ICS 23 / CSE 23: Fundamental Data Structures
Fall 2007
Course Reference
Instructor information
Office hours: I will be available in or around my office on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3:40-4:50pm. If you catch me in my office at other times during the week and I'm not working on something urgently, I'll be glad to chat with you about whatever's on your mind.
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 Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00pm-3:20pm in ICS 180.
Textbooks
You may also find it useful to purchase a Java reference book, if you don't already have one. If you took an introductory programming course using Java (e.g., ICS 21), you'll probably find your textbook from that course to be sufficient as a reference. If not, there are many suitable ones out there; different styles will appeal to different people, so I suggest going to a local bookstore and finding one that you feel comfortable with.
You should be aware that more recent versions of Java (5.0 and 6.0, sometimes known as 1.5 and 1.6) are sufficiently different that using older versions than these — or books that cover older versions than these — may cause you some very real problems in this course. I strongly suggest being sure that you check whether your Java reference book covers Java 5.0 or later before purchasing or using it.
Lab sections
ICS 23 consists of two scheduled parts: the lecture and the lab. Your lab time is 80 minutes twice a week during which your TA will be available to answer your questions as you work on your projects. On some occasions, your TA will gather you together — in whole or in groups — to discuss the projects. Mostly, it will be open lab time. You're also encouraged to ask questions about lecture material, if there are things you're having trouble with, or things you want to know more about. Your attendance in your lab section is not an explicit requirement of the course, though we strongly recommend it.
The lab section will begin meeting on Wednesday, October 3. The meeting times and places are:
| Lab | Time and Place | TA |
| Sec. 1 | WF 9:30am-10:50am ICS 192 |
Mike Sweredoski (msweredo@ics.uci.edu) |
| Sec. 2 | WF 11:00am-12:20pm ICS 192 |
Mike Sweredoski (msweredo@ics.uci.edu) |
Obtaining additional assistance
You can most easily get course questions answered by coming to lecture, your lab section, or office hours and asking them! You can also ask questions by sending email to me and/or the TA. 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 projects approach their due date, particularly on days when projects 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 project is due; if that's the case, we will not send a response if we can't get to it before the project 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.
Any student who feels he or she may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss his or her 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
Weights of graded artifacts
Your course grade will be determined from the weighted combination of your scores on each of five projects, one Midterm, and one Final Exam. The weights of each of these are:
Determining final grades
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 find that I'm able to achieve a fairer outcome overall by not constraining myself to a rigid scale up front.
If you're curious about how you're doing in the course, I'm happy to discuss your estimated grade at any time. It's generally best to have this conversation in person, so that we can explore issues other than just the raw numbers; I'm happy to have this conversation at any time that I'm available, and I'm also glad to do it via email if we can't find a mutually available time.
Dropping the course or changing grade option
You may drop the course or change your grade option through the end of Week 6 (Friday, November 9). I will sign all drop and change cards, so please do not approach your TA with these cards. Your TA is not authorized to sign them!
I should point out here that I'm generally not able to be on campus on Fridays, so the last day that I'll sign a drop or change card for this course is Thursday, November 8.
Academic honesty
The policy
As ICS 23 or CSE 23 students, you are expected to know and follow the academic honesty policies of both the Bren 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 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 code, 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 project.
Academic honesty is a two-way street. Providing your code to other students for them to turn in as their own is not permitted anymore than turning in someone else's code. Resist the temptation to give code 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.
Naturally, the Midterm and Final Exam are also expected to be individual efforts. Dishonest behavior during an exam will not be tolerated.
Violators of academic honesty policies are subject to the penalties described in the Bren School of ICS policy. They are also subject to an immediate course grade of F, and you will not be allowed to drop the course to avoid the grade. Also be aware that a single documented case of academic dishonesty may preclude you from switching into computing majors, registering for computing minors, joining the ICS Honors Program, and graduating from a computing major with honors.
The lesson
Okay, so the moral of the story is that it's wise to avoid cheating. I believe that it's relatively rare that students enter a course with the conscious intent to cheat their way through it; why come to UCI if you're not planning to get something out of the coursework? So why do people cheat every quarter in every course? The answers vary, but here's the easiest way I can boil down the numerous conversations I've had with students caught cheating in my courses over the years: I fell behind and couldn't figure out how to catch up. Things happen and ten-week quarters are unforgiving. You might get sick, you might have issues crop up in your family, you might have an off-campus job that's demanding too much of your time, you might be trying to decide whether you're on the path you want to be on... Any of those things (and many others) can make it hard to keep up. You fall a little behind, you fall a little further behind, and pretty soon the situation seems hopeless. You're under pressure, temptation gets the better of you...
If you feel like you're beginning to slip off course or things are getting beyond your control, the best thing to do is to talk to us sooner rather than later. We're here to help; we understand. But the reality of taking large-sized courses at a large-sized institution is that we're not going to know you're in need unless you tell us. If things are happening in your life, tell us; you don't have to be specific if you're not comfortable with it. Before the fact, there's often a way to work things out. After the fact, it's usually too late.