More about Course Administration
Instructor
- Wayne Eberly
Email: eberly@ucalgary.ca
URL: www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~eberly
Office Hours: 2:00–2:50pm, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in ICT 613 — or by appointment, arranged in advance by email.
Modality of Course
Section 1 of this course is a hybrid course — with web-based lectures, and in-person tutorials and tests. Section 2 of this course is, entirely, in-person.
Meetings
Lectures
This is a flipped course: Students are expected to work through material — before scheduled lecture times — that is provided ahead of time on the course web site. During the lecture presentation, the instructor will answer questions that students have about the assigned reading and will then solve a problem that is based on the reading material, and that might be similar to a problem that students will be asked to solve in a tutorial exercise, assignment, or test
Lectures will not be recorded. However a completed outline, showing a solution for the lecture problem, will be made available on the course web site after the lecture.
Meeting times are as follows.
- Section L01: 12:30–1:45pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays: web-based.
- Section L02: 3:30–4:45pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays: in-person, in ST 141.
Provided that there is room in the lecture theatre, students in the web-based section are welcome to attend the in-person lecture. Students in the in-person are welcome to participate in the online lecture, as well.
Attendance at lectures is highly recommended: Especially if you are also carrying out the assigned reading, this will make it easier for you to keep up with the course as the term progresses. It will also give you a chance to ask questions about the course material and get to know the instructor and other students in the course.
Participation in the lectures will also help you to be prepared for the tutorials, which are described next.
Tutorials
The best way to learn what you need to, for this course, is to use course material to solve problems. Thus a tutorial exercise that includes one or more problems to be solved will be made available, on the course web site, at least one week before its tutorial — and students will be expected to try to solve the problems in the exercise before the tutorial begins.
Tutorials begin during the second week of classes (on either Monday, September 11, Tuesday, September 12, or Wednesday, September 13). Meeting times are as follows. However, it is possible (depending on enrolment levels) that not all sections will be available.
- Section T01: Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:00–3:50pm, in SA 219.
- Section T02: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00–11:50am, in SA 219.
- Section T03: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00–2:50pm, in SA 219.
- Section T04: Mondays and Wednesdays, 5:00–5:50pm, in MS 569.
- Section T05: Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:00–12:50pm, in SB 324.
- Section T06: Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:00–1:50pm, in SA 219.
- Section T07: Mondays and Wednesdays, 8:00–8:50am, in SA 219.
- Section T08: Wednesdays and Fridays, 9:00–9:50am, in EEEL 445.
- Section T09: Wednesdays and Fridays, 3:00–3:50pm, in EEEL 445.
- Section T10: Wednesdays and Fridays, 4:00–4:50pm, in EEEL 445.
Since the goal, here, is for students to solve problems, teaching assistants will not be presenting solutions for the problems on the exercises during the tutorials. Instead, their goal will be to help students when students get stuck, and to help students to evaluate the solutions that they have obtained. Solutions for exercise problems will be made available on the course web site after the tutorials.
Once again, participation in the tutorials is highly recommended. It is sometimes easy to think that you can solve a problem, when you have not tried to do this, but have seen a solution presented to you — and then discover that you do not know how to solve the problem, after all, when you need to.
Participation in the tutorials will, ideally, help you to be more successful when solving problems on assignments and tests.
Assessment
Components and Weightings
When computing your grade, the following components and weightings will be used.
| Participation: | 5.0% | Assignments (3, equally weighted): | 45.0% |
| Term Test #1: | 12.5% |
| Term Test #2: | 12.5% |
| Final Examination: | 25.0% |
Grade Calculation
Each piece of work submitted by the student will be assigned a percentage grade. The student’s grade for each component listed above will be combined with the indicated weights to produce an overall percentage grade for the course. This percentage grade will be rounded up to the nearest integer, to obtain a whole number between 0 and 100. The following conversion between a percentage and a letter grade will then be applied to determine the course letter grade:
| A+ | A | A− | B+ | B | B− | C+ | C | C− | D+ | D | |
| Minimum % Required: | 95% | 90% | 85% | 80% | 75% | 70% | 66% | 62% | 58% | 54% | 50% |
Note: In order to obtain a grade above “D+”, students must obtain a weighted average grade of “C−” or better on the test component for this course — that is, for the term tests and final examination.
Participation
During each lecture presentation, students will be asked a small number of questions on Tophat that assess their completion and understanding of the assigned reading for the lecture. The percentage grade for participation will be the ratio between the number of Tophat points that you earn, and the total number of these points that are available. No other way to earn “participation marks” will be provided, so that you must attend lecture presentations in order to receive participation marks for this course..
Assignments
There will be three equally weighted assignments — each worth 15% of a student’s final grade. Each assignment will have two components, with the first component worth 5% and with the second component worth 10%. Additional details, about how these components are related, will be provided when the first assignment is released. Each component is due at 11:59 pm on the date shown for it:
| Assignment #1 — First Component: | Wednesday, September 27 |
| Assignment #1 — Second Component: | Friday, October 13 |
| Assignment #2 — First Component: | Wednesday, November 1 |
| Assignment #2 — Second Component: | Friday, November 10 |
| Assignment #3 — First Component: | Wednesday, November 29 |
| Assignment #3: Second Component: | Wednesday, December 6 |
Students will complete assignments in groups of either three or four students. This term — in order to ensure that administrative details are handled efficiently in this large course — groups will be generated by the instructor, using D2L’s tools for this.
One of the goals for this term’s assignment will be to provide rapid feedback for the first component of each assignment, in order to allow groups of students as much time as possible to use this, when making decisions about how to complete the second components of assignments. Thus, no extensions, of any kind, will be granted for the first component of any assignment. Students reporting illness or personal emergencies, who would normally look for extensions here, will be accommodated in other ways. A late policy for the second component will be advertised, for each assignment, when this assignment is made available.
Tests
Subject to approval, the term tests will be written at the following times:
| Term Test #1: | 6:00–7:30pm, Wednesday, October 18 |
| Term Test #2: | 6:00–7:30pm, Wednesday, November 8 |
The final examination will be a two-hour registrar-scheduled examination that is held during the examination period.
Students will be allowed to use a double-sided letter-sized page of notes (that may be either printed or handwritten) as an aid for each test. No other aids will be allowed. All tests will be in-person.
No “make-up tests” (or other opportunities to try again, if your performance on a test was unsatisfactory) will be made available — this class is too large for this to be feasible, if marking is to be completed in a reasonable amount of time.
