15b S05 Syllabus

Attendance of lectures is not required, but is highly recommended. You will be responsible for all material covered during lecture. Missing class can make the projects and exams especially difficult. If I verbally change the requirements of a project during lecture, you are responsible for meeting the new requirements. If you miss a class make sure you get notes from another student.

Attendance of labs is REQUIRED. For each 3 unexcused absenses, your course grade will be lowered one notch. For example, if you get a B in the course but miss 4 labs, you will get a B-. If you miss 7 labs you would get a C+.

Grading is relative. The students that do the best work will get an A, the students that don’t do as well will get a B, and so on. I do not follow the traditional percentage grades of 90% = A, 80% = B, etc., and I do not grade on a curve that defines how many students will receive each grade.

Students will receive a letter grade A-F (4.0 – 0.0) for each category (1 for exams, 1 for projects). The course grade will be a weighted average of the individual letter grades (see category percentages below). This mechanism allows for relative grading of each category (e.g., if the best score on the exams is a 60%, that student will probably receive an A for the exams, thus an A (not the 60%) will be averaged with the student’s other grades). This grading mechanism means that you have to get an A on both the assignments and the exams to get an A in the course.

I will routinely post the grading spreadsheet (grades). If you are not happy with a grade, talk to me immediately. If you do not talk to me within a week of the posting of a grade, I will assume you think the grade is fair and accurate, and you will lose your right to dispute the grade.

The midterm exams and final will have equal weight. The final will be cumulative. All exams will cover material from the lecture, the textbook and the programming projects. The exam dates and exams from prior semesters is on the exams page.

As an example of how I distribute grades, when I taught 15b in Fall 2002 I gave the following percentages of each letter grade. All the people that failed, gave up--they stopped turning in assignments, and stopped attending lecture.

A 12%
A-    10%
B+    13%
B      13%
B-    3%
C+   3%
C    5%
C- 3%
D+    5%
D   5%
F      28%

There will be 7 programming assignments due at approximately 2 week intervals starting Friday September 3.

The easier assignments will be worth a smaller percentage of your grade than the harder assignments.

I will routinely communicate with the class via e-mail. I will use your ECST e-mail. If you do not routinely read your ECST e-mail, you should create a .forward file to forward your ECST e-mail to the account you routinely read. The size of your ECST mailboxes is limited. If you let too much mail build up, you will not be able to receive new mail and thus might miss some important class information.

You are required to read e-mail I send to the class. Due to the nature of programming, e-mail is the best way to send updates on assignments. I suggest that you make sure your e-mail is working (by comparing e-mail you've received from me to that posted on the class web site) and that you check the class e-mail when working on class assignments and before exams.

I will fail students who cheat. I do not give second chances. It is not a good idea to cheat in my class. Don't underestimate my ability to catch people who cheat, I catch cheaters every semester.

I expect all students to follow the University’s honesty policies (http://www.csuchico.edu/sjd/discipline/honesty.html). I will fail students who do not follow these policies, even if they don’t understand them. It is your responsibility to understand these policies.

The bottom line is that you must do all the assignments on your own. Turning in code that anyone else wrote is cheating and will result in failing the course. Here are some examples of cheating:

copying code from another student
copying code from a book
copying code from the internet
paying someone else to write your code
buying code
stealing code
letting someone steal your code (e.g. giving out your password, incorrect file protection)
giving your code to another student (both giving code and taking code are forms of cheating)
helping another student so much that he/she is not doing the assignment (both helping too much and getting helped too much are forms of cheating)

On the other hand, you are allowed to discuss projects and you may get help finding bugs. Just make sure you don't get so much help that you are no longer doing the work.

· Increase the students’ technical maturity level
· Increase the students’ programming ability