CPSC 421/501 Course Policy Page, Fall 2020
This page concerns CPSC 421 Section 101 and CPSC 501 Section 101. The courses have been combined, except that CPSC 501 will have an additional presentation to give, worth 10% of the grade.
| Grading Scheme |
For CPSC 421 students, the course grade is computed as:
0.55 f + 0.35 max(f,m) + 0.10 max(f,m,h) where f,m,h are the grades on, respecitively, the final exam, midterm exam, and homework, after any scaling of the exams; your three lowest homework scores are dropped in the overall homework computation. For CPSC 501 students, the course grade is computed as 90% of the above CPSC 421 mark, plus 10% of a presentation (see below). |
|---|---|
| Midterm | The midterm will be held during class hours on Thursday, November 5, 2020. If you are unable to attend class due to your local time zone, you can take an alternate midterm at 8:30-9:50pm on Thursday, November 5; if so, you will need to enter your local time zone on Canvas in September. |
| Prerequisites and Background |
Formally, the prerequisites are
CPSC 221 (or CPSC 260 and EECE 320, both of which are no longer taught);
CPSC 320 is also recommended.
The point of these requirements
is that you should be familiar with some tools used in
algorithms and discrete mathematics;
these are mostly covered in Chapter 0 and Section 7.1 (regarding Big-O and
little-o notation) of Sipser's textbook.
More importantly, this course requires much more mathematical abstraction than one sees in a typical Computer Science course. This may require a significant amount of time if you haven't seen abstract mathematics; an example of this is Cantor's Theorem (covered at the start of the course). |
| Homework Policy | You may work together on homework, but you must write up your own solutions individually. You must acknowledge with whom you worked. You must also acknowledge any sources you have used beyond the textbook and two articles on the class website. |
| Presentation for CPSC 501 | Students in CPSC 501 have to give a presentation to the class based on one or more expository or research article(s) related to Theoretical Computer Science (for 10% of their grade). Here is a description of the assignment. |
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