CPSC 421/501 Course Policy Page, Fall 2024
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 essay/presentation to give, worth 20% 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 80% of the above CPSC 421 mark, plus 20% of a presentation (see below); however the grades in CPSC 501 may be raised if needed (but will not be lowered) to reflect the usual meaning of grades in grad courses. |
|---|---|
| Midterm | The midterm will be held in-person during class hours on Frieday, November 1, 2024. Location(s) will be announced. |
| Prerequisites and Background |
Formally, the prerequisite is
CPSC 221;
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 |
Some homework will be group homework; you may work in groups of up to
4 students.
Other homework will be individual homework.
You may work in groups of up to 4 students on individual homework,
but (1) you must write up your own
solutions individually; and (2) you must acknowledge with whom you worked.
For group and individual homework, you must
also acknowledge any outside
sources you have used beyond the textbook and the articles
on the class website.
Your homework must always use definitions and terminology given
in our class; some outside sources have errors and/or different
terminology and definitions.
Your groups may change from homework to homework. |
| In-Person | This class is in-person only; all exams must be taken in-person. In the unexpected event that I need to self-isolate, we will revert to Zoom classes on those days; such classes will not be recorded. |
| Canvas | We will use UBC Canvas, although mostly to set up some resources, such as signing-up for our piazza and gradescope sites. |
| Presentation for CPSC 501 | Students in CPSC 501 have to write an essay and possibly give a presentation to the class based on one or more expository or research article(s) related to Theoretical Computer Science (for 20% of their grade). Here is a description of the assignment. |
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