Syllabus Changelog
This document describes changes to the course syllabus.
End-Of Semester changes (Week 15)
I am going to change the grading scale in favor of students. I would not call this a curve; I have not yet graded finals, and it is not response to grades in the course. These changes are made to better reflect what feels standard at Grinnell, and also to better reflect my grading philosophy now, as a professor, versus fifteen weeks ago. The new scale is as follows.
Let n be your final point sum in the course (with extra credit and any additional free points also added). Your final letter grade is determined by the row below with the greatest p such that p ≤ n. (N.b. recall that there are ≥ 1000 points offered in the course.)
| Letter Grade | p |
|---|---|
| A | 900 |
| B+ | 870 |
| B | 800 |
| C+ | 770 |
| C | 670 |
| D | 600 |
| F | 0 |
A summary:
- An A is now 900-1000. I don’t know how much I care about A minuses.
- Likewise, a B and B+ are now 800-899. I don’t know how much I care about B minuses.
- There is no C-, as far as I can tell, at Grinnell. At least with respect to graduation, there is no C-. So I also don’t care much about C minuses.
- I have lowered the bar for a C to a 670. Since this course is terminal and required for graduation, all I am really doing is making the de facto the de jure: if you are “close enough” to a passing grade, I was probably gonna give it to you. It’s just clearer now that “close enough” means 670 points or above.
Mid-Semester Feedback (≈ Week 7)
The first round of changes are in response to feedback received from the Mid-Semester Course-Adjustment form. This feedback is aggregated and summarized below.
If there are any objections to any of these changes, please feel free to reach out to me by email, Teams, or in person. I am very happy to hear other ideas or ways to improve my proposals.
First, here is a summary of the feedback I received. Feedback that pertains to me or the course staff (and not the course itself) is omitted.
Likert rating aggregates
Course materials
Pace and difficulty
Most helpful aspect(s) of the course
Below is a word cloud that summarizes 18 replies to the question “Which aspect of the course is most helpful to you?”
Least helpful aspect(s) of the course
Below is a word cloud that summarizes 15 replies to the question “Which aspect of the course is least helpful to you?”
Summary of written feedback
Most feedback I received was positive (thank you!). Here are what I found to be the main takeaways from what was written.
- Quizzes have dubious value and cause some students anxiety.
- Some content has been cut from previous offerings of CSC341, and students are anxious they may be at a disadvantage in grad school because of these cuts.
- Labs are sometimes too easy and sometimes too long/hard.
- Lecture can be too long.
- Class Difficulty: The class is leaving some students feeling unchallenged.
I will try to address these in my proposals below.
Responses & Proposed Changes to Syllabus
Proposal 1: Replace (some) quizzes with reading exercises
One alternative to quizzes I have seen in other courses is to provide reading exercises—basically quizzes that you have a few days to do.
Here is the change I propose to add to the syllabus.
Reading Exercises
On weeks where there is not a quiz, you may be asked instead to perform a reading exercise. Each reading exercise will be due before the start of class that Thursday and assigned at the latest by the Tuesday of that week. The reading exercise will be 1-3 small problems on material covered in that Thursday’s assigned reading. You should expect the reading exercise problems to be rather straightforward, but to require a little more thought than the quizzes.
Response: Course Pace and and cut content
I do not have any changes to the syllabus to propose here, but I know some of you are concerned about cuts made to the course content. For full transparency, here are the Schedules of the three courses from which I draw this course’s content.
Feel free to compare our schedule with each of the above. Because Prof. Eikmeier’s course was also on a Tues/Thurs schedule, I have borrowed the most from her. I will say, in full honesty, that I have slowed down this second block of content (on Computability) perhaps too much. We are going to miss a few things because of this (namely the Post-Correspondence Problem and Rice’s Theorem). Those of you who are finding the course too slow are probably feeling so as a consequence of this decision. I cannot fix this mistake, but I can state that, moving forward, I do not intend to repeat this mistake for the last block of the course (on Complexity).
I will also add, for those of you going to grad school, that you will not be at a disadvantage for missing this stuff. You are likely still going to be at a great advantage compared to your peers, as this course is not taught in many undergraduate curricula.
Response: Lab difficulty and lecture length
I will put it plainly: balancing lecture time with lab time is difficult. In my teaching philosophy, lecture should be minimized and lab time maximized. I am working on improving this. As we move forward, I will try to reduce lecture length but make labs more informative and challenging so that you can get more hands-on experience with the content in class.
That being said, students generally expect to only be examined on the material that has been discussed in lecture. Ergo, I have an obligation to cover in lecture any material that you might see on homeworks or exams. So I can only shorten lecture so much.
Proposal: Homework challenge problems
It is always a challenge to make a course both fair and equitable. By fair I mean: all students must do the same work. By equitable I mean: appropriately challenging for each student’s level and background.
To try to address this, I am going to occassionally add challenge problems to the homeworks. Challenge problems will be (appropriately) more challenging but worth more points. In particular, students will be asked to choose between doing n challenge problems and m regular problems with n < m. In other words, you will sometimes have the choice of doing one challenge problem or two regular problems.
My proposed change to the syllabus:
Challenge Problems
Homeworks will occassionally offer students the choice of completing a challenge problem instead of one or more regular problems. Students will be instructed to complete only one of these options. For example, for a given homework, you may be offered three options for exercise 1—call these 1A, 1B, and 1C, where 1A and 1B are each worth 4 points and 1C is worth 8 points. You will be asked to submit exactly one of the two options: (i) 1A and 1B or (ii) 1C alone. By intention, you should expect 1C to be more challenging (and require more insight) than 1A and 1B, but to otherwise cover the same material.