CSCB09 2024 Summer: Course Information

Instructor: Albert Lai, albertyc.lai@utoronto.ca

Course website: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~trebla/CSCB09-2024-Summer/

More required websites to check:
Quercus: announcements, solutions, discussion forum.
MarkUs: submitting and returning assignments.
Crowdmark: returning tests.

Office hours on course website.

Textbooks:
Required (free PDF download): William Shotts, The Linux Command Line.
Required: Michael Kerrisk, The Linux Programming Interface.
Optional: If you need further help with C, try:
Programiz C tutorial (has more examples)
learn-c.org (has more topics and embedded try-out)

Course grade: If the final exam is in-person for the class and your final exam mark is no-show or strictly less than 35%, then the course grade is the minimum between 35% and the else branch; else, the course grade consists of:

10 Labs10×1% = 10%
4 Assignments Total 40%
Term test, 1h30m (outside class time)16% 1 aid sheet, letter size, 2 sides, no other restrictions.
List of useful tidbits will be provided.
Final exam, 3h34% 2 aid sheets, letter size, 2 sides, no other restrictions.
List of useful tidbits will be provided.

Tutorial-lab format: You will do lab exercises, and the TA will be present for an hour to provide help. While I recommend finishing the exercises right then for obvious moving-on reasons, you do have until Friday midnight.

Some policies

Academic integrity

You hand in only your own work. Plagiarism is forbbiden. Message from our AA&CC and advice from Prof. Pitt from downtown.

Reminder: Obtaining solutions from the Internet is also plagiarism.

Maturity requirement

Normally CMS instructors are supportive and lenient, in good faith that students are diligent in return (co-op thinking: they do more, you do more); inevitably, some students misunderstood it (tug-war thinking: they do more, you do less). And since people on the Internet are so eager to explain everything, students have forgotten that learning CS consists of a large part of practicing, and only a small part of receiving guidance. So I need to be strict before I can be collegial:

This is a university 2nd-year course, requiring a commensurate level of intellectual maturity, independence, reading comprehension, due diligence, and sense of responsibility. Quality of my answer to your question is proportionate to quality of your question.

Anti-Piazza position statement: Piazza encourages instant gratification, high-frequency spoon feeding, and fishing for answers. These are anti-theses to learning. (I believe that their business model is head-hunting brokerage instead.) I will use a much simpler course forum, on which possibly no single post is exactly “the answer”, and you will have to study the whole conversation and think for yourself.

Late assignment, skipping an assignment, a lab, or the term test

While I would like to be accomodating when there is a good case, you will have to provide a strong and well-documented reason and obtain my agreement on an alternative arrangement.

If the reason is foreseeable, you must obtain my agreement in advance.

I honour requests from AccessAbility.

There are 4 grace 12-hours for the whole term at your disposal when you don't have a good case. You may use at most 2 grace 12-hours per assignment. This is automated on MarkUs, so just submit late when you need to. These cannot be used for labs.

Due times are defined by the clock on the MarkUs server. Also take note that if a due time is printed as "11:59" it means 11:59:00; and if your submission time is printed as "11:59" it means e.g. 11:59:07, therefore it is already too late.

Re-mark policy

Re-marks are for instructors' and graders' errors, not for yours. Especially not the kind you can easily check right before or even after submission, such as: wrong files, wrong filenames, lateness by a few seconds or minutes, (for program code) compile-time errors.

The Mathlab server is the only platform for resolving disputes over auto-testing; “my code passes test cases elsewhere” is not a sufficient condition to earn marks.

Leniency can still be offered, but only if you speak up ASAP.