CS 302 Winter 2003
F. Vahid
Week 2

   * Policies in our 10/12/14 courses
     - Go over rest of the syllabus
     - Why mandatory attendance?
       * Programming is a SKILL
         - Like surgery, or basketball
         - Must be practiced
       * Learning occurs when calm
         - Most students always rush to meet deadline or to leave early
         - Never program calmly, never really learn
       * Must enforce regularly, no exceptions 
         - Intermittent reinforcement is very powerful -- make exceptions 
           once in a while (intermittment reinforcement), and they'll always 
           push for exceptions
         - Likewise, if some students get to leave, others will want to
         - Of course, they can leave (it's not a jail), but they'll lose 
           significant points -- and remember, lab grade is quite important
           now (C- minimum in lab to get C- in course)
       * Grading based on attendance is not so unusual for SKILL based courses
         - Physical education class -- grade is based on attendance
         - Dance lab -- grade is based on attendance
         - Clinical part of medical training -- attendance 
         - Programming -- attendance!  
       * But, we don't want to give wrong impression to students
         - Not just arbitrary rule to be mean
         - TAs play critical role
   * Enforcing policies is not always easy
     - Especially if you don't agree or aren't enthusiastic
     - Yet group decision making really only works if all support the
       group decision
       * Otherwise, we sabatoge policies, dooming them to failure
       * Think of parents -- number one rule is to present unified front
         to child, be consistent
       * Doesn't mean we all just agree -- we can disagree, but we discuss
         among ourselves, make policy, and then uniformly support. We
         can always continue to discuss, maybe change policy later.