Classroom Etiquette and Behavior Guidelines

Class Attendance and Missed Lectures

Spanish Universities typically do not control class attendance, especially at Masters (and above) levels. Class attendance will not be controlled in this course. While the instructors are of course available to clarify doubts, if you miss a lecture it is your responsibility to read the corresponding material and catch up.

Timeliness

Please be on time for the lectures as a sign of respect towards your classmates. That will also be beneficial for you: it is common to take some time at the beginning of the lectures to make announcements and to take questions related to past lectures, homework, etc. Anyone who is late will miss these announcements, and it won’t be polite to interrupt the lecture to ask about them, as it will take time from everyone else.

In-Class Electronics Use

The usage of laptops, tables, cell phones, etc. in the classroom is discouraged except when instructed to do so, due to their generally adverse impact. Longhand note-taking is recommended, as writing has been linked with the stimulation of brain areas related to memory and cognitive tasks. This is the reason why slides will in general not be made available before the lectures. Even in the case of online teaching and with lectures being recorded, taking notes can anyway be beneficial. Even if you are using a computer to follow the lectures, you should of course avoid using it to browse the web while in a lecture.

The following are some articles and papers studying the influence of electronic equipment in the classroom.

Diversity and Respect

Respecting everyone’s boundaries in a multicultural society may be challenging. Seemingly innocent comments or actions may inadvertently make others feel uncomfortable. Lack of visual clues when using videoconference may make committing mistakes easier. Please make your best efforts to avoid these situations.

Academic Integrity

We expect all students to respect some basic principles.

You should be careful when using Internet resources for assistance other than those specifically linked from the course website or specified in the assignments. You are welcome to use reference material, e.g., programming language documentation or an encyclopaedia. Be aware that performing a generic Web search may get you to much more, such as solutions. If you accidentally find a solution and choose to use it, document that you are doing so. You may lose some credit for the assignment, but at least you won’t be attributing anyone else’s work to yourself. You shouldn’t post looking for solutions on mailing lists or Web sites, either. Talk with your instructor if you have troubles completing your assignments.

Unless stated otherwise, assignments must be done alone. One exception for this course is the term project. You are welcome to discuss any parts of the assignments with course staff. With your friends and classmates, you may talk about the assignment: e.g., how far along you are, how long you anticipate needing, etc. You ought not to discuss solutions, except with the members of your term project team. If in doubt about whether you can discuss something, ask an instructor.

You are responsible for keeping your files private by setting the appropriate protections. If you fail and someone copies your work, you too can be held responsible. The same holds for other kinds of “sharing”, such as leaving your work visible in public places (whether computer screens or whiteboards). Another important kind of file-sharing is posting solutions on a publicly-visible version control repository site. If you host your work on such a site, make sure it is in a private repository.

Likewise, if you send a message related to an assignment or a project to the class-wide mailing list, you should be careful not to reveal what are your plans for the solution, or post snippets of your solution. Mail the instructor directly instead.

Lecture Structure and Materials

Lecture Length

In order to reduce the fatigue that a three-hour lecture would surely cause, we plan to use sessions of 50 minutes: 50 minutes for lecturing + 10 minutes break, repeat again, finish with a 50-minute session. That has worked quite well in the past and allows for some time to relax and refocus.

Material

Software to be used for the homework, models to be used, slides, and lecture recordings (at least during the year 2020-2021) will be provided. Slides will be available only after the lectures.

Lecture Recording (2020-2021)

The 2020-2021 course was given online and lectures were recorded. This means that your image or your voice may end up in the recording, and removing may be too resource-consuming. We will ask you whether agree to this arrangement. If you do not want your image to be recorded, simply turn off your camera. If you do not want your voice to be recorded when making a question, you can always use the chat facility of the videconference system used. This has the drawback that the instructor may not immediately realize that there is a question in the chat.

Evaluation Process

Grading

The grades for this course are based on:

• Homework.
• A group presentation of a term project, to be done at the end of the semester.

The initially planned relative weight of each part is 60% homework and 40% term project. Note that the evaluation of the term project does not only take into account the technical part: how the presentation itself is done is also taken into account. Also, the relative weights of the homework and term project may be altered if deemed convenient in view of the relative difficulty of the homework and the term project and how COVID-19 evolves.

Homework and Due Dates

In order to give early feedback, some homework may have a due date right before the starting of a lecture, with the solutions to the homework being explained in that lecture. The objective is to maximize learning, as the homework problems and solutions are fresh in your minds. In this case, granting extensions is problematic: those who did not turn in the homework will know the solutions. If any of you has a problem meeting a deadline, please let the instructors know well in advance to find a solution.

Turning in assignments on time has several advantages:

• Assignments tend to be accumulative: what you learn in one assignment helps you with the lectures that follow and the next assignments. Being late with one assignment can make you be late with the next one, or make lectures be more difficult to follow, potentially leading to a stressful situation as the semester ends.
• Predictability in the grading schedules is helpful to make the course run smoothly.
• There is also benefit to locality: by grading all the submissions for an assignment at the same time it is not necessary to “page in” the assignment’s content, and all the submissions can be handled uniformly and thus fairly.
• Real life has very often deadlines that are just impossible to change. Getting used to that and planning ahead is a good policy.

Interpreting the Assignments

Some assignments in this course do not have a unique, canonical solution. Others may have difficult solutions if you choose the wrong approach. In some cases you will be allowed to modify the assignment conditions, provided you give a good justification. If you do that, it is your responsibility not to transform your assignment into a substantially easier problem. If that is the case you may loose credits for the assignment.