Admin Policies - Fall 2016
Participation is part of your grade. Participation will be primarily evaluated through the use of index cards in class.
Students are responsible for material that is disseminated during class. If you miss class, please arrange beforehand with a friend to get notes/handouts for you. If you know you are going to miss something, contact the instructor beforehand. It's much easier to accommodate planned absences.
Students are responsible for all material taught in this course. If you join the class later in the semester, you are expected to complete all missed work immediately.
Although letting the Professor know beforehand is helpful for your learning, it is not sufficient to get participation credit for that day
The primary places where announcements will be made will be in class and via the Westmont Eureka Discussion Forum.
If you are not used to checking email regularly, or you find yourself overwhelmed by email, it's time to start learning how to be an email ninja. It is the primary method by which professional communication happens in the world. You must get in a habit of regularly screening your email and learning how to focus on the important stuff that gets sent to you.
If you need tips on how to be an email ninja keep your ears open for a workshop being offered by WICL
Look for a test post on the Eureka discussion board. If you don't see it, please investigate the problem so that you do not miss required information. I highly recommend subscribing to the news forum so you get information pushed to you.
You are welcome to email me directly. One thing that helps me to answer your email in a timely fashion is if you include the class code, "[CS 010]", at the beginning of the subject line. I have filters that bring these emails to my attention.
If you do not get a response to the email in 24 hours (except weekends), please resend it without guilt.
Also consider two other alternative methods of communication: Posting something on the class discussion board so that others can benefit from the conversation or talking to me after class or during office hours. Regardless of how ninja I am, email is a poor medium for complex communication and I may ask you to use one of these methods instead.
For assignments the late penalty is 1% per hour after the moment that it is due.
Other kinds of deliverables don't support late accommodation, for example, online quizzes and exams, offline quizzes and exams and participation grades.
Due dates are specified with a date and time in local time.
For example, if an assignment's due date is 11:59pm on Monday night and it is turned in on 11:59pm Tuesday night it is 24 hours late will be result in a 24% penalty.
If you find that you are unable to make it to a scheduled event (class, exam, presentation, etc.) due to sickness, please get some documentation from a health care provider to assist us in maintaining fairness to the other students in the class. In the absence of such documentation, please contact the staff as soon as you realize that you are going to miss a scheduled event. Generally sicknesses will be treated on a case by case basis. We will accommodate you as best as we can depending on the circumstances, but I also want to maintain fairness to the other members of the class by guarding against using sickness as an excuse to not meet requirements.
Standard time lines apply.
Prerequisites are there for a reason, so if you are asking me to waive them, please be prepared to do an assignment to justify it.
I will only offer an incomplete grade to a student who, through some unforeseen emergency, is unable to complete the requirements of the course. I will likely seek help from other faculty in assessing the best way to handle the situation because it's never not messy.
In general I have found that I regularly have to fail about 2% of my students for cheating. That's roughly 1 in every class of 50. Will it be you this term?
This is not a job. This is a class. Someone is paying me to make sure that you learn about this topic. When I give you assignments, it isn't because I want to know the answer. I usually know the answer. I want you to do the hard work of finding out the answer in a particular way. This is how you learn something. You can give me a "correct" answer that you obtained in an incorrect way. That isn't the goal. Let me repeat. I generally know the answers. Your grade is about you learning. Academic Honesty is about getting the answers in the right way so that you actually learn. Some of the things you do in my class will therefore be inefficient and difficult.
You may never use anyone else's work without clearly acknowledging the source. This includes code you find on the web, text from books, and answers from friends. Doing so is called plagiarism.
Plagiarism is any work that you use that you did not create and do not credit. If you plagiarize another work without crediting the source, you will receive a failing grade for the entire course at the discretion of the instructor. It takes 2 seconds to cite your source. If you want to be intellectually lazy, do something else with your life.
However, if an assignment requires you to do the work yourself, and you copy work from another source, but acknowledge it, then you did not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. This is also grounds for failing an assignment - albeit not plagiarism.
This has happened in my courses before, it has happened in conferences that I have chaired and I have sat in conferences in which others have presented my work verbatim. In each of these cases I took the strongest possible recourse available to me at the time. Our global academic system relies on properly crediting sources for everything to function.
Copying code counts as plagiarism. Referencing things like StackOverflow are totally normal and appropriate. Please indicate in your code comments the place where you got your code from if you use external sources. Not doing so is a bad habit and is going to get you in trouble professionally.
I have kicked students out of college for cheating in my courses.
Please familiarize yourself with the academic integrity policy: http://www.westmont.edu/_offices/registrar/academic_policies/academic-dishonesty.html.
Please read a more detailed definition of plagiarism defined by the ACM: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy.
The calendar web page for the class is subject to update. Check it frequently and be sure to refresh / reload the web pages when you browse them.
Please follow the assignments exactly. If you need clarification, ask before the assignment is due.
If there is a discrepancy between Eureka and the calendar page, the calendar page takes precedence
Students who have been diagnosed with a disability (learning, physical/medical, or psychological) are strongly encouraged to contact the Disability Services office as early as possible to discuss appropriate accommodations for this course. Formal accommodations will only be granted for students whose disabilities have been verified by the Disability Services office. These accommodations may be necessary to ensure your full participation and the successful completion of this course. For more information, contact Sheri Noble, Director of Disability Services (565-6186, snoble@westmont.edu) or visit the website http://www.westmont.edu/_offices/disability.
More generally I want to see you succeed! Let's figure out a way for you to meet the requirements of the course in a way that is fair to you and everyone else.