Course Policies

Table of contents

  1. Prerequisites
  2. Class Attendance
  3. Academic Integrity
  4. AI Assistance
  5. Students with Disabilities
  6. Ed Discussion
  7. TA Office Hours
  8. Late Assignments
  9. Exams
  10. Final Grades

Prerequisites

  • Algorithms: Computer Science 61B
  • Probability/Statistics: Comp Sci 70, Math 55, Stat 134, Stat 140, Data 100
  • Strong programming skills

Class Attendance

Class attendance is not mandatory, but is highly recommended. Lectures will be recorded and uploaded to the bcourses regularly. However, Course Capture is subject to human and technical errors and in case of such errors (e.g. missing audio), recordings will not be repeated. Thus, you are encouraged to attend and follow the lectures actively.

Academic Integrity

All students will follow the UC Berkeley code of conduct. Homework (code, writeup) is supposed to be completed by you individually and independently. You may discuss ideas with peers, seek information on the Internet at high level. However, all those sources should be documented in your homework writeup (e.g. name of students, webpages, software). For additional information on plagiarism, see here. We have zero tolerance policy for cheating and plagiarism; violations will be referred to the Center for Student Conduct and will likely result in failing the class.

AI Assistance

If you use the output of automatic writing assistants (e.g., ChatGPT) or code suggestions (e.g., Copilot), you must cite that source and be clear what text or code came from it (or was inspired by it). Note that this comes with three caveats. 1.) You retain responsibility for anything you submit (whether text or code); you should be prepared to demonstrate your understanding of it and have performed due diligence to check its correctness (as we will discuss, such language models are prone to fabricating about the world!); 2.) You should be honest about your use of these methods; this is a large class, and if you submit the same automatically generated code/text as another student without citing appropriately, we will treat it as plagiarism. 3.) The work you submit should still be largely your own, representing your own ideas, code and words, and submissions that rely too heavily on AI tools will not be graded very favorably. (This policy itself is inspired by that of Chris Potts .)

Students with Disabilities

Our goal is to make class a learning environment accessible to all students. If you need disability-related accommodations and have a Letter of Accommodation from the DSP, have emergency medical information you wish to share, or need special arrangements in case the building must be evacuated, please inform the course instructor immediately. We can discuss privately after class or in office hours.

Ed Discussion

We’ll use Ed Discussion as a platform for asking and answering questions about the course material, including homeworks. Students are encouraged to actively participate on this forum and help others by answering questions that arise (helpful students can see a grade bump across a threshold (e.g., B+ to A-) for this participation. When helping with homework questions, keep the discussion to the high-level concepts; don’t post answers to homeworks or quiz/exam questions.

TA Office Hours

While at TA office hours, keep academic integrity in mind: you may discuss homework questions at a high level with others present, but don’t discuss specific answers or share screens with code solutions. Neither the TA office hours nor Ed Discussion should be used for pre-grading (asking if a specific answer to a homework or quiz question is correct before the assignment is due).

Late Assignments

Students have a total of three late days to use when turning in homework assignments and quizzes (not group annotation project deliverables or 259 project deliverables); each late day extends the deadline by 24 hours. If all late days have been used up, homeworks/quizzes can be turned in up to 48 hours late for 50% credit; anything submitted after 48 hours late = 0 credit. Each homework and quiz will be due at 11:59pm, and will have a 2-hour grace period for any last-minute submission issues. Late days and incompletes will be assessed immediately following the grace period (at 2:00am sharp). The grace period applies to late days as well (if a homework is due at 11:59pm 1/21, and you use a late day to extend it to 11:59pm 1/22, you may turn it in up to 2:00am 1/23 and still be assessed 1 late day.) Late days are assessed immediately once homeworks or quizzes are submitted late and can’t be retroactively changed (if you submit 2 homeworks and 2 quizzes late, for example, you can’t decide after the fact which ones to apply your 3 slip days to – they apply to whichever homeworks or quizzes use them up first).

Exams

This course has two exams scheduled for Feb 21 and March 20. The higher grade of the two exams will be used as the exam grade. If you are satisfied with your first exam grade, you can skip taking the 2nd exam. We will not be offering alternative exam dates. If you expect a time conflict, you should not register for this class.

Final Grades

Grades for this course will not be curved. Minimum thresholds for letter grades are the following: 93 A, 90 A-, 87 B+, 83 B, 80 B-, 77 C+ 73 C, 70 C-, 67 D+, 63 D, 60 D-, 0 F. Students taking the course P/NP must complete all deliverables and will receive a P if their grade is greater or equal to 70 (C-); Students taking S/U must complete all deliverables and will receive an S if their grade is greater or equal to 80 (B-).