Student Tips And Class Policies

Course Goals and Requirements

The CS161-CS162-CS260 sequence serves as an introduction to computer science, software engineering and programming. It is intended for future Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering students. Although it counts as an AAOT Math/Science credit, it is NOT a recommended class for non-majors looking for science credits - they should take CS160.

This is a transfer class; thus it must meet the requirements defined by the universities that most students transfer into (OSU, Western, PSU, OIT and UofO). The material moves at a quick pace starting from week 1, be ready to work hard early on in this course; if you get behind, it will be very difficult to catch up.

Communication

General questions about the course, content and assignments should be done via the discussion board in eLearn. It is also where I will post any important announcements - you are responsible for checking it regularly. I monitor the board regularly, but if you read a question from another student on the discussion board and think that you can help, please do so! That said, the discussion board is not the appropriate place to post your code and ask "what is wrong???" If you want to ask about code you have written for an assignment, you need to follow the guidelines for "Getting and giving help" listed below.

For questions or issues of a personal nature (your grade, sending me your code to ask a specific question, etc...) please ask in person in class or office hours or use email. I check my email during every office hour, and often in between them - I generally reply to all emails within 24 hours. When emailing a question about your own code, the clearer and more specific you are, the more likely you are to get a clear response to your question. Make sure to describe: what you think the problem is, what you think the problem might be related to, what you have already tried and to include the relevant code. If you email me code with minimal extra information ("it keeps crashing and I don't know why"), expect to just get questions ("What have you tried?") in response.

The Work

Plan on spending 8-12 hours per week working on this course outside of the classroom (12-16 total for online students). Predicting how long it will take to write a computer program can be very difficult to estimate - do not count on being able to block out a set number of hours each week to complete your work. Due dates for the assignments and quizzes are firm, this is not a self paced course. The kinds of assignments for this class include:

CPPLab

CPPLab is a tool we use in CS161/162 to get the little practice essential to really learn how to program. Exercises in it are specifically intended to encourage you to practice throughout the week instead of doing all your practice the night the main assignment is due. You do not receive any points for submitting these assignments late.

CPPLab is graded on a very generous curve... I take the square root of the decimal percent you earn on each assignment - that is your grade on the assignment. (i.e. you solved 3 out of 4 problems. That would be 0.75, but I take square root to get .866 or 86.6%). Your total score is the average of those "curved" scores. (i.e. you get 86.6% on one assignment and 100% on the next, your average is 93.3%).

If you do the math you will notice that scoring 0/4 on one assignment and 4/4 on the next ends up with a significantly lower score than getting 2/4 on both assignments. That is intentional - CPPLab is about trying little bits of code while topics are fresh in your head. You will get more out of doing at least some of each assignment than occaisionally binging.

Moral of the story: These are a small part of your grade, but an essential part of learning the material. Make sure to try each problem, and hopefully get most of the done, but do not spend so much time trying to solve every problem that you don't have time to get the main assignments done.

Weekly Assignments

This is where you demonstrate an ability to solve problems with algorithms and fluently write clean code. You can turn in updated versions of any of the assignments any time before they are due. If I see multiple versions of an assignment,I will grade the one with the latest date on it. Late assignments are worth at MOST 70% of the total, and only for a maximum of 1 week after the due date. Assignments that fail to compile are worth at most 50%.

Make sure to follow any instructions about file names - there are often specific names you must give the files you submit for labs. Do not submit extra files (ex: project files your development environment creates).

Assignments are generally graded and returned within one week of the due date. I use rubrics to provide feedback - these are available for your review in the eLearn class site as soon as your assignment is graded.

Quizzes and Exams

Quizzes will be taken outside of class through elearn. You will have a couple day window to take each quiz. There are no quiz make ups or retakes, though I will replace your lowest quiz with your score on the final if that helps your grade.

The Midterm and Final are pen and paper exams that take place in class - they must be taken on the date scheduled. Online students will have a couple day window to take these exams at an approved testing center. Free test proctoring is offered at Chemeketa: https://www.chemeketa.edu/students/student-services/testing-services/. It is the student's responsibility to make an appointment for testing in the specified window for the midterm and for the final. If you cannot do the testing at Chemeketa, you must get approval for another test site (most colleges offer proctoring services for a small fee). This will likely take a few days to get set up, so make sure to plan ahead!

Study groups and student collaboration

I encourage students to study together and talk about the material in the course. Students are however responsible for doing their own work. Specific advice on what is considered acceptable:

Quizzes:
To be done without any collaboration.
CPPLab practice problems:
Work with whoever you like. It is fine to collaborate in real time with other people. It is not appropriate to share code on the course discussion boards until after an assignment is complete (don't post your code and ask "What is wrong with this?"). See the "Getting and giving help" section below.
Assignments (Weekly assignments):
Assignments are to be done individually. You should not share (email, dropbox, github, etc...) with anyone else - either to ask for help or to attempt to provide it. I will use an automatic tool to scan assignments for code that is duplicated in different submissions. If I have doubts about whether you wrote your own program, I may require you to come to office hours for a "code interview" where I ask you to explain the code, its development, and how you might modify it.

Getting and giving help

You should not share your code with anyone other than me, either as part of asking a question or answering someone else's question. That means you should not ask for help by giving your code to someone (or posting it on the discussion board) and saying "why doesn't this work?". You should never "help" someone by sending them your code and saying "this is how I did it". So how do you give/get help?

  1. Talk general strategy:

    As a Question:"Hey, I know I need to chop up this string, what functions can I use to do that?"

    While giving advice:"I found I had to use two loops so I could solve that problem."

  2. Point someone to examples from the class/book/other resources:

    "Oh, you should check Ch5.8 - it shows how to do that." or I used the StructSample project as a starting point for this project."

  3. Make up random examples using snippets of code not directly related to the assignment. If someone asks "How do you know if string.find() can't find what you are looking for?", you might answer:

    It returns -1, something like this:

    string foo = "something";
int location = foo.find("q");
if(location == -1)
    //it is not there

  4. If you are debugging a syntax error on one line of code, it is reasonable to show/share that line of code. Example: Why does this line of code give me an error that says "expression is not assignable"?
    4 = x;
  5. It is permissable to give someone debugging assistance in a live format (face to face or screensharing). During this process, you will quite likely by necessity see their code. That is OK, but you should help them by helping them track down what is going wrong in their program, not by telling them how to fix their code. If someone has a problem you can't help them work through by talking at a general level, that is a sign they have bitten off too much and once and do not really understand what they have written. Encourage them to back track and focus on a smaller, simpler chunk of work - to find and focus on the first line of code that goes wrong.

Technical Issues

Technical Support

Everyone taking this course needs regular access to a working computer 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.

All of the software used in this course is freely available and can run on Windows, Linux or Macs OS X. Although I am happy to help you troubleshoot software issues in office hours, making sure you have a working development environment is your responsibility.

Development Environment

QtCreator is the software we use in the computer lab. It and the gnu g++ compiler are the official development environment. You should install it at home and become comfortable working with it. You can find instructions for downloading it in the resources tab of my CS161 webpage.

If you chose to use another development environment (XCode, Visual Studio, etc...), you must make sure you know how to use it to produce platform neutral code - i.e. your code must compile on my machine using gcc without any modifications.