Tuesday and Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.,
ENG 231 (ACTIVE Center) ITE 233.
Course website: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/undergraduate/471/spring14/
Course schedule
In addition to regular office hours, I maintain a semi-open-door policy: you should feel to stop by to ask questions, or just say hello, whenever my door is open (which it generally will be unless I am out of the office, in a meeting, or deep in thought). If the door is partially ajar, feel free to interrupt if you have a pressing concern. If the door is closed, please do not knock unless it is a genuine emergency. (Also, I'm not that great at remembering names, so please don't be offended if I ask you several times to re-introduce yourself!) I will also make a concerted effort to answer e-mail and Piazza posts within 24 hours (or no later than Monday for email/posts sent over the weekend). I am online a lot and make student emails my top priority during the semester, so you may well receive a response within just a few minutes -- however, this is not guaranteed!
You should join the class Piazza discussion board by accepting the invitation that you should have received by email.
VERY IMPORTANT: Class announcements, hints, and discussion of assignments will be posted on the Piazza site. You are responsible for knowing the information that is posted there. You should be sure to set your email preferences so that the messages will come regularly to an account that you actually read. "I didn't see that email" is not a valid excuse for being unaware of information that was announced on Piazza.
You can also post questions on Piazza that can be answered by your fellow students and/or TA and professor. General questions (i.e., anything that another student may also be wondering about) should be posted here (rather than sent to the professor individually), so that everyone will be able to benefit from the answers. Responses posted by students to questions on Piazza must follow the academic integrity guidelines outlined above, so you should check with the instructor and/or TA before posting answers to questions about homework. (For example, posting a clarification to the meaning of a question is probably OK, but posting hints about the answer is not.)
Individual concerns, requests for extensions, questions about individual grades, and the like should be sent to the instructor and/or the TA as appropriate (preferably to both of us). You can send these by email or through Piazza (using "New Post", then selecting the "Post to Individual Student(s)/Instructors)" option).
| Homework (six biweekly assignments that may be worked on individually or in small groups (up to 3 students)) | 36% |
| Course project | 25% |
| Midterm exam | 14% |
| Final exam | 20% |
| Class participation (regular attendance and active engagement) | 5% |
Please refer to the class grading policy.
"Pre-Reading" should be done before class, and the reading guide explains what you should be getting out of the reading. I will not lecture on that basic material, although I may offer a brief review and am always willing to answer questions. We will sometimes have a "group Piazza quiz" to review and test your understanding of those concepts; those quizzes will not be graded (although your preparedness and engagement in the quizzes may factor into your class participation grade).
"Reading" is the material that will be on the exams. Generally speaking, this reading is a superset of the pre-reading, and I will give at least an overview lecture of the additional content in the reading. The reading guide contains some commentary on what will and won't be emphasized on the exam.
Students may work on homework assignments individually or in groups of up to three students. It is in your best interest to work on the homeworks as a group -- that is, physically together in one place, working on all of the problems as a group, making sure that every student fully understands the solutions. The exams will mostly have very similar types of questions to the homework problems, so if you split up the homework and each work on a problem independently, you are undermining the intention of the homeworks, which is for you to learn the concepts, apply them in practice, and prepare for the exams.
For written homeworks and homework sections, you may produce a single solution. You only need to submit one hardcopy of that group solution, with everyone's name on the first page.
For programming homeworks and homework sections, you must each individually implement the solutions. You may consult with the members of your homework group to get help and debug the code, but your solution should be your own (i.e., you may not just copy code from another student, or write code for another student). You may not show your code to, or get help from, anyone other than the students in your group, the instructor, the TA, and help center or LRC tutors. See below for submission requirements.
Each assignment will have a due date and is expected to be turned in on time. Late homeworks will be assessed a penalty as follows:
Homeworks will be due as hardcopy (typed or neatly handwritten) at the beginning of class on the due date. That is, an assignment due on a Thursday will be due at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, and must be turned in in class. If you will miss class, you must arrange for your homework to be turned in to the instructor or TA during or before class. There is a ten-minute grace period, but if you show up later than that, the late penalty will be assessed. If an emergency arises and you are absolutely unable to attend class, you may send me your homework via email as a "placeholder"; a hardcopy must still be submitted to me (under my office door or handed to me or the TA) within 24 hours to avoid the late penalty.
Programming assignments must be submitted both as hardcopy and via the submit system on the gl machines. Documentation on the submit facility is available at http://www.gl.umbc.edu/submit/ . The project name for the course is "cmsc471" (lower case).
The implementation of the programming assignments must be your own work. If you are working in a group, the guidelines discussed above apply (the code must be your own but you can show your code to a group member and ask them to help you figure out what is wrong with it). If you are stumped on a particular error, you may consult with someone else; however, if you consult with someone other than the instructor, the TA, or the help center, you must place a comment in your code near the point of the error, stating the source and scope of the help you received. Reasonable help will not affect your grade; failure to cite your sources is academically dishonest, and will be dealt with severely.
Written answers on essay questions for homeworks and exams must be your
own work.
If you wish to quote a source, you must do so explicitly at the
point of the quotation, with proper citation. Plagiarism of any source,
including another student's work, is not acceptable.
Any violation of the academic honesty policy will result in a minimum penalty of a zero grade for that assignment. Additional penalties, depending on the severity of the offense, may include a reduced or failing grade for the class.