Disclaimer
This syllabus supplies basic data about all my classes. The
class syllabus and web site may override this document. This
syllabus is tentative and changes will be announced in class
and posted to the course in my website
[ http://cse.csusb.edu/dick/ ]
Urgent changes may also be
Emailed to your CSUSB EMail account. My classes follow
the "General Regulations and Procedures" in CSUSB Bulletin
of Courses with respect to course withdrawal, cheating, and
plagiarism -- see below.
Work
The College of Natural Sciences (25~35) advises you that
you should be doing at least 2 hours of study, outside of
class, per week, for each unit you are taking. Study assigned
parts of books, handouts, and online resources to prepare for
each class. More, you may have to develop novel software,
documents, and web pages on your own. Don't waste any
money on software or hardware for my classes. Use our
systems as much as you can. The more you write and test,
the better you will get. You can develop software on your
own machine but to earn full points the results must work on
our systems. Talk to the CSUSB and/or CSE Help Desks or the CSE
Club about getting software that lets you work
remotely (SSH and Putty).
Expect to work in class. Do not plan to do homework or sit back and listen. Turn off or silence phones. Shut down computers and wireless devices unless instructed to use them.
In lab sessions, you will do experiments and exercises based on the online lab materials, lectures, books, discussions,.... Some lab work (but perhaps not all) can be done remotely or at different times.
Cheating and Copying
Plagiarism means presenting others' work as your own. It
is punished at CSUSB. Check out the policies in the catalog.
If you borrow something from books, friends, handouts,
WWW pages, Google, etc. you must state where you found
it. It is illegal to make permanent copies of things on the
Internet unless you have explicit permission to do so. You
have my permission to copy most of my pages, but you must
not plagiarize them. When I spot plagiarism, I give ALL
copies the same score - ZERO.
Security, the Internet and Your Account
Your account has full access to Internet. We are not to blame
for what you find there. Don't be tricked by scams that ask for
money, or personal information. We don't ask for passwords
via the phone or email. Keep your passwords a secret.
Change them regularly. Include numbers, letters, and
symbols.
Assessment
Computers and wireless devices may not be used in exams. I
give the highest weighting to points that I see you earn. A
comprehensive final examination normally makes a big
difference. I do not set special make-up work or grade late
work. Instead I design my grading so that an 'A-' is possible
with roughly one week of work missing. I bend these rules for
documented emergencies like sickness. You can earn 5
bonus/make up points (1%) by attending a computer science
seminar (http://csci.cusb.edu/dick/seminar/) and giving me a
one or two paragraph summary of one presentation.
Grading
I don't use a curve. The maximum number of points is 500.
Normally all points prior to the final are totaled and no more
than 300 can be carried forward. No more than 200 points
are normally earned in the final. These totals are added and
converted to percentages. An A indicates a close to 100%
performance. A B is for 90% and so on down to a D(70%). If
the best total in the class is less than 98.33%(an A) then all
totals will be scaled up to make the best = 100%. The
boundaries(%) will be as follows:
Adds and Drops
You are responsible for carrying out all adds and drops. If
you are not on my roster by census date I can not give you a
grade and you must leave the classroom. If you do not drop
before the census date I am forced to give you a grade.
Emergencies
Power cuts: http://policies.csusb.edu/blackout.htm
Earthquakes: remain calm, duck, grab furniture, and cover
your head.