Study groups and student collaboration

I encourage knowledge sharing between members of the class. Forming/joining a study group to talk through material with is a great way to help yourself learn the material. That said, you are each responsible for learning the material and doing your own work. Assignments and quizzes are NOT GROUP PROJECTS and are to be done individually. I do reserve the right to assign a "0" score on any material that is clearly plagiarized or for which a student cannot explain their answers. All campus academic policies apply and will be enforced.

In general, I support collaboration that helps students develop their own understanding of the material and independently demonstrate that understanding. Collaboration that deprives students of a chance to develop a real understanding of the material, or that involves a student submitting work that demonstrates someone else's understanding instead of their own, is not permitted. Here are some examples of allowable forms of collaboration:

• Helping someone work through problems on a practice activity or showing them how you did a problem.
• Helping someone understand what an assignment question is asking about and pointing them.
• Posting your work for a practice problem and asking for help identifying where the error is.
• Asking about why your computer code might be producing a certain error message and posting a single line that contains the error message. (Assuming the problem is more than a single line of code).
• Talking in general about the approach you used for a an assignment problem, or the ideas you talked about in a question that involves a short answer.

And here are some examples that are not permissible:

• Showing your assignment to someone so they can see "how you did it".
• Asking another student to walk you through solving an assignment question.
• Posting your complete code for an assignment question and asking "why doesn't it work?".
• Posting your completed assignments on the web.
• Working with someone on a quiz.

Weekly Assignments

Assignments are posted as two files. The assignment questions are provided as a PDF. Once the week starts I will announce if there are any changes (i.e. someone points out a typo or unclear question), but to avoid confusion I recommend NOT making your own copy of this document - the one on the website will always be up to date. A separate answer document is provided in .docx (MS Word) format. You should download your own copy of that and use it to answer questions. If you do not have MS Word, you can download LibreOffice for free and use those to work with the documents.

You can turn in updated versions of any of the assignment any time before they are graded. If I see multiple submissions from one student, I will grade the one with the latest date on it (and ONLY that one - it must be a complete submission). The scores for assignments turned in up to one week late are capped at 70% of the possible points. Work turned in more than one week late will receive no points.

Assignments are generally graded and returned within a few days of the due date. I use grading rubrics that will help you identify correct answers and places where you went wrong. your review in the eLearn class site as soon as your assignment is graded. There is often partial credit available for questions so you should always make an attempt at a response.

Programming Tutorial Completion / Participation

10% of your grade is for completion of specific tutorials and activities. For online students, this will primarily be the programming tutorials assigned each week. For in person sections, participation in group learning activities will also be included in your practice/participation grade. Each of these will be worth the same as one programming tutorial.

Each programming tutorial consists of a number of sections that you will complete online. Each of these sections is scored as either completed or not. Your participation score for a week will be based on the number of sections completed - 12 completed out of 15 assigned would be 80%. These practice assignments must be completed during the week assigned to earn credit.

These activities may not be made up or submitted late. That said, each of these activities will represent less than 1% of your final grade - should you have to miss one or two of them it will have minimal direct impact on your grade.

There will be other practice activities that are not scored. I often provide worksheets of problems designed to help you develop an understanding of the material along with keys you can use to check your work. These are not collected, but completion of these activities is still expected and assignments/quizzes will be based off of them.

Quizzes and Final Exam

The quizzes and exams for CS160 are "open book"; however, they are strictly time limited, and are NOT group projects. If you know the material ahead of time then there should be sufficient time to complete the quiz/exam. But if you resort to looking things up during the quiz, you will almost certainly run out of time. Quizzes and the final will be taken by everyone during a set exam time window (usually a 3-4 day period). You can take the exam anytime and anyplace during the availability window; as long as you have access to a computer, browser, and the Internet.

There are no makeups of quizzes or final. Quizzes are generally graded and available for review within 3 days of the end of the quiz period. I do not release the graded quiz until the quiz period has ended as other students may not have completed the quiz. Please do not ask questions about the quiz in the discussion board until the entire quiz period has ended.

Final Grade Calculation

The weekly assignments are all equally weighted and worth 40% of your final grade; practice activity completion (or "participation") is worth 10% of your grade; the quizzes are also equally weighted and worth 30% of your final grade; and the final exam is worth 20% of your final grade. No extra credit is available in this class.

Graded course components	Weight	Letter grade ranges
10 Assignments Practice completion 4 Quizzes Final Exam	40% 10% 30% 20%	A = 90-100% B = 80-89% C = 70-79% D = 60-69% F = Below 60%

Technical Support

Everyone taking this course needs regular access to a working computer (a phone or android tablet are not sufficient) with internet access. If you do not have access to such a computer at home you need to expect to spend a significant amount of time in the open computer lab at Chemeketa or some other location with computers/internet.

You need to already possess the computer skills necessary to operate and maintain your own computer system, access and effectively use the Internet, use e-mail, take on-line exams, create files, save files, open different file types, rename files, upload files, download files. I am willing to spend reasonable amounts of time helping you with technical problems during my office hours, but do not otherwise provide technical support.

Technical issues other than outages of Chemeketa's servers will NOT be accepted as an excuse for missing deadlines.

Class Communication

Communication on all general class related issues are to be done in the class discussion board in eLearn. Any general questions received via email will be posted to and answered there. Do use email for personal questions about things like your grade, feedback on your answer for particular questions,etc...

Discussion board and email "netiquette":

• Make a personal commitment to learning about, understanding, and supporting your peers.
• Assume the best of others in the class and expect the best from them.
• Participate actively in the discussions, having completed the readings and thought about the issues.
• Pay close attention to what your classmates write in their online comments. Ask clarifying questions, when appropriate. These questions are meant to probe and shed new light, not to minimize or devalue comments.
• Think through and re-read your comments before you post them.
• Never make derogatory comments toward another person in the class.
• Do not make sexist, racist, homophobic, or victim-blaming comments at all.
• Disagree with ideas, but do not make personal attacks.