Instructor: Keith VanderLinden
Materials:
Weekly Expectations: The summer sessions of this course are more concentrated, basically covering the material at the pace of two units per week rather than one. The assumption is that you have no other courses and thus can focus on this one exclusviely. Expect to spend upwards of 20 hours per week in the summer session. To succeed, you’ll need to complete the following assignments each week:
Unless stated otherwise, the assignment submissions are due by midnight of the last day of the time period. That is, the lab assignments are due by midnight on Wednesday or Saturday, and the homeworks by midnight the following Saturday or Wednesday respectively.
Grading: We will compute your final grade as follows:
If feasible, you will work in pairs during the lab exercises and you may work in pairs for your weekly homeworks as well. When you work in a pair, one of the partners should submit one copy of your work with both of your names on it. Your partner should be someone else from this course. For the final project, you must work on your own.
Feel free to discuss ideas with us or with your classmates, but don’t copy code. You may, on exceedingly rare occasions, reuse someone else’s code provided that you make it clear what code you’re reusing and what code you wrote yourself. We’ll grade you on the code you write.
We’ll throw out your lowest quiz score. Your grades will be available in the Moodle gradebook, generally before the next assignment of a similar type is due.
Attendance: The online, interactive discussions require your presence; either attend them live or watch the recordings. Further, each topic in this course builds on previous topics so it is very difficult to catch up once you fall behind. If you must miss a class for any reason, please let me know so that I can set you up with the appropriate material and activities for the session you miss.
Honors: There are no special honors sections of CS 108; however, any student (or team of students) can elect to take a normal section of CS 108 for honors by contract. Honors-by-contract involves putting together a significant project for you to work on throughout the semester in addition to the regular assignments for the course. If you are interested in the doing the course for honors, talk to us and prepare to put together a proposal and contract within the first two weeks of the semester. You will find a template for the contract and addition information on the department’s honors program on the .
Disabilities: Calvin will make reasonable accommodations for you if you have documented disabilities. Notify the Coordinator of Services for Students with Disabilities located in the Student Academic Services, Spoelhof Center 342-361, and also notify us within the first two weeks of class.
Incompletes: We will give an incomplete grade (I) only in unusual circumstances, and only if those circumstances have been confirmed by the Student Life office.
Late Work: We will clearly indicate a due date for all assignments. Anything submitted after that date is late, unless you have made prior arrangements with us. For each late assignment, you will be charged 10% for each business-day that you are late (e.g., if an assignment is due on Friday, you may turn it in on Monday at 10% off, Tuesday at 20% off and so on). We will grant up to 50% of the points for assignments submitted more than one week late, but not more and we will also grant you 4 grace days with no penalty, no questions asked. Please note that grace days do not apply to the reading assignments or the final project and we do not accept any late work after the last day of class. If there are exceptional circumstances, please talk to us so we can work something out.
Academic Integrity in Computing: Code re-use can be a valuable practice in computing, but mindlessly copying code is not an effective way to learn programming and reusing code or algorithms without attribution is plagiarism. If you've copied code with attribution, We’ll grade you on the code you wrote not on the code you copied. If we detect copying without attribution, i.e., plagiarism, we'll be forced to give you a failing grade for the assignment and perhaps for the course. Additionally, we will report you to the office of Judicial Affairs, which may result in the incident being part of your student record.
Calvin’s General Statement on Academic Integrity: The student-faculty relationship is based on trust and mutual respect, which can be seriously undermined by the suspicion or reality of academic dishonesty. Academic Dishonesty includes, but is not limited to, plagiarism (students plagiarize when they do not credit the sources of their writing - the words, information, ideas, or opinions of others), improper group work, reuse of a paper from another course and/or cheating on a test. Students are encouraged to speak to their faculty member with specific questions related to academic dishonesty. For further clarification or information, please visit http://www.calvin.edu/academic/engl/writing/plagiarism.
Responsible Use of Technology: We expect you to abide by the guidelines expressed in the policies given in your institution’s technology policy (for students on campus, see Calvin’s Technology Policy Documents).
Etiquette: We expect you to treat students and instructors for this with respect by adopting courteous communication practices throughout the course, either on the videos, which may be recorded, or the online forums. No personal attacks, trolling, bad language will be tolerated.