Instructor: Albert Lai, trebla@cs.utoronto.ca
Course website: http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~trebla/CSCC24-2020-Winter/
Office hours on course website.
More websites to check: Quercus for announcements, forum, solutions. MarkUs for submitting and returning assignments.
Required reading and reference reading: No textbook to buy. Weekly reading and reference material are listed on the course website.
Course grade (Revised April 3 after voting):
| 10 Tutorial-labs | 10×1% = 10% | No, there is no “best 10 of 11” provision. |
| 4 Assignments | Total 45% | |
| Term test, 1h15m (outside class time) | 20% | 1 crib sheet, letter size, 2 sides, no other restrictions. |
| Final exam | 25% | take-home, 24 hours |
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 only hand in your own work. Plagiarism is forbbiden. Message from our AA&CC and advice from Prof. Pitt from downtown.
Obtaining assignment answers from the Internet is also plagiarism.
Maturity requirement:
Normally CMS instructors are supportive and lenient, in good faith that students will reciprocate with a mature sense of responsibility; inevitably, some students misunderstood it. And since people on the Internet are so eager to explain everything, students have forgotten that learning CS consists of a huge part of practicing, and only a tiny part of receiving guidance and hints. So I need to be strict before I can be collegial:
This is a university course, not a highschool course (or lower).
You are expected to be an adult, accepting the full consequences (including, but not limited to, failing to earn marks) of your own actions, inactions, choices, and errors.
You are expected to exhibit university-level due diligence and ability in independence, reading comprehension, inference, deduction, and good judgment. Quality of my answer to your question is proportionate to how much due diligence you exhibit.
Furthermore, this is a C-level 3rd-year CS course, and normally in the 2nd term. You are expected to have completed computer science education up to and including 3rd year 1st term. Course work assumes that you have this much background. Due dates and term tests can clash with those of 2nd-year CS courses, for which no accomodation will be offered.
Anti-Piazza position statement: Piazza incentivizes instant gratification, high-frequency spoon feeding, and mindlessly fishing for answers. These are anti-theses to learning. (I believe that Piazza's interest is not in fostering learning but rather selling you to head hunters.) I will only use the simplistic forum on Quercus, on which possibly no single post is exactly “the answer”, and you will have to study the whole conversation and think for yourself, as per my due diligence policy.
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.
For medical reasons, use this form: link.
I honour requests from AccessAbility.
There are 2 grace days for the whole term at your disposal when you don't have a good case. You may use at most 1 grace day per assignment. This is automated on MarkUs, so just do it when you need to. These cannot be used for labs.
Due times are defined by the clock on the MarkUs server, not by your clock. Also take note that if a due time is printed as "0:00" it means 0:00:00; and if your submission time is printed as "0:00" it means something like 0:00:07, therefore you are late.
Re-mark policy: Re-marks are for instructor's and TA's errors, not for yours. Especially not the kind you can easily check just before and after submission, such as: wrong files, wrong file types, lateness by a few seconds or minutes, (for program code) compile-time errors.
Leniency for those errors can be offered, but only if you speak up before marking begins. Marking begins at an unannounced time. However, as per the maturity requirement, you are expected to be able to deduce, from this course information sheet, a minimum time window during which marking does not begin.