CSCI 1300 Computer Science 1

Fall 2011 Class Grading and Other Information

Instructors and Other Resources

Class Plan

We aim the course at a student who has an interest in computing but has never written a computer program. It may surprise you that there are only 18 things that you must learn about our programming language, C++, to write sophisticated programs. Each of these things on its own is simple to understand, and we will cover them all in the first three weeks of class. The fun part comes in learning the design skills and data structures to efficiently and correctly put these individual pieces together into structured programs that solve useful problems. In addition, you will learn other important software engineering concepts including debugging techniques and the effective use of programming style.

Grades, Homework, Exams...

CU Learn
All homework will be submitted through culearn.colorado.edu. All scores will be recorded there, too. Submission instructions (including directions for late submissions) are at www.portmain.com/intro/submit.html.

Working Alone
You may talk with other students and instructors about the assignments, but you may not look at or copy code written by others unless the assignment explicitly allows group work. The penalty for violating this code is an F for the entire semester. All exam work must be done entirely on your own with no books, no notes, and no electronic devices.

Exams
The course is divided into four parts, with an exam at the end of each part.

Grading

Weekly homework: Most weeks will have a homework assignment due at 10pm on a Friday evening. Late homework may be submitted until 10am on the following Monday with a 10% penalty. In addition, you may submit up to two very late homeworks with a 13% penalty. These very late homeworks must be submitted no later than the following Wednesday (five days after the original due date). No homework is accepted after that, so please submit whatever work you have done by the deadline. If your lowest homework score is lower than your final homework score, then I will replace your lowest homework score with your final homework score. The homeworks count for half of the course grade.

Four exams (one of which is the final exam): Makeup exams can be arranged only if you let Michael know at least 72 hours ahead of time or if an unavoidable problem causes you to miss class. Other missed exams will be recorded as a zero score. The four equally weighted exams count for half of the course grade.

Course Grade: I will, of course, use a computer program to determine your course percentage as:

    percentage = 0.5*h/H + 0.5*e/E

In the formula, h is your number of homework points, H is the maximum possible homework points, e is your number of exam points, and E is the maximum possible exam points (all recorded as double variables in a C++ program!). Your course grade is computed by your percentage:

Percentages will not be rounded, so even one point can be important. Please do let us know if there are any grading errors as soon as possible.