Welcome to the Fall 2018 web page for CS173, lecture A
CS Proficiency Exam, click
here
Important announcements
Final exam solutions and rubric
here
Final exam review session, held by Meghan, on
Thursday December 13, 1-3 PM in 1320 DCL.
Extra office hours:
Thursday, December 13, 12-1 PM
and Friday December 14, 12-1 PM
(in the usual place, next to SC 3102)
Basic information
- Day/time: 1002 ECE Building, TuTh 9:30-10:45
-
Instructor: Tandy Warnow, Founder Professor of Computer Science
- Co-instructor: Prof. David Varodayan
-
Email:
- Please don't send email directly to Professor Warnow for CS173
or CS196
issues; it is too easy for this email to get lost in the hundreds of emails
that come every day.
To write specifically to Prof. Warnow,
please use:
cs173a-instructors@lists.illinois.edu (which will also
be ready by Prof. Varodayan).
-
To write to the course staff (TAs, GA, and instructors), please use
cs173a-staff@lists.illinois.edu.
- Warnow's office hours: Tu 11 AM to 12 PM in Siebel 3235
- Teaching assistants:
Forest Yang (foresty2),
Meghan Shanks (meghans2),
Aniket Murhekar (aniket2),
Jacob Laurel (jlaurel2),
Peiye Zhuang (peiye),
and Weilin Zhang (weilinz2).
-
Office Hours for 173 A staff.
Please note that this course is different from the B lecture.
We will use different textbooks.
We will cover most of the same material, but in
a different order.
LaTeX
Your homework assignments will regularly include
material that you should be doing by typing mathematics and then
uploading
a PDF. It can be acceptable to do this in the textbox provided in
Moodle but this can make it difficult for the
TAs and CAs to grade (i.e., it's not easy to read
mathematics that isn't properly formatted).
Therefore, you are strongly encouraged to learn LaTeX, so that
you can create and compile latex documents, and then
upload PDFs produced using LaTeX.
I have provided LaTeX for some of the lectures to make it easy
for you to learn this.
You can also use Overleaf as a way of easily creating and compiling LaTeX.
Lectures
The lectures for the course
(including reading assignments, presentations
provided, and dates of the midterm
exams) will be posted
here.
If you miss a lecture, please make sure to look at the
webpage with the posted lecture (in PDF or PPT) and
also talk with one or more of the other students in the
class to find out if something was covered in class that wasn't in the
posted lecture.
Similarly, if you miss a lecture, please come to my
office hour to find out what you missed; I'll be glad
to present that material to you.
Piazza
We will set up Piazza for you to use. However,
please try to be careful in how you use this. In particular,
don't use it to get solutions to homework questions, and don't post
solutions to homework or exam questions since it's possible some student
might not yet have submitted their
answers.
The course TAs will be monitoring
Piazza regularly and will respond to your questions.
Please see piazza.com/illinois/fall2018/cs173alecture.
Please attend office hours!
You are strongly encouraged to attend office hours -- especially
mine!
If you are considering applying to graduate school
and might want a recommendation letter, please
see me early in the semester.
(By the way, going to faculty office hours can have unexpected
benefits --
I have written many letters of recommendation for graduate
school and fellowships for
former CS173 undergrads who attended office hours.
Kodi Collins,
one of my former CS 173 students,
came to office hours with questions and ended up joining
my research group!
)
Textbook, Syllabus, etc.
The main focus of the course is learning how
to prove theorems, but also (of course) to
read and write mathematics. Thus, these
themes repeat throughout all the
material presented in the course, even though
the focus of the attention may seem to be
on different topics.
You should read the assigned reading and lecture material
before attending class!
The class textbook is
Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (7th edition) by
Kenneth Rosen, which is available in
Grainger Library, and available for purchase at the Bookstore.
Grading
Attendance:
Participation in discussion and lecture section is expected
(and 10% of the grade is based on discussion section participation).
Furthermore,
the lectures will include material that is
not in the textbook nor in the reading materials!
Therefore, you are responsible for all material presented in
class.
If you miss class for any reason, please make a point of getting
notes from another student, attend office hours, and
download the class presentation (PDF or PPTX).
We do not take attendance in the lecture, but we will take
attendance in the discussion section.
Even so, you will not be penalized for missing
up to two discussion sections (though note that this includes
the first discussion section, which you may not have
been at if you added the class late).
You should read the assigned reading and lecture material
before attending class!
Late homeworks or reading quizzes:
Late homeworks or reading quizzes are not accepted, but the bottom
grade of each category is dropped.
Make-ups for the midterms or final exam will only be permitted
in the case of documented illness, or similar unavoidable problem.
Illness policy:
In addition to dropping the worst homework and reading quiz,
I will also allow you to miss one
homework or reading quiz due to illness - even without
medical documentation (send email with an explanation
to receive this exception). If you receive this exception, then
your assignment grade for that category will be based on the
other assignments for that category. If your illness prevents you
from doing more than one assignment in a given category, then
exceptions may also be granted, but documentation will be required.
More generally, illness that lasts more than one week is likely to
have substantial impact on your ability to do well in the class; please
make arrangements to get extra help to
catch up if this is the case.
How your final course grade is calculated:
- Participation in discussion section: 10 pts
- Reading quizzes: 10 pts (typically due Tuesdays at 10 PM on Moodle, bottom RQ dropped)
- Homework: 20 pts (typically due Wednesdays at 10PM on Moodle, bottom homework dropped)
- Midterms: 40 pts (October 11 and November 13, 7:15-8:30 PM) in DCL 1320 and ECEB 1002.
- Final exam: 20 pts
Midterm exams:
There will be two 75-minute midterm exams that will be held in the evenings.
These will be closed book, and will be largely similar to the
homework assignments.
You will not be allowed to bring a calculator or cellphone to the exam.
Please be on time, and be respectful of the other students by being
quiet during the exam.
If you leave early, do so quietly so that you do not disturb the
other students.
Raise your hand if you think one of the problems is unclearly stated.
The average for Midterm 1 was 86%.
The median for Midterm 2 was 92, and the average was 88.5.
The histograms for the two midterms are given below.
Grades between 90-100 get some kind of A, 80-89 get B's, 70-79 get C's,
60-69 get D's, and below 60 get F.
Midterm prep documents:
(Midterm 1 prep document)
(Midterm 2 prep document)
Room assignment for Midterm 2:
-
DCL 1320: ADC, ADD, and ADI.
-
ECEB auditirium: all other discussion sections.
-
Conflict exam: ECEB auditorium (during regular class period)
Homework and Reading Quizzes:
-
You are expected to do all the assigned reading before coming to class.
This includes looking at the lecture notes (PDF or PPTX).
- Homework and reading quizzes together count for 30% of your course grade,
and so together are more than the final exam.
Please don't make the mistake of not doing them (or missing their deadlines).
Also, homeworks and reading quizzes are essential for doing well on
the exams.
- The reading quizzes are based on both the assigned reading and the material taught in the lecture, which may not be in the assigned reading. What this means is
that you can't just show up in class and listen to what is presented - you have
to actually read the material that is assigned!
It also means that you cannot just read the textbook and other
assigned reading - you also need to look at the
posted lectures.
-
These assignments are submitted on Moodle. The reading quizzes
and most of the homework will be autograded
in Moodle, but some homework will require that you write something (typically
at most 2 pages) and then upload that into Moodle for the course staff
to grade by hand.
For these written assignments,
you have two options: PDF or putting text into the textbox.
The best option is to do your homework in latex, create a PDF of the homework, and then upload the PDF into Moodle. You can also just type your answer into the box that is provided, but it is very difficult to show mathematical notation if you do that. Do not write out your homework on paper and then take a photograph of your homework before uploading - this is rarely legible enough to grade. Please make sure to put your name on your written material, since we might print these solutions before we grade them.
-
You are allowed to collaborate on homework as long as you follow
the rules about collaborations.
In general, these
specify that if you work with some other people,
you must list everyone you worked with on the submitted homework and you
must write up your solutions entirely by yourself. Copying (or
copying and then modifying it to make it look like you did it yourself)
someone else's solution is not acceptable.
The full details are available of this collaboration policy are provided
here.
-
If you feel that you should have received more points than you got, please
see the TA for your discussion section first.
See me if you are still not satisfied.
If there was a mistake in the grading, we will address it!
-
One piece of advice: start your homework early! It won't always be easy.
Final Exam information
- The final exam prep document is available
here!
- The final exam is on December 15 from 7-10 PM,
in DCL 1320 and ECEB 1002.
Use the same assignment to rooms as for the two midterms.
- If you have a conflict with this date, please read
this document carefully,
and then
submit a conflict exam request through this page.
- If you are requesting DRES accommodation, make sure
you arrange accommodations at DRES well in advance. Contact
one of us (Prof. Varodayan or Prof. Warnow) if you will have
a problem with taking the exam on any day other than December 15.
- The final exam will cover all the material in
the course, other than the material covered on December 4 and 6.
- A prep document for the final exam will be made
available and posted by December 7.
However, the two midterm prep documents (for midterms
1 and 2) are also prep for the final, and so the final
prep document will only contain the new material not covered
by the two midterm prep documents.
Moodle
We will use Moodle for homework and reading quizzes.
All homeworks and reading quizzes can be submitted earlier and then
revised -- and the final submission is the one that counts.
You will not get feedback on the submissions until after the
deadline for the assignment.
Most of the homeworks and reading quizzes will be autograded,
but there will also be times where you need to provide a written
out proof or derivation. For this, you'll have the option of
typing your solution directly in the box provided, or uploading a PDF. The PDF
is probably the better way to go, since you can then write
mathematics using latex.
Please note that it is not acceptable to write out your
homework, take a photograph of it, and then upload the photograph - that
is rarely legible.
Also, please make sure to put your name on your written solutions,
since we might print them before grading.
Honors (CS 196)
Please see this page if you are joining
the honors section (CS 196).
Interested in doing research?
If you are interested in doing research, please read
this, and then
write to me or come see me.
I love having research students, and am delighted when they
succeed. For example, Kodi Collins, a
student from a former CS 173, did research with me and published a paper: see
PASTA for Proteins, Kodi Collins and Tandy Warnow.
She is now a PhD student at UCLA doing Computer Science!