Syllabus Highlights
CSE 1310 – Introduction to Computers and Programming
Vassilis Athitsos
University of Texas at Arlington
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About the Course
• This course is aimed to be the first course in
computer programming.
– This course is aimed for students who have NEVER
PROGRAMMED BEFORE.
• The topic is difficult.
– It requires very precise, mathematical thinking.
• Unlike other courses, "getting most of the material"
will not get you a good grade.
– If you have even small gaps in the material, it will be very
hard to do well in the class.
– For a program to work, it needs to be 100% correct.
– Code that is 99% correct is 0% useful.
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Time Expectations
• Expected: 10 hours per week outside of class.
• Weekly programming assignments, that will be time
consuming.
• This is a class where:
– Falling behind is easy.
– Catching up is hard.
• Attention to detail will be crucial.
– Code that is 99% correct is 0% useful. (yes, you will be
hearing this a lot in this class).
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Grading (1)
• A letter grade will be computed for your average
homework score.
• A letter grade will be computed for your average
exam score.
• The smallest of those two grades will be your
semester grade.
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Grading (2)
• So, if you ace the exams but do no homeworks, you
will fail.
• If you ace the homeworks but fail the exams, you will
fail.
• I fully expect some people will be shocked at the end
of the semester, when they fail the class due to this
policy.
• Still, there is nothing I can do about that.
– The grading policy is on the syllabus.
– You are responsible for reading and understanding the
syllabus.
– Complaining in December will be useless.
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Grading (3)
•
•
•
•
No homework scores will be dropped.
No exam scores will be dropped.
Grading is based on performance.
Grading criteria do not include:
– Effort.
– Class participation.
– What grade you need to qualify for financial aid, for a job,
for graduation, etc.
• All requests for leniency in grading will be ignored.
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Re-grading Policy
• Any request for re-grading (for an assignment or midterm
exam) must be made within 5 days of receipt of that grade.
• Any request for re-grading the final exam must be made
within 3 days of receipt of that grade.
• Re-grading can lead to a higher or lower grade, depending on
grading errors that are discovered.
• Usually, around final exams time (when people try to get extra
points, to make the threshold for a better grade) students ask
us to regrade exams and assignments from two or three
months ago.
– At that point they get shocked to hear about the re-grading policy.
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Assignments
• You must submit on Blackboard.
• Late penalty: 4 points per hour.
– No exceptions, except for medical/personal emergencies
documented in writing.
– Network/computer crashes will not be accepted as an excuse.
• Every semester, some people get 0 in an assignment (or
more), because they submitted the wrong file on
Blackboard.
– Then they ask for leniency, because they did all the work, and
just made a silly mistake in submitting.
– Sorry, there will be no leniency on this issue.
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– Verify your submission every time.
Exams
• Most questions will ask you to write code.
• Some questions will ask you to read code and:
– Predict what the code will do.
– Fix mistakes.
• Exams are open book.
– You can use books, notes, and any other handwritten or
printed material.
• No electronic devices are allowed:
– No calculators, cell phones, laptops, e-books.
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Class Participation
• Class participation is not part of the grading criteria.
• However: asking questions, and trying to answer
questions, can help you in understanding the
material.
– If you have questions and you do not ask in class, where
are you going to get the answers?
• If you do not understand something, always feel free
to raise your hand and ask a question.
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Course Website
• The course website is here:
http://vlm1.uta.edu/~athitsos/courses/cse1310_spring2016/
• The course schedule, lecture slides, and code we
write in class, will be available on the "Lectures" link.
• Assignments will be available on the "Assignments"
link.
• The exam schedule and information about each
exam will be available on the "Exams" link.
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Syllabus
• The syllabus is posted here:
http://vlm1.uta.edu/~athitsos/courses/cse1310_fall2015/syllabus/
• You are responsible for reading and understanding
what the syllabus says.
• At the end of the semester, when grades are posted,
it is common to get complaints from students, saying
that they were not aware of various aspects of the
syllabus, that severely hurt their grade.
– My only response will be to point them to this slide.
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Getting Help
• There are two teaching assistants for this course.
• In total, there are seven teaching assistants for all
sections of 1310.
• The teaching assistants will have lab hours, at ERB
124.
• The lab schedule is posted on the course website.
• Feel free to go to the lab during posted lab hours,
and ask ANY teaching assistant for help with the
course material.
• There will be several lab hours every weekday.
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Getting Help
• If you send us an e-mail, send it to ALL OF US (myself
and the TAs), to maximize chances of getting a reply
fast.
• For many questions regarding installation of
software, and bugs with your code, we will just ask
you to go see a TA during lab hours.
• Do not expect responses to frantic queries in the
last minutes before an assignment is due.
– Little sympathy will be offered for people who leave
assignments for the last minute.
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Getting Help – StartStrong Program
• This is only available for first-year students.
• All first time, first-year students can receive six FREE
hours of tutoring for this course and other selected
subjects for this semester.
• Students must sign up and complete their first hour
of tutoring by February 12th.
• To sign up, visit UTSI in 205 Ransom Hall/University
College.
• Flexible tutoring hours are available from 7:00am 9:00pm, seven days a week in the Central Library.
• Find out more at www.uta.edu/startstrong
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Attendance
• Attending exams is mandatory.
– Again, exceptions are made only for medical/personal
emergencies documented in writing.
– Transportation problems, malfunctioning alarms, not
accepted as an excuse.
• You do not have to attend lectures.
• However, if you do not attend lectures, you are still
responsible for understanding the material.
– Do not expect a private lecture during office hours or by email.
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Attendance
• I need to report to UTA:
– If a student has attended the class at all.
– When a student has stopped attending.
• Because of that, we will be taking attendance
every day till census date.
• I don’t know what UTA does with the
attendance data.
• For the purposes of grading, attendance in
lectures does not matter.
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