Syllabus
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Course Description
This course is an introduction to computer science in the context of scientific, engineering, and commercial applications. The goal of the course is to teach basic principles and practical issues, while at the same time preparing students to use computers effectively for applications in computer science, physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, and other disciplines. Topics include: programming in Java; hardware and software systems; algorithms and data structures; fundamental principles of computation; and scientific computing, including simulation, optimization, and data analysis.
Textbook
R. Sedgewick and K. Wayne, Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Addison–Wesley Professional, 2016. ISBN 978-0134076423. We will be referencing this text all semester. The lectures are based on its contents. The hardcopy version of the textbook is available from Labyrinth Books.
Course Organization
This course includes lectures, class meetings, precepts, programming assignments, a final project, and two (2) two-part exams, as outlined below.
Lectures. Lectures are provided as studio-produced videos. You are expected to watch lecture before precept so that you are well-prepared. See the Schedule page.
Class Meetings. Class meetings are scheduled Thursdays throughout the semester at 3:00pm. These meetings are used for exams, practice exams, and programming assignment overviews.
Precepts. Precepts meet twice per week (either Monday/Wednesday or Tuesday/Thursday). Working within a small group, your preceptor will review key learning objectives for the week’s lectures and precept exercises. The precept will involve question and answer, group discussion, etc. Each precept involves working with a partner on interactive exercises and problem sets. Precept attendance counts for 5% of your overall grade.
- Precept Absences. You can miss up to two precepts for any reason without an impact on your grade – these absences will be dropped from the grade computation at the end of term. If you miss a precept, you can visit another precept and this will count as attendance – but please let your regular preceptor know about it, as well as the preceptor of the one you visit. If you miss a precept entirely, it’s still a good idea to contact your preceptor to let them know what’s up.
Programming Assignments. There are ten (10) programming assignments, all equally weighted. We will automatically drop the programming assignment with the lowest grade.
The acknowledgments.txt File. All assignments must include a file named acknowledgments.txt, which includes your acknowledgement of original work (as specified in Rights, Rules, Responsibilities), any citations, names and dates of those who provided help, etc. Submitting the acknowledgments.txt indicates that you have stopped working on your assignment and your submitted work is ready to be graded. Your assignment solution will only be graded if the acknowledgments.txt is submitted.
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Late Work. Assignments are due on Sunday nights at 11:59pm. Submissions made after 12:00am will be marked late. If any part of an assignment is submitted late, the entire assignment will be marked late.
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Late Days and Late Assignments. Late assignments are assessed a penalty equal to 10% of the possible points on the assignment per day or partial day late. We realize that students may need additional days to complete an assignment due to travel, religious holidays, routine medical issues, etc. So, the penalties for your first four late days are automatically waived. Please do not contact course staff if you need to utilize one (or more) of your automatically waived late days. Additional late penalties will be waived only in the case of a medical or personal emergency, as documented by your residential college Dean or Assistant Dean for Studies, who must provide a recommendation to the course administrator. Notes from McCosh cannot be accepted for late work. We will make a decision on any waivers or accomodations based on this recommendation.
Final project. The final project is approximately the length of two programming assignments. We encourage you to work with a partner. It is due on Dean’s Date at 5:00pm. You may not use late days on the final project. We will not accept any work after Dean’s Date without a residential college Dean or Assistant Dean for Studies recommendation and our approval.
Exams. There are two two-part exams during the semester. The exams have a written portion and a programming portion. There is no final exam. No makeup exams will be considered without a Dean’s and/or Assistant Dean’s recommendation and our approval in advance.
Regrades. If you feel a mistake has been made grading your work, please use the regrade request features of codePost (programming assignments, programming exams) or GradeScope (written exams). Regrade requests must be submitted within three (3) days of your work being returned.
Final Grades
Your final grade will be calculated based on a weighted sum of all the assignments, final project and exams. The final letter grade cutoffs will be determined at the end of the semester based on overall class performance, but not curved to any specific distribution. Staff discretion may be applied to adjust borderline cases - for example, answering student questions on Ed Discussion can be used to bump borderline grades.
| Grade Contributions | Weight |
|---|---|
| Programming Assignments | 40% |
| Final Project | 10% |
| Precept Attendance | 5% |
| Programming Exam 1 | 2% |
| Written Exam 1 | 15% |
| Programming Exam 2 | 13% |
| Written Exam 2 | 15% |
While final letter grade cutoffs will be determined at the end of the semester, a 93.0% will guarantee an A, 90.0% for an A–, 87.0% for a B+, 83.0% for a B, 80.0% for a B-, 77.0% for a C+, 73.0% for a C, 70.0% for a C-, or 60.0% for a D. You risk course failure if you earn below 60.0% of the available points.
Contacting Course Staff
The best way to contact course staff is to use our Ed platform. We encourage your to post publicly (attributed or anonymously) as your question may help others. Private posts are appropriate for issues that apply only to you. The reason we ask you to use Ed to ask questions, even private ones, is because the entire COS 126 staff can see your message without being forwarded; and also, since it is in a dedicated area, it does not get drowned out by other emails. Please do not post your assignment code on Ed, even in private posts.
Course Collaboration Policy
This course permits (and encourages) many forms of collaboration, including with course staff, classmates, and lab TAs. However, you must be careful to collaborate only as authorized below. Here is an executive summary:
| your partner | course staff | COS 126 alums | classmates | AI Chatbots | Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discuss concepts with … | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| acknowledge collaboration with … | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| show your code/solutions to … | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no |
| view any code/solutions of … | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
| copy any code/solutions from … | yes | no | no | no | no | no |
Concepts. Understand the difference between concepts and actual code. You may discuss general concepts, e.g., what is the syntax of a for loop, or explain how to input a sequence of numeric values. But you may not discuss specific code-related solutions to programming assignments.
Collaboration with an AI chatbot. You may not use AI composition software (such as ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot) to create or debug programming assignment code.
Your solutions. You must individually compose all of your solutions. The term solutions refers to any of the products created when completing a programming assignment, such as source code (including comments) and the readme.txt file. It includes both finished and unfinished products, regardless of correctness or completeness.
- You must never expose solutions to anyone who is taking COS 126 now or who might take COS 126 in the future. Do not post solutions in public code repositories.
- You must never receive or view any solutions to a programming assignment (or variant of an assignment) other than your own. This includes other student’s solutions, solutions available on the Internet, code generated by tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Github Copilot), etc.
All the rules above continue to apply after assignments are graded and after the end of the semester.
Collaboration with course staff. You are welcome to discuss your solutions with course staff members (instructor and preceptors) in office hours or via private Ed Discussion posts. Do not post code on Ed or email us your code; instead, submit your code via TigerFile - the course submission system.
Collaboration with classmates. We encourage you to discuss common concerns with classmates either private via personal interactions or publicly in the Ed Discussion course forum. These discussions must be kept at a general level, without exposing your solutions.
| For example, you may discuss: | But, you may not: |
|---|---|
How to interpret an error message. For example, “What does StackOverflowError mean?” |
Look at another classmate’s solutions (or show another classmate your solutions). |
| How to use a feature in IntelliJ. For example, “How do I start the embedded terminal?” | Lead a classmate step-by-step through any part of the assignment (or allow a classmate to lead you step-by-step through any part of the assignment). |
| Clarifications for the lecture videos, lecture slides, textbook, old exam questions, or the assignment specifications. |
Collaboration with students who have already taken COS 126. Anyone who successfully completed COS 126 in a previous term, including lab TAs and peer tutors, may assist you in the following ways:
- They may look at your code.
- They must not write, type, or dictate code.
- They may help debug, but they must not give step-by-step directions on how to complete the assignment.
- They should give thought-provoking suggestions rather than dictating what to change.
- While helping you, they must not look at any other solutions, including their own.
Collaboration acknowledgment. You must acknowledge all collaboration in the acknowledgments.txt file for that week’s assignment. Please include the names (and dates) of lab TAs, preceptors, students, etc. who provided assistance.
Collaboration with a partner. On certain assignments and the final project the collaboration policy is relaxed to allow working with a partner, subject to the following rules:
- Choose a partner whose skill level is close to your own - only two partners per group.
- Your partner does not have to be in your precept.
- Complete all work with your partner, sharing the same screen. This includes debugging, testing, commenting, writing the
readme.txtandacknowledgments.txt, and submitting the files. - You and your partner must work together on all components. You may not split up the work. One partner may not start the assignment/project without the other partner present.
- Go to office hours or the Lab TAs with your partner; one partner may not edit the code without the other partner present.
- Use the following pair programming protocol: one partner, the driver, types the code and the other partner, the navigator, reviews the code, identifies bugs, and asks questions. Swap roles every thirty (30) minutes.
- Do not post your code where it is visible to anyone but you and your partner. Code can be shared using Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
- You may not combine late days with your partner, or use your partner’s late days. For example, if one partner has used one late day, and the other partner has used three late days, and your assignment is submitted two days late, each partner will be charged two late days. So you may want to discuss this before you form a partnership.
- You and your partner must indicate that you both adhered to the partner collaboration rules in the
acknowledgments.txtfile. - To dissolve a partnership, you must contact the course administrator.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism and abetting plagiarism are serious academic infractions. Programming is a creative work and the academic regulations that apply to plagiarizing prose also apply to plagiarizing code. Princeton’s Rights, Rules, Responsibilities defines plagiarism as the use of any outside source without proper acknowledgment. It ranges from verbatim copying (e.g., cutting-and-pasting code) to thorough paraphrasing (e.g., changing variable names or rearranging code).
Outside sources and citations. Copying or adapting code that is not yours is permitted only if it comes from the course materials (i.e., the course textbook, companion booksite, programming assignment specifications, lecture slides, lecture videos, and precepts). If you do so, you must cite any code that you copy or adapt (with the exception of code that is included with the assignment).
Plagiarism detection. We use sophisticated software tools that are able to detect plagiarism, including thorough paraphrasing. For example, we compare each submission (including interim submissions) against a code database, which includes all submissions from this offering, previous offerings of the course or from other sources. These checks may be done periodically during the semester or even after the semester ends. While we take no pleasure in bringing cases to the Committee on Discipline; it is our duty to keep the playing field level for the overwhelming majority of students who work very hard in this course and follow the rules.
Penalties. We refer alleged academic violations (including plagiarism and abetting plagiarism) to the Committee on Discipline. If found responsible, the typical penalty is an F as a course grade plus whatever penalty that the CoD imposes. (The typical CoD penalty for plagiarism is suspension from the University for at least one semester.) Violators of course policies that are not adjudicated by the CoD will receive penalties based on the severity of the violation, ranging from a warning (for violations that are both unintentional and innocuous) to an F in the course (for violations that are both intentional and serious).