Course Syllabus
Note about this syllabus
This syllabus contains information pertaining to all the sections of CMSC250, but the ELMS page itself hosts the registration of only William Gasarch's students (sections 0301-0404). For assignments and announcements that pertain exclusively to Jason Filippous sections, please visit Jason's sections' ELMS page here.
Instructors
Jason Filippou (jasonfil@cs.umd.edu), sections 0101-0108
William Gasarch (gasarch@cs.umd.edu), sections 0201-0304
Offices:
- Jason: AVW 1201
- Bill: AVW 3245
Office hours:
- Jason: Wed 9am - 1pm
- Bill: Mon 11:00-12:00, WThu 12:30-2:00
Webpages:
TAs
These roles are subject to slight changes as we figure out the workload of our TAs. Note that by tutor we refer to what the department of Computer Science has traditionally been calling a "teaching TA".
Name | Role |
Aditya Acharya | Tutor |
Alex Brassel | HW Grader |
Andrea Hopkins | Tutor |
Austin Le | HW Grader / Assignment Proofreader |
Erik Metz | HW Grader / Assignment Proofreader |
Ian Hammer | Tutor |
Ioana Bercea | HW Grader |
Joon Kim | Tutor |
Justin Shen | Tutor |
Katherine Cordwell | Tutor |
Katherine Scola | Tutor |
Mahsa Derakshan | HW Grader |
Meena Sengottuvelu | HW Grader |
Owen Hoffman | Tutor |
Pei-Jo Yang | Tutor |
Phong Dinh | Tutor |
Rachael Zehrung | Tutor |
Sina Dehghani | HW Grader |
Sina Mirnejad | Tutor |
Siqi Cao | HW Grader |
Suraj Nair | HW Grader |
Yan Kang | Tutor |
Lectures
Jason: Tue, Thu, SKN (Skinner) 0200, from 11:00 to 12:15
Bill: Tue, Thu AVW 1115 09:30-10:45 (0201-0204), 2:00 - 3:15 (0301-0304)
Discussion Sessions
Discussion occurs on Mondays and Wednesdays, in specific times that can be accessed through this Testudo link. Every section is assigned a tutor ("teaching TA"), as follows:
Section code | Meeting time (Mon / Wed) | CSIC Room # | Tutor |
0101 | 10am-10:50am | 3120 | Owen |
0102 | 11am-11:50am | 3120 | Aditya |
0103 | 12pm - 12:50pm | 3118 | Katherine S. |
0104 | 1pm-1:50pm | 3118 | Katherine S. |
0105 | 12pm-12:50pm | 2117 | Aditya |
0106 | 10am-10:50am | 1121 | Yan |
0107 | 11am-11:50am | 1121 | Yan |
0108 | 2pm-2:50pm | 1121 | Andrea |
0301 | 8am-8:50am | 3120 |
Justin |
0302 | 9am-9:50am |
3120 |
Joon |
0303 | 2pm-2:50pm |
3120 |
Rachael |
0304 | 3pm-3:50pm |
3120 |
Phong |
0401 | 8am-8:50am | 2117 | Sina M |
0402 | 9am-9:50am |
2117 |
Ian |
0403 | 5pm-5:50pm | 1122 | Katherine C. |
0404 | 5pm-5:50pm | 2117 | Peijo |
Homework Grader Assignment
Below is a concrete association of sessions to a homework grader:
Section | Homework Grader |
0101 | Meena |
0102 | Suraj |
0103 | Ioana |
0104 | Ioana |
0105 | Suraj |
0106 | Sina D |
0107 | Sina D |
0108 | Meena |
0301 | Mahsa |
0302 | Erik |
0303 | Siqi |
0304 | Austin |
0401 | Mahsa |
0402 | Siqi |
0403 | Alex |
0404 | Alex |
Office Hours
All office hours are taking place in the undergraduate office hours room, AVW 1112 (right across the undergraduate office in A.V. Williams), except for the instructors', which take place in their respective offices, outlined above. Please note that, for increased accuracy, we outline our office hours in half-hour slots.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | |
09-09:30am | Siqi / Yan | Jason | Siqi | Peijo / Yan | |
09:30-10am | K. Scola | Siqi / Yan | Jason / K. Scola | Siqi | Peijo / Yan |
10am-10:30am | K. Scola | Ioana / Yan | Jason / K.Scola | Ioana | Peijo / Yan |
10:30am-11am | K. Scola | Ioana / Yan | Jason / K. Scola | Ioana | Peijo / Yan |
11am-11:30am | K. Scola / Bill | Ioana | Jason / K. Scola | Ioana | |
11:30am-12pm | Bill | Ioana | Jason | Ioana | K. Cordwell |
12pm-12:30pm | Meena / Mahsa | Mahsa | Jason / Erik | K. Cordwell / Owen | |
12:30pm-1pm | Meena / Mahsa | Mahsa / Bill | Jason / Erik | Bill | K. Cordwell / Owen |
1pm-1:30pm | Meena / Mahsa | Mahsa / Bill | Erik / Austin | Bill | K. Cordwell / Owen / Austin |
1:30pm-2pm | Meena / Mahsa | Mahsa / Bill | Erik / Austin | Bill | Owen / Austin |
2pm-2:30pm | Suraj / Justin | Andrea | Ian / Justin | Sina D. / Rachael / Suraj | Alex |
2:30pm-3pm | Suraj / Justin | Andrea | Ian / Justin | Sina D. / Rachael / Suraj | Alex |
3:00pm-3:30pm | Suraj | Andrea | Ian | Sina D. / Rachael / Suraj | Alex |
3:30pm-4pm | Suraj | Andrea | Ian | Sina D. / Rachael / Suraj | Alex |
4pm-4:30pm | Phong / Aditya | Joon | Phong / Aditya | Sina D. | Sina M. |
4:30pm-5pm | Phong / Aditya | Joon | Phong / Aditya | Sina D. | Sina M. |
5pm-5:30pm | Aditya | Joon | Aditya | Sina D. | Sina M. |
5:30pm-6pm | Aditya | Joon | Aditya | Sina D. | Sina M. |
Description of Assignments
- Weekly homework assignments. Those will be released on Tuesdays and are always due 5 minutes before the relevant Tuesday lecture. They will be compiled into PDF form and uploaded on ELMS. For information on how to create a PDF that will be acceptable for our purposes, see the section "Uploading your homework assignments" below.
- Online quizzes on ELMS (usually 2 per week, after lecture). Those are meant to assess your understanding of the material presented in lecture and will be auto-graded. They will be posted after lecture and due 5 minutes before the subsequent lecture. You will only need a computer with a web browser and an Internet connection.
- Attendance in discussion sessions. Starting with the second discussion session, our tutors will be holding (signed) attendance in the discussion sessions.
- Examinations. We will have 2 midterm exams and 1 final exam (see "Exams" section below). Those will be our only "summative" assessments for this semester. They will be written in pen (or pencil) and paper and will be handed out to proctors after the exam time.
- Ungraded assignments. Those are meant to help you out with elements such as assessing your mathematical background, learning or practicing the various different perks of ELMS.
Major Scheduled Grading Events (Exams)
- Midterm 1: Wednesday, 03-15, various locations (TBD)
- Midterm 2: Monday, 04-20, various locations (TBD)
- Final: 05-16, 4-6pm (location TBA by central scheduling mid-semester)
Grading
This grading policy is subject to minor changes, up to 3% above or below for every one of the following assignment categories:
- Homework assignments: 10%
- Discussion Session attendance: 5%
- Online ELMS Quizzes: 10%
- Midterm 1: 20%
- Midterm 2: 25%
- Final: 30%
The course staff reserves the right to reduce the number of homeworks or quizzes on any given week, if deemed academically necessary.
University "Course-Related Policies"
Starting with Fall 2016, the University has packaged certain campus-wide "course-related policies" into a single centralized webpage, which is traversable by navigating this link. Every course is required to link to these policies, which cover very important elements such as:
- Excused absences (what are your rights, what are our responsibilities), including dates of projected religious observance.
- Disability accommodations on campus
- Code of Student Conduct and matters pertaining to Academic Integrity.
- Grade contesting.
- Mid-Term ("Early Warning") grades
It is the responsibility of every instructor on campus to link to the course-related policies page from the course syllabus. Those policies are part of this (and any other) syllabus and you should familiarize yourselves with them! We further specialize the "course-related policies" by virtue of the following rules:
- Students who, because of a documented reason such as illness or religious observance, were unable to complete an ELMS quiz, can get an extension of up to two days for a full-credit submission.
- Students who, because of a documented reason such as illness or religious observance, were unable to complete a homework assignment, can also be given an extension of up to two days for a full-credit submission, except if this extension would encompass the Monday following the Tuesday early submission of the homework (because on those Mondays tutors will typically give away the solutions during recitation). In those cases, the student can be excused from the submission of their homework, which means that their total homework grade will be calculated over the rest of their homework submissions, early or late.
- Midterm exam make-ups will be given only up to one (1) week after the scheduled date.
- Midterm grade contests will only be considered up to two (2) weeks after we disseminate the midterms.
- Students needing DSS accommodations should provide the instructor with the necessary DSS forms during the schedule adjustment period, detailed on this webpage as being the first 10 days of lecture.
- Homework submissions, irrespective of software used for response preparation, shall reserve a signed UMD Honor Pledge.
Textbook
This semester, we have a required textbook. This textbook is:
Susanna Epp, Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 4th Edition, Brooks / Code publishing, ISBN-
13: 978-0495391326.
However, we do not require that you purchase the 4th edition of the book new (the cost of the hardcover can go all the way up to $350 through online retailers like Amazon). Other books that the instructional staff consider good choices are:
- Kenneth Rosen, Discrete Mathematics and its Applications, 7th edition, McGraw Hill, ISBN-13: 978-0-07-338309-5
- Thomas Koshy, Discrete Mathematics with Applications, 1st edition, Elsevier, ISBN-13: 978-0124211803.
Students who want to have access to extra material for practice are encouraged to purchase, rent or borrow any edition of these books.
Uploading your homework assignments
We only allow PDF format for the upload of your homework assignments, whose description will also be supplied in PDF format, prepared with the document preparation system . We can think of four different ways to submit your homework assignments:
- ("lah-tech"; highly encouraged) The best way to submit your assignments is to edit the provided source files (which have the suffix .tex) and then convert them to PDF using pdflatex. This is because of the ease, aesthetic quality and modularity of mathematical formulae with . To help you out with learning , we have included the well-known document "The Not So Short Introduction to " in our course materials (link to PDF). In addition, the "review sheet" (see "Background" below) that we publish so that you can assess your mathematical background (as it pertains to 250) has the source included, so that you can play around with it if you wish. It has been observed anecdotally that people who learn tend to never, ever want to use another program to author documents ever again.
- Microsoft Word or Open/Libre Office (easy with simple text, tough with formulae): It is also possible to use your favorite office suite to write down your responses, but you would have to convert to PDF before submission, otherwise the system will not let you upload your response. Those programs tend to have very cumbersome and unwieldy, WYSISWYG equation editors, so we preferto using those.
- Directly editing the PDF with a PDF program that allows it (very easy with simple text, virtually impossible with formulae): Some programs like Adobe Acrobat DC Professional (available for free to all students through Terpware) and Apple Preview in Macs allow for this, but we have not found an easy way for the inputting of mathematical formulae.
- Hand-Written scan (highly discouraged): If you must submit a hand-written response, we kindly ask that you use an actual scanner to turn your response into a legible PDF. This University libraries link has a lot of information about scanning, printing and copying around campus; consult it if you're not sure where to use a machine capable of producing quality scans of handwritten documents. If you submit a hand-written response, it will have to be legible. If we cannot read your response to a question, we will not be able to grade it with anything above a zero!
Late online quiz and homework assignment policies
As stated above, homeworks are due 5 minutes before every specific section begins its Tuesday lecture (exceptions might apply, e.g: Election Day.; see "Description of Assignments" above and course calendar for more information). Late homeworks will be accepted until the same time before the Thursday lecture, with a 50% penalty. After that point in time, the homework assignment will not even be available on ELMS! As mentioned above, online quizzes given out after Tuesday lectures will be due 5 minutes before the same section's Thursday lecture. If not submitted until that time, they will be able to be submitted late until Friday at 11:59pm, once again with a 50% penalty. Similarly, post-lecture quizzes given out after Thursday lectures are due 5 minutes before the same section's Tuesday lecture, and late submissions will be accepted until 5 minutes before the subsequent lecture (so, at the same time as any post-lecture quiz that might have been given out on Tuesday), for 50% credit once more.
Below are some examples of the late homework assignment policies. The names have been chosen randomly and do not necessarily reflect the situation of any given current student.
- Julie is a student in the 0103 section. It is Tuesday, 02-07 at 10:55am and Julie has not completed the online quiz due at exactly that minute. She will still be able to submit late until Thursday 02-09 10:55am, for 50% credit.
- José is a student in the 0104 section. It is Thursday, 02-23 at 10:55am and Jose has not completed the online quiz due at exactly that minute. He will still be able to submit late until Friday, 10-23, at 11:59pm, for 50% credit.
- Nakeesha is another student in the 0104 dection. It is Saturday, 02-25 and Nakeesha has not submitted the online quiz given to her the Thursday before. This is not a problem (yet), since that particular quiz is due 5 minutes before her Tuesday lecture (10:55am on Tuesday 02-28)
- Malik is a student in the 0101 section. It is Tuesday, 03-21, 10:55am and Malik has not submitted his homework assignment due in his lecture. He still has 2 days, until Thursday 10-29 10:55am to submit for 50% credit.
- Derek is a student in some section. It is Thursday, 02-16 11:25am and Derek has not submitted his second homework, which was due the Tuesday before, 5 minutes before his lecture. Unfortunately, Derek can no longer submit his second homework, because his late deadline has passed. He will receive a 0 (zero) for that particular homework.
Make-Up assignment policy
- Online quizzes. Students that did not attempt an online quiz because of an excused absence (see relevant section on excused absences) that precluded them from being in front of a computer within the alotted days given for the completion of the quiz can be given a full-credit re-attempt from the instructor.
- Homeworks. One-on-one extensions can be given by the instructor in the event of a prolonged excused absence that clearly precluded a student from studying for and using a computer to upload the homework.
- There are make-up midterms. As stated in the specification of the campus-wide "Course-Related policies above", a student whose absence from a midterm or final was excused, can sit for a make-up midterm within one week from the scheduled time of the actual midterm.
- Make-up finals are also possible, once again within one week of the scheduled date of the exam.
Leftover Assignments
The course staff consists of graduate as well as undergraduate TAs. Undergraduate TAs do not have offices in A.V Williams (or any other campus building) where they can securely keep assignments that have not been collected by students. For that reason, any leftover quizzes and exams are being left with the relevant course instructors, in their AVW office. Students interested in picking them up can visit the instructors during their scheduled office hours.
Final papers
According to University regulations, the instructors have to keep final papers at least 6 months after they were sat for. After that particular date, the instructors reserve the right to either securely keep, redistribute, or shred the exams. After that time passes, no guarantees can be made as to the state of any final exam.
ELMS
This semester we are using the University's CANVAS-based system, ELMS (link to UMD ELMS website) to run our course. Your homework assignments will be uploaded on ELMS as PDFs. All announcements will also be posted on this platform, as will be your grades. ELMS is highly tailored to facilitate grading and accessibility, and allows for the integration of clicker technology and appropriately tailored e-books and material. It also allows for auto-grading of your quizzes.
Office of Learning Assistance Service
Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the office of Learning Assistance Services, which is part of the Counseling Center of the University (link to their website) and also referred to as a resource in the Course-Related Policies outlined above. If you are experiencing difficulties in keeping up with the academic demands of this course, the first thing you should do is talk to us and your assigned mentors. If you feel as if you need more resources, you are encouraged to contact the Learning Assistance Service office at 2202 Shoemaker, with phone# 301-314-7693. Their academic coaches can help with time management, reading, math learning skills, note-taking and exam preparation skills. All their services are free to UM students!
Course Summary:
Date | Details | Due |
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