staff before the relevant deadline. Except in exceptional cases 11 we will not grant requests for extensions or other accommodations after the relevant deadline has passed.

We are more that happy to make arrangements to help accommodate students with learning disabilities or other challenges. However, we ask that you assist us by informing us of your situation as soon as possible. We will be much more accommodating of requests received before the relevant assessment or deadlines, rather than after. The earlier in the semester you can let us know what kind of help you need, the better prepared we can be to provide it effectively. Please use this web form to ensure that we have your Letter of Accommodation on file.

Note that in many cases your letter of accommodation will require that you request accommodations before or on the relevant deadlines. If you fail to do so, we will not consider late requests. Part of our job in ensuring that you—and every CS 125 student—succeeds in the course is keeping you on track throughout the semester. By the time the end of the semester rolls around, it is far to late to begin asking for deadline extension and completing missed assignments.

As far as our quizzes in the CBTF, if you have accommodations identified by the Division of Rehabilitation-Education Services (DRES) for quizzes and midterms, please take your Letter of Accommodation to the CBTF proctors in person before you make your first reservation. The proctors will advise you as to whether the CBTF provides your accommodations or whether you will need to make other arrangements.

Our course assistants are so excited about computer science that they are teaching you to learn more! Please treat them accordingly—with a lot of appreciation!

Our course developers do not hold office hours or help with labs. But they are working hard behind the scenes to make CS 125 better this semester and in the future.