UCR CS 14: Introduction to Data Structures And Algorithms

Fall Quarter 2003: September 22, 2003 - December 13, 2003

Overview

Basic information

Lecture schedule

Lab schedule

General course features and policies (please read these carefully)

• Material covered: You'll be responsible for learning material covered in lecture, in the textbook, and in lab. Lecture does not cover all required material alone.
  
  
• Academic dishonesty: cheating is strongly punished (typically with an F in the course). You can report cheating anonymously at: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/cheating/. Assignment submissions must represent your own original work. Copying from any sources (web, other books, past or current students, etc.) is strictly prohibited -- learning to program requires you to learn to solve programming problems by yourself; using existing code and other resources becomes important later on in your studies. While discussing assignments is encouraged, team coding (even of pseudo-code) or letting others see your code are specifically not allowed. Be aware that programs are automatically compared to the current and prior quarter's programs for plagiarism, using a sophisticated code-comparison tool that ignores insignificant differences (like whitespace and variable names). If you're smart enough to fool the instructors, TAs, and code-comparison tools, you're more than smart enough to do the programs on your own!
  
  A couple more notes. Be aware that a subset of exams may be photocopied, for comparison with exams submitted for regrades. Also, be aware that lying to an instructor in order to be able to make up a missed exam or in other ways to obtain a better grade can be treated as academic dishonesty. During exams, cell phones must be stored away in a place not visible (e.g., inside a backpack).
  
  
• Final Exams are scheduled by the University, not by the instructor, and are correlated to the course sections. What that means is that you must take the final exam scheduled for the section you are enrolled in.
  
  
• Regrade policy: regrade requests must be submitted in writing and within one week of the distribution of the graded material. The entire exam/assignment may be regraded, not just the problem in question, so the grade may go up or down. Thus, think your regrade requests through carefully. Grade-database errors should also be pointed out within one week of posting.
  
  
• Final grades: Per university policy, changes to your final grade will be made only in the event of a clerical error. Asking your instructor how far you were from a cutoff and what extra work you can do to improve the grade is not appropriate.
  
  
• Switching/adding/dropping lab and lecture sections: all add, drop, and section changes of all lower division Computer Science courses, after the period when students can do so electronically is over, are done through the College of Engineering's Student Affairs office. Neither the instructors nor the CS department itself can sign any add/drop forms, nor can they arrange for section changes. Please go to Student Affairs, Bourns Hall A159, for any such changes.
  
  
• Communicating with the instructors and TAs: when sending electronic mail to the instructors or TAs, please include your full name, course & section details, student ID number, and UCR email address, so that we may properly identify you (remember, many students have similar names, and instructors may be teaching several courses). Also, please try to be polite and use reasonable grammar and formatting.
  
  
• Cell phones: During lectures and lab sessions, please turn off your cell phone.
  
  
• Homework and lab reports: All turned-in assignments will be turned in electronically. Each file should begin with our report template header. Source code must comply with professionally accepted coding standards. Also, you must include a section explaining the design, structure, etc of your program and how it works. Comments in source code are important, but they are not a replacement for an explanatory section. Please remember that successfully writing a computer program that compiles and runs correctly is not something anyone can do in just a few minutes, even when it looks easy. Debugging typically takes three times longer than figuring out how to write your program. So don't leave your programming assignments to the last minute!
  
  
• Compilation: all code that is submitted for programming homeworks and labs should compile with g++ flags -W -Wall -Werror -pedantic. There will be a minimum of a 10% penalty for homeworks that do not compile with these flags.
  
  
  
• Linux: All home programming assignments are to be done under Linux, or another Unix operating system. Submissions that are done under Windows (even if they compile under Linux) may be penalized.
  
  
  
• Reading: Read the current book sections before coming to lecture, and attend all lectures in their entirety. To encourage these important college study habits, we may give a few simple pop quizzes during the quarter, at any time during lecture.

Lab Guidelines (please read these carefully)

• Students are required to stay the full three hours of lab session every week. You'll have in-lab exercises, discussions, and practical exams. Work ahead or on extra course-related material if you finish early.
  
  
• During lab discussion time, students should not use the computers. Ideally, students would move their chairs to the whiteboard area.
  
  
• Prepare for lab before arriving.
  
  
• To reduce disruptions and provide for the best educational environment, all persons in lab during scheduled lab time should be formally registered in that section. In general, no swapping sections and no unregistered people in the lab are allowed, even if there are extra computers.

Additional Resources

• GNU Emacs Reference Card (pdf).


• Books
  
  • C++ in a Nutshell pre-release web page.
  • Software Craftsmanship - The New Imperative.
  • Practical C++ Programming.

© 2003 UC Riverside Department of Computer Science & Engineering. All rights reserved.