CIS 422/522 Policies

Your Responsibilities

Reading

You are expected to do any assigned reading before class, and come to class with questions about what you read. You are expected to take notes on what you read, understand the material, and to look up words that you don't know (the web makes this easy).

Class Participation

This section is written for face-to-face class, but largely applies also to Fall 2020. Our class will be remote, but it is not asynchronous.

All students are expected to attend all lectures, presentations, and group meetings with the professor, and to take written notes at all classes and meetings. Students are also expected to participate in class presentations, group meetings, and discussions. Your in-class participation may be supplemented by Piazza posts with questions or comments; often this will result in incorporating related material in the next class session. All students will also be expected to participate in a few in-class group presentations.

Come to class ready to engage the material and to interact face-to-face with the other human beings in the classroom. Leave your 21st-Century distractions behind. Turn off your cell phones, smart phones, and pagers. Cell phones ringing in class is inappropriate, discourteous and disruptive. Activities such as texting, surfing the web, or checking email during class is inappropriate and discourteous. Please do not use laptops or electronic devices during lectures. Please practice your skill of focusing on the intellectual activity occurring in a physical room with real live people.

Mandatory Attendance

In order to maximize the project-based group-learning experience, the course has mandatory attendance. As some will say, "Ninety percent of life is just showing up." You are expected to schedule other events such as trips or job interviews to avoid conflicts with the course. The only acceptable excuses for missing a class are documented medical problems, religious holidays (if cleared in advance), presenting papers at top academic conferences (if cleared in advance), and documented personal emergencies. If you miss a class, you are expected to contact your classmates to learn what you missed. Five unexcused absences will result in an nonpassing grade for the course. Roll will not be taken every day, but conspicuous absences such as missing a group presentation or a quiz will be noted.

Note that Zoom does record your presence or absence.

Group Projects

There will be two group projects. The first will last four weeks and be assigned by the instructor. The second will last four weeks and will be proposed by the groups. The second project will be due during the final week of classes. For the first project, the instructor will assign the teams. For the second project, students will select their own teams.

Team Interaction

Software engineering in the 21st century is a team activity. Constructive, professional interaction in a team is as important as your technical skills. If you hire on as a software developer after graduation, you will be placed in a project team. Usually you will not be able to choose the other team members. CIS 422 simulates this situation, and requires you to work constructively with your teammates.

Working in teams requires that each individual act professionally. You must contribute to the deliverables of the team, communicate regularly, and interact with other team members in a civilized manner. There is never justification for rude, demeaning or threatening comments. A team member who fails to contribute or interact in a civilized manner will receive a single warning from the instructor; a second infraction will result in immediate removal from the team and failure in the course.

Exams

There will be a midterm exam and a final exam four mini-exams that will combine material from lecture and discussion with reflection on your own project. For example, after lecturing on architectural design, I might ask you to assess a particular quality of the architectural design of your project. These will be "take home" exams, i.e., they will be designed to require about an hour each, but you will have a couple days to complete them at your convenience. An unexcused absence at an exam will result in a grade of zero on the exam.

Communication

Students have the responsibility to communicate with the instructor about any questions, concerns, or problems that they have during the course. These might relate to any aspect of the class including lectures, group dynamics, communication breakdowns, or anything. Please visit the instructor during his office hours or set up an appointment to discuss any problem or concerns.

Email

While our Piazza site is the appropriate place for most out-of-class communication, some communication is better done by email or face to face. For example, if you wish to discuss accommodations for a disability, the best approach is to use email to set up a face-to-face appointment outside of regular office hours. Please contact the instructor with any questions and concerns at all regarding the class, following these guidelines:

• Check your @uoregon.edu and @cs.uoregon.edu email accounts daily, consistent with the Registrar's email policy.
• If you have a problem with spam on your @cs.uoregon.edu account, use SpamAssassin.
• If necessary, you can forward your cs.uoregon email and/or forward your uoregon email.
• Email from your @cs.uoregon.edu or @uoregon.edu account to clearly distinguish your email from spam. SpamAssassin filters out a lot of email from non-.edu domains.
• Configure your email client so that your first and last name appear in the "From:" header. Send an email to yourself and make sure your full name (such as "Michal Young") appears in the "From:" header.
• In the subject line of your emails, include "422" or "522" and describe the topic in a few words.
• Keep signature files to a minimum.

Students in CIS 522

Graduate students (enrolled in CIS 522) will have additional responsibilities including reading and responding to academic papers on software engineering.

Grades

Overall grading policy, rubric, and weights are described on the class home page.

Projects submitted late will be subjected to a full letter grade penalty. Projects will be accepted no more than two calendar days past the due date. Exceptions will only be considered if the request is submitted before the due date.

Any grading discrepancies (such as a miscounting of points on an assignment) must be resolved within a week after the assignment is returned.

Assessment of Work

Evaluation Criteria

Projects will be assessed against a set of evaluation criteria that will be made available with each project. Read these criteria carefully because they reflect the aspects of the projects that are important given the pedagogical goals of the class.

Subjective Assessment

While much in the discipline of computer science is objective (such as whether a computer program will compile and produce a specified answer), most of the material covered in this class will be concepts, ideas, terminology, conventions, and practices that cannot be defined in pure objective language such as that of a computer program. Exams and projects are graded based on the instructor's assessment of the accuracy and completeness of the answers and materials provided by the students.

Good Writing

Projects will be evaluated in part based on the instructor's assessment of the quality of the written materials submitted. A modern software engineer must be able to communicate his or her ideas clearly and concisely. Good writing occurs on three levels:

1. Structure a paper so that the main ideas are clearly accessible. State the main point of the paper in the introduction. Start each paragraph with a topic sentence. Break the paper into sections and give each section a title. Summarize your major findings in a conclusion. A storytelling approach is not a good organizational style.
2. Communicate individual ideas effectively. Be thorough but concise. The tone of your writing should be serious and direct, as if you were reporting to your boss at a real job. An informal "chatty" style is not appropriate. Every figure (graph, drawing, or screenshot) must be relevant, should have a caption that explains what it is and why it is important, and should be referred to in the main body of the text.
3. All spelling and grammar must be standard and correct.

If you have any doubts about the quality of your writing, work with your project collaborators to critique each other's drafts. Also, take drafts to the drop-in writing lab at the Teaching and Learning Center. Drop-in tutoring is currently offered Mon-Thur, 9:00am-7:00pm and Fri 9:00am-5:00pm in the Sky Studio, 4th floor of Knight Library. (Check the TLC site for location and time changes.)

Course Policies

Diversity Welcome

The modern technology workplace is diverse, international, and intercultural. This course welcomes and values these differences as an opportunity to increase our awareness of the contemporary global society, how to work better in groups, and how to build better computer systems.

Students with Disabilities

If you have a documented disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, during the first two weeks of class please (a) ask the counselor for students with disabilities to send the instructor a letter verifying your disability and (b) arrange to meet with the instructor to discuss your needs.

Recording

You may not make audio or visual recordings of the class without explicit permission from the instructor. While I (Michal Young) am generally comfortable with being recorded, some other students in class may not be. If you ask my permission to record, I will inquire with other students before granting it.

Academic Honesty

Students who are found to have committed an academically dishonest act in this course will receive an F for the course.

Academic honesty includes the following. You should do all of the following:

• Clearly list each person and his or her contribution to any project or exam. Include this information in all documents that are submitted, and in the header of all affected source code files. The contributor might be a tutor, roommate, officemate, fellow student, or any other person that contributed in any way to your work.
• Clearly identify and delimit any code that is derived from any source whatsoever, published or unpublished, with the original source and author indicated in the header of every affected source code file, and front and center in all submitted documents.
• Protect your own work and insure that other students cannot obtain and use your solutions without attribution. Do not put your solutions on a web site with no password protection, even if no other pages point to this web page. (However, project repositories in CIS 422 may be publicly accessible.)

Academic dishonesty includes the following. You should not do any of the following:

• Misrepresent someone else's work, including anything you find on the web, as your own work, or in any way contribute to such a misrepresentation.
• Submit someone else's work as your own without indicating the source.
• Knowingly or negligently make your work available to another student such that they can submit your work as their own.

Evidence of academic dishonesty will be rigorously pursued consistent with the University of Oregon guidelines on student conduct and community standards.