Policies

Class Requirements & Grading:

• Quizzes and final exam: 65%
  
• Other: 10%
  
• Laboratory: 25%
  

About Active Learning

A significant amount of active learning will be included in the class. This could come in a variety of forms, but will generally mean that the lecture time will be partially consumed with individual or group assignments regarding topics of interest.

Part of the active learning scenario will be that assignments that are completed and submitted for grading and quizzes will be a signficant part of the final grade. Class attendance and participation will be important, and it will be necessary for people to attend their proper section. Mostly that means that people registered in the 8:00 section will have to attend the 8:00 section, not the 9:00 section.

Quizzes and Daily Assignments:

Quizzes and assignments to be completed both in and out of class will dominate the grades. Not all assignments will be graded and they can occur at any time. Given the format of the course, no makeup will be given for missed quizzes or assignments, but final grades will reflect no penalty for a small number of missed assignments. The 2 lowest quizzes will be dropped and missing 10% of assignments will incur no penalty.

Grades will be posted electronically on a weekly basis (more or less) using your student id number as the key. If you don't want your grades posted, notify me. If you want me to use some other key, send it to me electronically.

The laboratory represents 25% of the credit for the course. In the labs you will be exposed to a variety of network properties that are of interest to computer scientists, including writing network programs, operating system configuration and network organization. The laboratories will be primarily concerned with writing programs that utilize network support features of the operating system, specifically Unix/Linux.

More information can be found on the Laboratory Page.

Everyone is expected to work on the programming assignments independently and not credit will be given for team efforts. That also means that glaring similarities between two programs will be treated as a violation of the University Conduct Policy.

In an effort to insure sufficient Linix/Unix and C experience for graduating seniors, all assignments must be done using the C (or C++) programming language and using the Linux operating system.

There will be a final exam over the laboratory material during the last laboratory period of the semester.

Since TA support is reduced this year, not all labs will be graded. A simple pass/fail grade may be used on some and on others, a random set of assignments will be graded. However, the final project is required and will be graded.

The final exam will be given during the time specified in the Semester schedule. No finals will be given early.