ICS 184 / EECS 116: Introduction to Data Management
Summer 2006
Course Reference


Instructor information

Office hours: I will be available in or around my office on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:30-4:50pm, during which all course-related issues will have the highest priority. I'm in my office at many other times during the week, and if I'm not working on something urgently, I'll be glad to sit down and talk with you.

Contacting me: I tend to be much easier to reach via email than by phone, so I would suggest using email to contact me under normal circumstances. When you write me an email, please take a few moments to make sure that the following information is placed somewhere in your message: your name, your student ID#, and which course you're enrolled in (as I'm teaching more than one).


Times and places

The lecture meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00-3:20pm in CS 174.


Textbooks

There is one textbook that accompanies the material in this course:


Discussion section and TA information

There is a discussion section for this course; the discussion section is an hour once a week, during which your TA will answer questions and discuss assignments and/or lecture material with you. You are not required to be enrolled in the discussion section in order to attend, and you are not required to attend the discussion as part of the course; however, we strongly recommend that you take the time to attend, as it's a great way to get help as you work through the course material.

Discussions will begin meeting Wednesday, July 5, and will continue to meet every Wednesday from 4:00-4:50pm in CS 180.

Our TA this quarter is Vibhav Gogate, whose email address is the first letter of his first name, followed by his entire last name, followed by @ics.uci.edu.


Obtaining additional assistance

You can most easily get course questions answered by coming to your lecture or discussion and asking them. I am available in my office at various times throughout the week, and am happy to help you in person.

You can also ask questions by sending email to me and/or the TA; both of us read our email fairly often throughout the day (and, at least in my case, often into the evening). Thus, you can usually get a response to your course-related questions within a few hours (sometimes less frequently on weekends and holidays). If the questions require a complex or lengthy response, we may ask you to see one of us in person. As assignments approach their due date, particularly on days when assignments are due, we begin to receive quite a bit of email all at once, so we may not be able to respond to all messages before the assignment is due; if that's the case, we will not send a response if we can't get to it before the assignment is due. We aren't ignoring you on purpose, but unfortunately it's not always possible for the relatively small course staff to answer questions from a large number of students at once.

You are encouraged to participate on the ics.184 newsgroup. I hope that this will become an effective mechanism for discussion throughout the quarter, and that students can help other students. At the very least, read it periodically, as the TA and I may be using it to make coursewide or section-wide announcements. You are responsible for knowing what goes on there. Please make sure that you read the ground rules that I've posted there, as I will expect that you follow them. If you don't know what a newsgroup is or how to connect to it, no problem! I've written a document that explains everything you'll need to know to get connected.

Any students who feel that they may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss these specific needs. Also, contact the Disability Services Center at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations, such as alternative test-taking environments or note-taking services, are implemented in a timely fashion.


Grading

Your course grade will be determined from the weighted combination of your scores on each of six assignments, one Midterm, and one Final Exam. The weights of each of these are:

Course grades will be determined neither on a normal curve nor a straight scale. It is guaranteed that overall scores over 90% will receive an A- or better, scores over 80% will receive a B- or better, and scores over 70% will receive a C or better. However, the actual cutoffs may be lowered at the end of the quarter. In short, it is not my intention to fail half of the students, nor am I planning on giving only 2% of the students A's, but I prefer not to constrain myself with either a straight scale or a formalized curve.


Dropping the course or changing grade option

During Summer Session, you may drop the course or change grade option until the end of the eighth week (Friday, August 18).


Academic dishonesty

As students in this offering of ICS 184 or EECS 116, you are expected to know and follow the academic honesty policies of both the School of ICS and the University as a whole. Please take a few minutes to read the policies, which can be found at this link.

All of your lab work is expected to be completed solely by you. Group work and/or sharing of code or answers between students is not permitted. Note that "high-level discussion of course material for better understanding" is permitted and encouraged, but when it comes time to sit down and write your solution, that is expected to be done by you and you alone. All submissions are compared to one another using an automated plagiarism detection system. This system is extraordinarily good at finding similarities between submissions, even when there are superficial differences. (Note that we also compare your submissions to those submitted during previous quarters whenever one of these assignments was given during a previous quarter, so it is an exceedingly bad idea to turn in, or even refer to, code written by a friend of yours who took the course already.)

Since all of your work is expected to be completed solely by you, you will be held responsible even if you plagiarize only a small portion of someone else's assignment.

Academic dishonesty is a two-way street. Providing your work to other students for them to turn in as their own is not permitted anymore than turning in someone else's work. Resist the temptation to give work to your friends "for reference." Based on my experience, I can say that your "friends" may very well betray you and turn it in, anyway.

Violators of academic honesty policies are subject to the penalties described in the School of ICS policy. They are also subject to an immediate course grade of F, without the possibility of dropping the course to avoid the grade. Also, be aware that a single documented case of academic dishonesty may preclude you from switching into a computing major, registering for a computing minor, joining the ICS Honors Program, and graduating with honors.