ICS 32A: Python Programming with Libraries (Accelerated)
Fall 2023
Course Reference
Instructor information
How best to contact me
I tend to be much easier to reach via email than any other way, so I would suggest using email to contact me under normal circumstances. As it turns out, I'm not in my office all that often, but I am connected online quite a lot.
When you write me an email, it's not a bad idea to be sure you're including enough contextual information in your email that I'll be able to answer the question: your name, your student ID#, and which course you're enrolled in are all good data points to include. Without things like this, it raises the likelihood that I won't understand the context of the question you're asking (e.g., "When is Project 1 due?" is a question that has a different answer in different courses of mine), which means we'll need an additional round trip to get the matter settled.
Office hours
I'll be offering virtual office hours via Zoom on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:00pm-7:00pm, beginning on Monday, October 2. You'll find a link in the Canvas course space.
If you require a conversation privately at other times, I'll do my best to accommodate your request, but we'll schedule those on an ad hoc basis; email me as a starting point and let me know what you'd like to discuss and what times you are available. With several hundred students in two courses this quarter, I may not be able to accommodate every request, so I may also direct you to other places you can get help more quickly (such as the labs with TAs and LAs, which I'll describe below), but I'll certainly try to accommodate requests that I'm best equipped to handle myself.
Course staff
In addition to me, this course is staffed by a number of folks in a few different roles. They are listed below.
Teaching assistants
There are five teaching assistants, who will share the duties of attending lab meetings, will serve as an additional source of assistance on your projects and via the Ed Discussion online discussion board, and will be the primary point of contact with regard to the grading of the projects and reinforcement exercises.
Readers
Additionally, we have two readers, who will be tasked with grading the reinforcement exercises.
Learning assistants
In addition to the TAs, the following in-lab learning assistants will also be staffing the labs at various times, specified further below.
Course organization
In-person format
This course will be administered in a predominantly in-person format. What this means, chiefly, is that full participation in this course will require your physical presence on campus at various points throughout the quarter, and that we will not be offering a separate virtual experience to students who are not physically attending at those times.
Required equipment
In order to participate in this course successfully, you may at times find it helpful if you have access to a few things.
@uci.edu email via that connection. These services are part of how we'll be communicating. If Internet accessibility is a problem, there are some resources at UCI TechPrep that might be of help.Lecture
A lecture meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:00-6:20pm in BS3 1200. Given the course's size, attendance is not graded, but we certainly recommend it. (Naturally, attendance is required on the days when exams are held, which are listed in the Schedule.)
Pre-recorded videos
Portions of the lecture material will be pre-recorded and will be available to officially-enrolled students via the Canvas course space for ICS 32A, in addition to the lecture material that is scheduled to be presented in-person. It is reasonable to expect that a decisive majority of the lecture material will be presented in-person and will not separately be available via pre-recorded videos. You'll see that the video content is listed in the Schedule, alongside the lecture content.
Of course, you are under no obligation to watch the pre-recorded videos, and we will not be measuring whether or not you do so. For the most part, the lectures and any pre-recorded videos will corresponding pretty closely with the Notes and Examples, as is usual in my courses these days. But it's hard to imagine you'll get what you came for without watching the videos and attending the lectures.
Where to go online
While the course is predominantly an in-person offering, there are aspects of the course that are administered online.
@uci.edu email address, so you'll need to ensure that you're able to read and respond to emails sent there.Online decorum
It should go without saying — though recent experiences tell me otherwise — that we expect a reasonable level of decorum within all of these online spaces at all times. While I won't be able to describe all the ways that you might behave problematically, do be aware that we will not tolerate behavior that is offensive to others, or that disrespects others; just because you're online doesn't relieve you of your obligation to be collegial with one another and with course staff, and there will be repercussions when you do not meet that obligation.
Reinforcement exercises
Roughly corresponding to each week's lecture material will be a collection of reinforcement exercises, whose role is to help you assess your knowledge of each topic. Think of these as "Things you should expect to be able to do and/or explain if you understood this topic well," so they are a sort of measuring stick that you can use to gauge your understanding. They do contribute to your grade (see below), but also contribute to your ensuring that you leave this course with what you came for.
These exercises will be released as they are available. Asking when these will be available will not make them available; they'll be posted when they are.
Labs (The ICS 32A Help Center)
There are seven lab sections, meeting throughout the day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Collectively, we will refer to all of these hours as the ICS 32A Help Center, which meet at the following times:
While you are required to be enrolled in a lab section — and this enrollment does determine who will grade your projects — you are generally free to attend the ICS 32A Help Center whenever you need it, regardless of which lab section you are enrolled in, with one caveat: If there are many more students attending a lab than are actually enrolled in it, we may need to prioritize answering questions for students officially enrolled in that lab. (We hope we won't need to do that, but the simple reality is we can't support all of you simultaneously, so we can only promise you our best.)
While it is not a required part of the course, and nothing will be graded in the labs this quarter, attendance does offer some significant benefits:
Some of our lab sections are laptop-only sections, which means that there are no computers available for general use except one that you bring for yourself. However, these sections will be staffed with the same personal help available in the others, so if you tend to carry a laptop around with you anyway, you will probably find it at least as comfortable as the alternative.
Staffing in the ICS 32A Help Center will be as follows. The TAs listed for the sections below are the official TAs of record — so, in general, they would be your first point of contact regarding the grading of projects.
| Lab Section | Location | TA | LAs |
| Lab 1 MWF 8:00am-9:20am |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Harrison Espino | Anjali Bhimanadham Zixuan Chen |
| Lab 2 MWF 9:30am-10:50am |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Harrison Espino | Curtis Chang Ghala Zuhair A Alshehri |
| Lab 3 MWF 11:00am-12:20pm |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Mitra Behzadi | Bowen Wang Diego Guzman |
| Lab 4 MWF 12:30pm-1:50pm |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Shagoto Rahman | Azra Zahin Ghadah Ibn Jurais |
| Lab 5 MWF 5:00pm-6:20pm |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Guangyi Zhang | James Liu Trystan Camden Vasquez |
| Lab 6 MWF 6:30pm-7:50pm |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Tamoghno Das | Jae Yun Kim |
| Lab 7 MWF 8:00pm-9:20pm |
In-Person: ICS 364A Laptop-Only |
Tamoghno Das | Heli Hothari Kenta Adachi |
The labs will begin meeting on Monday, October 2.
Ed Discussion
Around the time the quarter officially beings, a course space will be created on Ed Discussion. You'll find a link to Ed Discussion on this course's Canvas page, and officially enrolled students should automatically have access to it once the quarter begins.
Within Ed Discussion, you'll be able to ask us (and each other) questions about course material, and can expect to see both course staff and students answering those questions along the way. It is our hope that this can be a useful resource to you, and the course staff will be glad to be of service there throughout the quarter.
However, it's important to note that Ed Discussion is only a positive and productive tool if students use a certain level of etiquette and care in using it, so we'll be requiring that — and your grade can be negatively affected if you do otherwise. So, what does that mean? It begins with a straightforward guiding principle: When you ask a question on Ed Discussion, you're essentially asking everyone in the course, which means that the question needs to be appropriate for those circumstances. In practice, that means a few things.
Textbooks
This course requires no textbook, as I will be providing a complete set of Notes and Examples covering every lecture this quarter.
Note that you might find a book that complements the lecture material and helps you fill in details that you missed while listening to me speak for eighty minutes, though I think the Notes and Examples section will generally be enough information for you to succeed. If you prefer a book (or online supplements of your own choosing) other than what I'm providing, that's generally fine, though do be aware that style and approach among practitioners of a programming language tend to differ, particularly with respect to a language with the long and varied history of Python. We'll be expecting you to follow similar conventions to those we're learning about in this course.
Additionally, one of the main skills you'll be building in this course, aside from broadening and strengthening your Python programming skills, is the ability to find, analyze, and synthesize information in online documentation, tutorials, and other materials that make libraries — not just those that are included with Python, but also those that are obtained from third parties — accessible to you and useful in solving real programming problems. To that extent, the Internet will serve as a significant "textbook" for us, as well. (Be aware, though, that this does not include using solutions to these projects written by previous students, nor to the use of generative AI; see the section titled Academic honesty below for more details.)
Accommodations for disabilities
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 online or by phone at (949) 824-7494 as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations, such as alternative test-taking environments or note-taking services, can be arranged for you in a timely way.
Grading
Weights of graded artifacts
Your course grade will be determined from the weighted combination of your scores on each of seven programming projects, eight sets of reinforcement exercises, and an in-person Final Exam. The weights of each of these are:
Exam attendance policy
Your attendance at the Final Exam on the scheduled date and time is a required part of your enrollment in this course. You will find that date and time listed in the Schedule.
Verify at the start of the quarter that you'll be able to attend the exam as scheduled and, if not, you'll need to find another course to enroll in. Once you remain enrolled in this course, you've made a commitment to attend the exam as scheduled, and we will not, under any circumstances, schedule a Final Exam at a different time to accommodate a scheduling conflict, regardless of whether you were aware of it ahead of time. It is your responsibility to keep your schedule clear, and to arrive at the exam on time and ready to put in your best effort; it is similarly your responsibility to take the necessary precautions to reduce the chances of illness. Your score on an unattended Final Exam is zero, with your grade calculated accordingly.
The only exception to this policy is a documented illness or incapacitation, where, to be clear, the documentation must come from a position of authority — a doctor, a police department, campus authorities, or the like — and clarify why it was not possible for you to attend the exam as scheduled. Things like photographs of in-home medical testing kits or emails from family members or friends do not constitute documentation under this policy.
Online participation and decorum
While it is not our intent to measure your participation — in the sense that we won't be tracking whether you're attending the lectures, watching pre-recorded videos (if any), attending the lab sessions, and so on — we are requiring that students meet the decorum requirements described above. We reserve the right to deduct as much as 10% from a student's grade when their behavior does not follow those decorum requirements, with repeated or severe violations warranting larger-sized deductions. My sincere hope is that no one will receive these deductions, but we do reserve the right to use them if need be.
(Note, too, that you'll be notified as soon as we've decided that you'll be receiving one of these deductions, so you don't need to worry that we'll suddenly be reducing your score at the end of the quarter unannounced.)
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 prefer not to constrain myself with either a straight scale or a formalized curve.
Unforeseen circumstances may lead to changes
This course has been designed specifically for in-person delivery, in a way that takes into account the potential for some uncertainty along the way. While we'll certainly do our best to leave these policies — as well as the general structure of this course — intact, it is possible that unforeseen circumstances may require us to make modifications along the way. If so, we'll make those modifications in a way that attempts to preserve the spirit of the course and its grading to the extent possible, and we'll notify everyone of any necessary changes as soon as we can, but will not be willing to engage in an individual or group negotiation about the changes made.
Dropping the course or changing grade option
Through the end of Week 2 (Friday, October 13), you may drop the course by simply going to WebReg and dropping it. If you wish to drop the course after that date, you will need to use the Enrollment Exceptions system to request a drop; I do not have the final say over those, ultimately, as the Dean of the Bren School (and your major, if you are majoring in something outside of the Bren School) must approve them. It is not generally the case that an exception will be accepted simply because you're not doing well in a course, though extenuating circumstances are certainly considered.
Similarly, changing your grade option (to Pass/NotPass or back again) can be done via WebReg through the end of Week 2 (Friday, October 13), after which you must use the Enrollment Exceptions system to request the change. As with exceptional drops, you must receive approval from the appropriate Deans, and that approval is not guaranteed, and I do not have any influence over them.
Enrolling in the course after it begins
Even in courses with no available capacity, students are sometimes able to enroll after the beginning of the quarter — sometimes even as late as the end of Week 2 — but the presumption is that students attempting to enroll in the course (e.g., by being on a waitlist, or simply considering it from the outside looking in) have been keeping up with the coursework. Essentially, the day you add the course, we expect that you'll be at the same point in the coursework as everyone else, and that any past due dates have already been met.
Finding out how to become enrolled
This particular offering of ICS 32A has an official waitlist, which is the only mechanism for enrolling in the course. I have no ability to influence the ordering or priority of students on that waitlist, nor can I increase the course's capacity.
If you have questions about enrolling in the course, adjustments to its capacity, or other such matters, your best bet is to speak with the ICS Student Affairs Office. As they are managing enrollments amidst a variety of competing constraints, there is essentially nothing I can do to help with enrollment-related matters.
Access to resources while waiting to enroll
Essentially all of the materials for this course can be found right here on the course web site, which is available on the open Internet. So, fortunately, you will not need to be enrolled in order to remain up to date; all you'll need to do is revisit these pages (and possibly reload them) as they're updated.
Provided that classrooms and lab meetings have empty seats, you can feel free to attend classes while you wait to enroll. If classes are filled to physical capacity, you'll need to leave to make room for someone who is officially enrolled.
Students on the waitlist will automatically have access to Canvas for as long as they're on the waitlist.
Submitting your work while waiting to enroll
Aside from the Final Exam, all of your work is to be submitted on Canvas. Since students on the course's waitlist will have access to Canvas, they will be able to submit their work, even if not officially enrolled. Consequently, we will be requiring that waitlisted students have submitted their work on time — just as officially enrolled students have done — so that, once enrolled, they are up to date. If you've taken a seat from someone else who is caught up, it's only fair that you've also kept up.
Academic honesty
The policy
As a student enrolled in ICS 32A, 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 work on projects and reinforcement exercises is expected to be completed solely by you. Working in larger groups and/or sharing of code or solutions 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. Note, also, that this disallows the use of automatic systems, such as generative AI systems, from producing any part of your solution, because that, too, would not be code written solely by you.
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 work.
Academic honesty is a two-way street. Providing your code to other students for them to turn in as their own is not permitted any more 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, and then you'll have a lot to answer for.
Naturally, the Final Exam is also expected to be an individual effort. Dishonest behavior during an exam will not be tolerated.
All violations of academic honesty policies will be reported to the UCI Office of Academic Integrity & Student Conduct (AISC) and will trigger an administrative procedure, which is described on their web site. Additionally (and at least as importantly), you can receive a course grade of F — as a number of students in my courses do, because of this issue, every quarter — without the option to drop the course to avoid the grade. A single documented case of academic dishonesty may also have other ramificiations, such as precluding you from switching into computing majors, registering for computing minors, joining the ICS Honors Program, and graduating from a computing major with honors. All of this is University and Bren School of ICS policy and is not subject to negotiation.
Knowing when you're being dishonest
I've been asked by students how they know when they're crossed the line between asking for help and being academically dishonest. To me, there is a fairly straightforward way to know the difference. Did you actually write the code in question? That's not a matter of whether you typed it in; that's a matter of whether it was you who wrote it (i.e., it is comprised of your own ideas about how to solve the problem, how to organize the solution, and so on).
The easiest way to determine whether you've crossed the line is whether your work was driven by someone else's existing solution. Here are some examples:
In my view, this really isn't that complicated. We require you to do your own work, because that's how the learning is done in this course. A large part of what you're learning to do is to design and write programs, a skill that can only be built by designing and writing programs. You have to make the decisions about what to do next, how to organize your program, and so on. If someone else is making most of those decisions for you, you're not building the skills necessary to be ready for the courses that follow on from this one. And, from the standpoint of academic honesty, if someone else is making most of those decisions for you, that's plagiarism.
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 misunderstood one of the earlier topics in this course (or one or more important topics in previous coursework) on which later topics depended, 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 overall life 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, and suddenly it seems better to submit someone else's work than to submit nothing. As upwards of 10% of my students (who have cheated like this) can attest, it's not.
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.
And, in general, some students won't pass this course with a C or better this quarter, and won't be ready to take follow-on courses yet. And that's not as disastrous as it sounds. Most students who get less than a C in ICS 32A take the course again; most of those who take the course again pass it the second time around, with their feet firmly underneath them and ready to move forward.
Sharing your own solutions online
Some of our past students have wanted to post their own solutions to their projects online, with the goal of helping others or just showing off work that they were proud of. This is also problematic from an academic honesty perspective, because many or all of the projects you're working on will be reused in a future quarter; good problems are good problems, and I don't rebuild five new projects every quarter. Given that, posting your prior work online will absolutely lead to other students finding it and plagiarizing it — this is now one of the more common root causes of plagiarism cases that we find.
I can appreciate, of course, that you might want to build a portfolio of work to demonstrate your skills as you build them, and I'm not unsympathetic about that. However, the reality is that posting solutions to first-year coursework is very unlikely to be of use in job searches or other professional scenarios. I've asked a number of hiring managers over the years, including ones I've worked for in my industry career, and have universally received the same response about it: Hiring managers generally aren't interested in seeing prior homework. Projects in courses like this one are sanitized, in the sense that they're problems that have been designed to be solved using techniques just taught, with the requirements clearly spelled out, and with few enough rough edges that a large number of students can solve them without encountering roadblocks that can't be overcome. Real-world work isn't like this, as it turns out. Figuring out what needs to be built is as important as figuring out how to build it. Building a portfolio is best done with your own solutions to your own problems, containing things you've written to scratch your own technology itches or explore concepts that you wanted to learn more about on your own.
So, in general, despite the fact that you may be proud of the work you've done, you need to understand that there is a very strong likelihood that the only thing you'll be doing is enabling future students to plagiarize your work — and quite possibly becoming embroiled in the investigation yourself and being reported to AISC — while not accomplishing much of anything positive for youself.
Do not share your prior solutions online, during or after the quarter.