Grading

Your grade will be calculated from three categories:

Social Learning and Engagement

Part of learning is being involved in a community of people. (It’s impossible to learn without reference to others; even if you sit on your own and read a book, someone wrote it, if you use a LLM, people built it). Communicating, not just consuming, is crucial for how knowledge gets stored in your brain.

Each week there are readings, lectures, and discussions. The readings make sure you come to class with something to talk about, and the lectures and discussions are where you’ll talk about them with others and do the talking.

Each week there are 8 points of social learning credit available:

For lecture points, one point will come from an on-paper, in-person set of answers on a handout done in class, and the other will come from completing a more detailed worksheet and submitting it electronically before the next lecture session.

Both are graded on completeness and reasonableness, not on strict correctness. If you miss a lecture, you cannot earn the credit for the in-person, on-paper component, but you can still submit the worksheet electronically for 1 point.

Assignments

We plan 6 assignments (due Fridays in weeks 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10) that will have a mix of programming and writing about programs. That’s a plan – deadlines may shift a little, and we will clearly post if they do.

Most assignments will have an initial deadline and a review/resubmission deadline. The review/resubmission deadline will be around 2 weeks after the initial deadline. It will have a mix of similar and new tasks that you can do to make up for lost credit on the first submission, and tasks that involve reviewing other students’ work.

This is the only late policy for assignments – if you miss the initial deadline you can resubmit the modified work at the resubmission deadline.

Initial submissions are graded out of 4 points:

Resubmissions are graded in part based on feedback on the initial submission. For a score of 0 or 1 on the initial submission, the maximum score on a resubmission is 3. For a score of 2 or 3 on the initial submission, the resubmission score can reach 4.

Some resubmissions may require an in-person meeting with a staff member to check understanding.

Exams

We will have 3 exams during the quarter, flexibly scheduled through the UCSD CBTF, in weeks 3, 6, and 9. In finals week, you will have the opportunity to retry any of the exams – the retries will have different questions that test similar content. The final score for each exam is the max of the original exam and the retry exam score, so a retry can never lower your grade.

Exams during the quarter are 45m long; you can reserve a single final exam retry slot for 2h, in which you attempt any or all of the retry exams.

Exams are graded out of 4 points. The sum of question points may add up to more than 4; we will publish the point-specific cutoffs after we finish grading each exam. Exams will have a mix of questions, with some involving programming in Java without access to the internet or agentic programming tools.

Grade Categories and Philosophy

A slogan for the course’s grading policy is High Standards, Multiple Tries. Most course components have chances to make up or otherwise improve your score; most students make use of some of these opportunities, and few students submit full-scoring work on all of their first attempts (the course is designed to be challenging). In addition, we think that all of the course components are important. To earn a A, B, or C in the course, you need to achieve A, B, or C level scores in all three categories:

D grades are not given (if the C thresholds are not reached, a F or NP is the final course grade). Other pluses and minuses will be given around the boundary of these scores by consistent policy not published in advance. The plus/minus policy will not consider exam retries, so if you have A-level exam credit after the three in-quarter exams, there is no grade incentive to retry exams.

Requests to change this grading policy (for a specific student or class-wide) will be denied with a link to this syllabus section. Consider this: we may, as instructors, decide for academic reasons that the most accurate way of assigning letter grades in the class needs to change. However, it would be inappropriate for us to do so in response to student requests: that could create an appearance that we give students the grades they ask for rather than the grades that represent their achievement.

Make-up Work, Missed Work, and Special Circumstances

Our intent is that no extensions or make-up work is given outside of these policies. If you miss an assignment, use the resubmission deadline. You can miss many lectures, discussions, or readings with no impact on your course grade, so no make-up options are given for missing those. If you miss an exam, there are retry opportunities in finals week. These are all designed to naturally handle the case where you miss up to a week of the course with no special syllabus changes. Do not send us medical records or other documentation to justify absences.

If you do miss more than a week of work in the course, or if you want help applying these policies to a specific situation you find yourself in, or if there is an accommodation you need not covered by these polices, please email both instructors so we can advise.

🤖 AI, CSE-011, and You

AI and Writing

It is your responsibility to make sure that any writing (prose) you submit under your name is representative of your thoughts and positions. It is not good if you answer “What did you mean by this sentence?” with either “Oh sorry, AI wrote that” or “Oh I don’t know what I meant there”.

The easiest way to avoid issues is to do all the writing yourself. It’s one of the main places where using AI almost always replaces your own thinking, to your detriment. Note that this does not mean “you can’t use AI to help you write”; many tools can be useful for proofreading, checking, filling in parts of examples, brainstorming, etc. But don’t let that turn into AI doing the thinking and decision-making for you.

It’s also a matter of respect – when you write prose for other humans, it’s rude to delegate it to an agent if it was meant for communication between humans: it would be weird to show up to office hours and use your phone to speak for you. It also erodes confidence in human communication when our individual voices are flattened out into one provided by a major AI company. Alex Hillman has a great short piece on this; I think the key line is [“don’t ask the recipients of your work to try harder than you did”](https://jfdi.bot/blog/ai-generated-content-broke-the-social-contract).

You can lose credit for this on assignments where we grade writing, or where you write feedback or reviews of code or other student work. We will deduct credit for (our judgment of) bad writing, not for AI-generated writing specifically; the two just often happen to overlap.

We will not use generative AI to write substantial communications with you, either. We confidently claim authorship of the content of these pages. We do use Claude and other assistants to help us proofread them, and fill in metadata like schedule details and so on, but the text we write ourselves.

We may use AI to help us with parts of grading your work; this will be clearly explained and labelled, and be accompanied by human review.

AI and Coding

Individual assignments may encourage or discourage the use of external tools like coding agents or chatbots.

In general, for take-home programming work, these guidelines are for your learning, rather than something we try to enforce. Here’s an analogy:

Consider physical conditioning, let’s take running for fitness in particular. There are many machines in the world that are remarkably effective at moving people around: electric scooters for example. Taking a scooter for a few miles gets you to your destination more quickly and less sweatily than running, but completely misses the point of the run. The goal of running for fitness has little to do with getting to a destination and everything to do with the changes that happen inside your body. Many people can run the same miles on the same road and get the benefits from it, despite them all doing the same work that a machine (the scooter) could have done.

Programming is also necessarily collaborative, and often builds on past work. As a general rule, you can use code that we provide or that you develop with other students in this class. If you use code that you developed with other students, got from Piazza, or got from the internet, say so, including the source and which students you worked with in CREDITS.txt. All of the writing in assignments (e.g. in open-ended written questions) must be your own.

If you use an AI agent or other similar tool to help write code, disclose it! In CREDITS.txt include a few sentences about which tools you used and which specific parts of the assignment they helped with.

If you don’t include a CREDITS.txt and it’s clear you included code from others or from an AI tool, you may lose credit, have to do a resubmission, or get a 0 on the assignment. Repeated or severe violations can be escalated to reports of academic integrity violations.

Other Policies

Exam Integrity

It is a violation of academic integrity to share details of your exam with others until after you receive your grade for it. Keep in mind that the exams are randomized to discourage casual cheating, so your exam may not be the same one that others see. It is a violation of academic integrity to communicate with anyone other than the official proctors during the exam, or to use devices other than the ones you are using to complete the exam.

Lecture and Discussion Integrity

It is a violation of academic integrity to submit work for someone else in lecture or discussion, when handouts or other attendance mechanisms are used. You also should not try to submit handouts or worksheets for sessions you did not attend in person.

In-class Professionalism

Devices

To a large degree, you are responsible for managing your time, attention, and learning in lecture, and I hesitate to make policies that attempt to govern or restrict your choices with respect to note taking or device use. However, lecture is a communal space, and your actions can affect others’ learning. In particular, what you have on your screen may be unavoidably in the field of view of other students. Because of this, you are responsible for a fragment of the attention of everyone in a cone of space behind you. With this in mind, the policy for lecture is that if you use a device, you must have lecture-related content onscreen. There is even research that shows that the content of screens in the classroom, even quite far away, can have a detrimental effect on learning. If you cannot resist checking social media, playing a game, or doing other off-topic tasks during lecture, sit in the back 2 rows so that you are only having an effect on your own attention, or the attention of others with a similar mindset.

Collaboration

Some lecture and discussion work may be highly collaborative, and designed to encourage communication between students. Some of the activities will have you talk to other students, or exchange code, ideas, or commands with other students, and write down what happened.

In all of this communication, remember to be polite, professional, and focus on the work. A huge part of the job of a working software professional or researcher is professional and clear communication.

Some tricks for this: avoid statements that reference the author of the code, frame negative feedback as possible improvements or ways your expectations were violated, and take responsibility for anything you don’t understand.

Examples:

condition to be true but I think it will be false because XYZ … we could demonstrate that by doing ABC.”

10-12, these 3 lines could be shortened into one line using method chaining: ….” And use some judgment: it’s likely that some of the advice you’d give is helpful and constructive, and some of it is just showing off.

read these conditions when they are written as …. because …” If you don’t have a good explanation to put after the “because”, how do you know it’s a good suggestion?

trouble understanding lines 20-24. It would help me to work through an example of how that part is supposed to work”

Student Conduct Policy

UC San Diego strives to maintain a climate of fairness, cooperation, and professionalism. It is expected that you practice basic principles, including, but not limited to, mutual respect, civility, and decency, towards maintaining an atmosphere free of abusive or demeaning treatment. Non-academic student misconduct will be reported to the Center for Student Accountability, Growth, and Education for violating UC San Diego’s Principles of Community.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a learning environment for this course that supports a diversity of thoughts, perspectives, and experiences while respecting your identities (including race, ethnicity, heritage, gender, sex, class, sexuality, religion, ability, age, educational background, etc.). Our goal is to create an inclusive learning environment where all students can feel comfortable and thrive. Accordingly, the instructional staff will make a concerted effort to be welcoming and inclusive to the wide range of students in this course. If there is some way we can help you feel more included, please let one of the course staff know (in person, via email/Piazza, or even using an anonymous note).

We also expect that you, as a student in this course, will honor and respect your classmates, abiding by the UC San Diego Principles of Community. Please understand that others’ backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences may be different than your own, and help us build an environment where everyone is welcomed and respected.

If you experience any sort of harassment or discrimination, please contact an instructor as soon as possible. If you prefer to speak with someone outside of the course, please contact the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination.

Students with Disabilities

We aim to create an environment in which all students can succeed. If you have a disability, please contact the Office for Students with Disabilities (OSD) and discuss appropriate accommodations as soon as possible. We will work to provide you with the accommodations you need, but you must first provide a current Authorization for Accommodation (AFA) letter issued by the OSD. You are required to present your AFA letters to the instructor and to the department’s OSD Liaison so that accommodations may be arranged.

Basic Needs/Food Insecurities

If you are experiencing any insecurities related to basic needs (food, housing, financial resources), there are resources available on campus to help, including The Hub and the Triton Food Pantry. Please visit The Hub for more information.