Department of Information Science and Telecommunications

INFSCI 0015 "Data Structures and Programming Techniques

(Spring 2001, CRN 28006)

Assessment and Grading

Components of the Final Grade

Course assessment includes quizzes that will be offered throught the course, homework programming assignments, and two exams - midterm and final. The final exam is not cumulative. You final grade has three components: work over the duration of the course, midterm exam grade, and final exam grade. Each of these components will be evaluated separately using 100pt extended Letter Grade scale (0-20 is F range, 20-40 is D range, 40-60 is C range, 60-80 is B range and 80-100 is A range). After that the final grade will be calculated as 40% course + 30% midterm + 30% final.

Grade for the work over the duration of the course is a sum of your assignment grades, quiz grades (two lowest quiz grades will be excluded) and activity points. Your progress will be measured as a percentage of the max possible points: (assessment_points + quiz_points + activity_points)/(max_assessment_points + max_quiz_points) * 100%. Using this formula you can always check where you are standing. Score < 50% corresponds to F, 50-62.5 is D range, 65.5-75 is C range, 75-87.5 is B range, and 87.5-100 is A range. The formula to convert this score to 100pt extended Letter Grade scale is (X-37.5)/12.5*20.

Activity Points

You can earn bonus "activity points" for several things such as asking a good question in a discussion forum, providing a helpful answer in a discussion forum, helping during the lecture, attending additional "catch-up" sessions, finding errors in slides and examples. Activity points will be added to your assessment/quiz results.

Submitting and Naming

All assignments has to be submitted in paper form on the due date before or after the lecture has to be in instructor's hands by 4pm on the due date. Submit a printed copy of the program code and a sample output (starting from assignment #3). In addition, the program code of the asigment in ascii form has to be submitted electronically using CourseInfo or CourseMaster systems at any time by or on the due date (your submissions are time stamped). Naming conditions for electronic submissions are strict. The link should be named programX_Y where X is assignment number and Y is problem number within the assignment. You will lose 1/2 point for every misnamed link. All submitted work should bear the number of the assignment/quiz and the author's name in printed form. You will lose 1/2 point for every solution that lacks this data. By submitting work under your name, you are indicating that you have completed the assignment. This means that you should be able to completely explain every line of code in your program. Failure to be able to account for your coding decisions will be reflected in your grade.

Course Policies

Academic Integrity

You are expected to be fully aware of your responsibility to maintain a high quality of integrity in all of your work. All work must be your own, unless collaboration is specifically and explicitly permitted. Any unauthorized collaboration or copying will at minimum result in no credit for the affected assignment and may be subject to further action under the University Guidelines for Academic Integrity. You are expected to have read and understood this Guidelines. A document discussing these guidelines was included in your orientation materials.

Attendance

Class attendance, while not mandatory, is required if you want to succeed in this course. While most of the material covered by the lectures could be found in course books, for most of the lectures the order of presentation does not match any book exactly. Some material is not sufficiently covered by the book. Finally, all lectures include animated demonstration of examples. If you have missed the lecture, make sure you havea copy of the slides. Spare copies can be picked up from a folder near the instructor's office or printed from the Web.

Late Submissions and Resubmissions

The due date for assignments is strict. For extreme circumstances you have 5 late days to use at your discretion (i.e. you may use them on a single assignment, or distribute them over several assignments). Outside of this limit late assignment will not be considered. You can also improve your submission or fix errors in your submission until due date. Simply upload the new version adding "_v2", "_v3", etc to the name of the link to the program (i.e., program3_1_v2) The rules for submitting an updated version are the same as for late submissions - by or on the due date or use your late days limit. No assignment can be submitted or resubmitted after it was analyzed during the lecture.

Make-ups

If you miss a quiz or and assignment, you will received a zero. There will be no make-up quizzes, but the instrutor will drop the two lowest scores on the quizzes. There are also no make-up assignments since most of the assignments will be analysed in the class on or shortly after the due date. Missed exams can be made up in cases of extreme circumstances.

Office Hours

Office hours are an opportunity for you to clarify details you may have missed in class or to resolve a serious problem you have encountered when working on an assignment. They are not a place to get a "second run" of the lecture if you missed the class or obtain answers on the assignment. If you come to office hours with a problem on the assignment, make sure that you have access to an electronic version of your code.

Special Considerations

If you have a disability that requires special testing accommodations or other classroom modifications, please, notify both the instructor and Disability Resources and Services by the second week of the term. You may be asked to provide documentation of your disability to determine the appropriateness of accommodations. To notify Disability Resources and Services, call 64807890 (voice or TDD) to schedule and appointment. The office is located in the William Pitt Union, Room 216,

Course Overview

Introduction
First program, compilation, syntax errors
Variables, data types, and arithmetic expressions
Comparisons, simple conditions, while loop
More Data Types, conversions, constants, for loop
Conditional statement, complex conditions
Embedded while and if
Arrays. Array processing with for
Array as a data aggregate, linear search
Multi-dimensional arrays
Structures, arrays of structures
Binary search in an array. Analysis of search algorithms
Functions, parameter passing
Abstract Data Types. Stacks
Application of stacks
Stack Implementation with arrays
Queue as an abstract data type. Queue implementation with arrays.
Linked list as an abstract data type
Pointers
Linked Lists implementation with pointers
Stack implementation with linked lists
Binary trees
Applications of Binary Trees

Course Schedule

Thursday January 4	Lecture 0
Tuesday January 9	Lecture 1
Thursday January 11	No class meeting
Tuesday January 16	Lecture 2. Add/drop period ends
Thursday January 18	Lecture 3
Tuesday January 23	Lecture 4
Thursday January 25	Lecture 5
Tuesday January 30	Lecture 6
Thursday February 1	Lecture 7
Tuesday February 6	Lecture 8
Thursday February 8	Lecture 9
Tuesday February 13	Lecture 10
Thursday February 15	Lecture 11
Tuesday February 20	Lecture 12
Thursday February 22	Lecture 13
Tuesday February 27	Lecture 14
Thursday March 1	Midterm exam
Tuesday March 6	Spring Recess
Thursday March 8	Spring Recess
Tuesday March 13	Lecture 15
Thursday March 15	Lecture 16
Tuesday March 20	Lecture 17
Thursday March 22	Lecture 18
Tuesday March 27	Lecture 19
Thursday March 29	Lecture 20
Tuesday April 3	Lecture 21
Thursday April 5	Lecture 22
Tuesday April 10	Lecture 23
Thursday April 12	Lecture 24
Tuesday April 17	Lecture 25
Thursday April 19	Lecture 26
Wednesday April 25	10:00-11:50 AM Final Exam