Admin Policies - Spring 2017
Participation is part of your grade.
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 the day that you miss.
Participation will be primarily evaluated through the use of index cards in class.
The primary places where announcements will be made will be in class and via the Canvas Announcement Forum.
A test post is up on Canvas. If you don't see it, please investigate the problem so that you do not miss required information. I highly recommend subscribing to the announcements so you get information pushed to you.
Before you email, please consider if it would be more effective to talk after class or during office hours. Email is a poor medium for complex communication, at least for me. Nonetheless feel free to email me if necessary. Some things that help me to answer your email is if you include the class code, "[CS 030]", at the beginning of the subject line. If you do not get a response to the email in 24 hours (except weekends), please resend it to bump it to the top of my inbox.
Also consider two other alternative methods of communication: Posting something on the class announcement 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 tough. I may ask you to use one of these methods instead in response to your email.
This class moves fast and staying on top of readings will be critical for your success.
The late penalty is 1% per hour after the due date.
Some assignments don't support late accomodation, for example, exams and participation.
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.
The 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
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.
If you are in doubt ask. It will go so much better than if plagiarism is discovered on its own.
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 Canvas 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.