CS 125 Spring 2020 Syllabus

From the official catalog description:

There is no required textbook for CS 125. We make all of the materials you need available online—including lecture slides, lab handouts, and MP descriptions. We also maintain a 2 list of available online learning resources that may help supplement the materials we will provide you.

However, this semester we will be reading Coders by Clive Thompson together, and there will be several quiz questions on the book each week. Coders is both a fun read and an invaluable introduction to the technology community. It will help you better understand both how computer science has changed the world, and how it may change you—both for the better and for the not better. You can acquire a paper or electronic copy of Coders for under $15.

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.

Here are answers to some commonly-asked questions about CS 125.

We suggest that you add our shared calendar to your calendaring program 4 We don’t maintain separate calendars for labs, so this calendar is only for collective class events: lectures, office hours, quizzes, MP checkpoint deadlines, and other events that are relevant to the entire class.

This spring lectures are being held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10–10:50AM in beautiful and historic Lincoln Hall. 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 led by our 5 office hour captains and staffed by 5 course associates and 146 course assistants. This spring we’ll be holding office hours every day but Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 from 12–8PM in Siebel 0403. But if in doubt, check the calendar. 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 divided between points earned in controlled environments (quizzes and midterms, participation) and uncontrolled environments (MP and homework). You will spend most of your time completing the MP 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 track participation in 15 labs and drop your lowest 3 scores. We will assign 70 homework problems and drop your lowest 8 scores. The machine project has 6 checkpoints and we not drop any checkpoint 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 9. CS 125 maintains its own grading and statistics interface which you will use throughout the semester.

Many other programming courses give a series of unconnected programming assignments. In prior semesters CS 125 did this as well and referred to each as a machine problem.

However, last fall we replaced the multiple unconnected assignments with a single machine project: an Android application that you will complete in parts over the course of most of the semester. Don’t worry—if you don’t finish one part, we have ways to grade you future work independently of that incomplete component. But we do hope that this format will encourage you to fix up and improve the parts of the project that you completed previously.

Completing a single longer project will better prepare you for future programming tasks—both in industry and side projects that you may do on your own. It is rare in software development to start something from scratch, work on it for only a few weeks, and then never touch it again. What is more normal is to work on more interesting and larger pieces of code for months or even years—starting with something simple and then gradually adding features and complexity, just as you will do this semester. You are forced to live with your mistakes and decisions, but also end up creating something much more significant.

To reduce load on office hours and provide you with better support around checkpoint deadlines, this semester we will divide the class in half. The Blue Group will have MP checkpoint deadlines on Sundays at 11:59PM. The Orange Group will have MP checkpoint deadlines on Mondays at 11:59PM. Your group assignment will be determined by your lab section.

Note that this means that, over the course of the semester, the Orange Group has exactly 24 hours more to complete the entire machine project. We consider the 50% reduction in peak office hour load to be sufficient to justify this small difference. Feel free to discuss this on the forum if it makes you uncomfortable.

To help you conquer the large machine project, we will break it down into checkpoints that will happen roughly once every two weeks once the project begins. Each checkpoint is 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 that component of 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. So as soon as each checkpoint 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 checkpoint 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 MP checkpoints than starting early. And coming to office hours.

It is extremely important that you keep up with the MP. 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 reason students fail CS 125.

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 Spring 2020 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 machine project programming. 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 checkpoint 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 Monday and ending on Wednesday 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 checkpoint (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. And as a reminder, there will be a few questions on each quiz on that week’s assigned reading from Coders.

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.

In comparison to the weekly quizzes, the midterms will be more comprehensive. Anything covered up to that point in the semester is fair game, with particular emphasis given to the material covered since the last midterm. Finally, you should expect about half or more of the points on each midterm to be for auto-graded programming problems. This may be more than a typical weekly quiz.

Midterm dates are posted on the course calendar. You must make arrangements to take each midterm in the CBTF. If you miss a midterm, you will receive a zero.

Preparing for the midterms is similar to preparation for a weekly quiz: review the lecture materials, practice the homework problems, and ensure that you are comfortable with the material covered on the MP.

Note that CS 125 does not have a final exam. We will hold an (optional) final project fair on reading day for you to show off your cool new Android apps and that joyful event will be the end of the course.

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 Fall 2019 we filed 26 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 MP 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 14 we will not grant requests for extensions or other accommodations after the relevant deadline has passed.

We are more than 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.

The University of Illinois is committed to equal opportunity for all persons, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, creed, age, ancestry, national origin, handicap, sexual orientation, political affiliation, marital status, developmental disability, or arrest or conviction record. We value diversity in all of its definitions, including who we are, how we think, and what we do. We cultivate an accessible, inclusive, and equitable culture where everyone can pursue their passions and reach their potential in an intellectually stimulating and respectful environment. We will continue to create an inclusive campus culture where different perspectives are respected and individuals feel valued.

The Office of Minority Student Affairs' (OMSA) Academic Services Center (ASC) offers free tutoring and academic services. Matched and drop-in tutoring along with Supplemental Instruction (SI), collaborative learning/study groups, and academic skills workshops are among the services featured in the OMSA ASC. OMSA’s services are designed to help students achieve in college. The level of rigor at the University of Illinois is different than in high school or community college. No matter how you performed before attending Illinois, there is always room to examine and hone your study skills. To earn more about these services, visit https://omsa.illinois.edu/programs/tutoring/.

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.