CSE260 Home Page (Fall 2009)

Welcome to the CSE260 (Computer Science II: Honors) home page for Fall 2009. This page will be the main source of course information throughout the semester.

Important Course News and Messages

Please check this page regularly for new messages. The newest messages will always appear first.

Project 2 Statistics:
The maximum possible score was 12. Scores actually achieved ranged from 0 to 12. Statistics were as follows ("valid" refers to number of nonzero scores): PRJ2 (whole class ) Valid 16; Mean 7.75; Std. Dev. 3.49

This is for your reference, so you can tell about where I think you stand as far as your work on the project is concerned. Seeing a credible attempt at the project is an important factor for me in deciding that the C/C- grade cutoff should go below you when I assign the final letter grades. Students leaving this course have to demonstrate design and coding skills sufficient to get them through the upper-division courses.

Midterm Exam Statistics:
The maximum possible score was 68. Scores actually achieved ranged from 28 to 56. Statistics were as follows: MIDTERM (whole class ) Valid 19; Mean 45.92; Std. Dev. 9.37

Grade sheets are available online. I tended to be somewhat fussy about the answers to a number of the questions. The reason is, for written answers like this that require subjective grading, unless I am somewhat fussy, I end up allowing just about any old thing that people write, giving most people the same score, and having no information content in the result. I grade everybody's answer to a particular question before going on to the next question, and I try to apply the same criteria to everyone. Because of the subjectivity, there will be noise in the scores on individual questions, but by the time the scores for all the questions are added up, I believe that the results contain valid information about students' relative performance.

If there is a clear mistake in your grade sheet, such as no score got recorded for a particular question, then please let me know. Otherwise, I will probably not want to engage in extended discussions about individual scores.

HW9:
The confusion over the HW9 problems has been resolved. They were correct as I originally listed them It was someone's Chinese version of the text that was different. Please do these and submit them by Thursday.

HW9:
I goofed and forgot to link HW9 to the home page until now (3:15AM, Friday, Nov. 6). If you would normally do this over the weekend, please try to get it turned in by the normal due date (Sunday midnight). If that's not possible, I will accept it through Thursday.

LAB5/HW5 Bar Graph Exercise:
If you want to see my idea of a solution to this exercise, download this zip file.

Emailing me:
Due to vast amounts of spam mail, I am forced to use a fairly aggressive spam filter on my email. Because student email often comes from places like Gmail, as does a lot of spam email, students have sometimes had problems reaching me. What worked last semester is for me to have a special whitelisted mail alias specifically for this course, this semester. The email address for this semester is:
cse260f09@starkeffect.com
If you have problems reaching me, use the address above. Hopefully it will last the whole semester, but if a virus on somebody's PC gives this address to a spam bot, I will have to change it.

BlueJ Submitter:
I am working on ways to do assignment submission this semester. One thing you should do is to download the file submission.defs and place it in your BlueJ configuration directory. This will allow you to use the BlueJ submitter for projects done in BlueJ. I am thinking about ways of doing something similar for Eclipse.

Personalized Course Information Area:
If you are taking the course, please visit the Personalized Course Information Area, register a user ID there, and fill out the Academic Dishonesty Form.

I will be using this system to manage assignment handin and distribute grades.

Eugene W. Stark