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David Scot Taylor 212 MacQuarrie Hall Assistant Professor Dept. of Computer Science San Jose State University Phone: (408) 924-5124 (email works better) Email: taylor "at" cs.sjsu.edu My office hours for Spring 2009 : Tue/Thur 8:20-9:00, (the last 10 minutes in MH222), 11:50-12:30, 14:45-15:30, or by appointment.I will also have office hours on Friday, 5/15, from 11 a.m. until noon. |
The book is:
An Introduction to Formal Languages, and Automata (Fourth Edition)
Peter Linz
ISBN: 0-7637-3798-4, Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2006.
You can find errata (bug reports) for the book at http://computerscience.jbpub.com/catalog/0763737984/.
We will cover most of the first nine chapters, plus parts of chapters 10, 11, and 12. Other topics may be added depending on time. The course website has a link to a tentative course schedule with more precise readings from the book.
Reading assignments: Reading assignments will regularly be for the next class. Ideally, students will do the reading to get an idea of what the class will be about, then attend class, and then re-read the material with intuition gained from class. At the very least, assignments should be read before or after class. Due to possible unannounced quizzes on the reading, reading the material before class is preferred for cases when there is only time for one reading.
Written assignments: For some assignments, you may be allowed (or even required) to work in small groups, of two or three students (with one homework submitted per group). For others, individual work is expected. This will be specified for each homework. The default is that homework should be done individually, though you may still discuss high level ideas with others. You should document any collaboration on each homework.
For group submissions, all names should be made very clear on the front page. Each of you should feel confident that you understand everything on your group's submission. (If you understand a question best among your group, nothing will make you understand the material as well as teaching it to others.) The lowest 1/6 of (homework plus quiz) grades for each person will be dropped for the semester.
Most of your discussion should be with people in your group. You may generally discuss problems with other students as well, but not to the point of working out specific answers. Therefore, I don't expect that any group answer will look too similar to another group's answer.
Besides the given course textbook and your instructors, all sources used to help in the homework (other texts, other people) must be referenced properly. Failure to properly reference is considered cheating. Do not use web-sites to look for answers to assigned problems. That is, you may use the web to look for information on a topic, but you should not use it to look for specific answers to given questions. You absolutely may not use the web to directly find solutions to assigned questions.
Not all homework questions will be graded. The homework is a tool for you to learn the material. It is given to help you prepare for the tests, and for future classes. Some questions will be graded as just "attempted" or "not attempted", others will be graded more completely, and others not at all. In total, the written assignments will be worth 15% of your grade. Your course performance should improve if you make a real attempt at the homework. Each homework will be graded on a 0-5 scale.
Homework solutions for problems from the textbook will not be posted on the website. It is generally considered inappropriate to post solutions to textbook exercises without the blessings of the textbook authors. We have no such blessings.
Late homework policy: Please submit homework on time. If you have a real reason why the homework is late, and I have not yet discussed solutions or handed back homework, I will accept late homework, but once we have had solution discussions, homework solutions are distributed, or graded homework is returned, it is too late.
Students should attend all meetings of their classes, not only because they are responsible for material discussed therein, but because active participation is frequently essential to insure maximum benefit for all members of the class. Furthermore, unannounced quizzes may be given during any class meeting (other than the ones with scheduled exams). Attendance per se shall not be used as a criterion for grading.
Please do not ask me ahead of time if I will be passing out solutions in a given class. I do not want to encourage anybody to not turn in homeworks when due, I only want to encourage people to work on homework in general. As of right now, I plan to have solutions ready for every due date.
Programs: There will be several programming assignments. They will build upon each other, and you are expected to get each one to work perfectly. Unless a student gets every program to work perfectly, their grade is limited to a C- maximum. Programs will otherwise be worth 10% of your grade, with penalties for late submissions.
Quizzes: Unannounced quizzes may be given during class, each taking about 5 minutes total. These will generally be problems from the homework, or very similar to something assigned on the homework, or something which was very plainly covered in the assigned reading. In the former two cases, the quiz will be graded instead of the homework. In the latter case, the quiz may be given in addition to collecting and grading of the homework. Quizzes will be graded as homework (on a 0-5 scale), and thus, 1/6 (rounded up) of all graded homework and quiz grades combined will be dropped in calculating a homework average.
Tests: There will be two tests during the semester, the first worth 15% of your grade, the second 20%. Each test question will have a point value and a "default" value of 30%. If the question is left blank (or the default value clearly circled and the question crossed out), you get the default value. The goal is to allow you to spend your time correctly answering questions which you can best answer, and concentrating on the questions which you find to be difficult but not impossible. It will also help to avoid the practice of writing as much random material for a question in hopes that the grader will pick out the correct parts and give "pity points": answers with no structure which seem nonsensical will receive 0%, even if somewhere in them there is some partially correct statement. The default option may be used for at most a specific maximum number of points (30%-50% range), as specified at the time of the test.
Final:Course grade: Your tests will all be normalized to have a standard deviation of 10. Midterms will be normalized to a mean of 55/100, and the final to 50/100. Homework (including quizzes) will not be normalized, and will be worth 25% of your weighted average. Your final numerical grade will be the maximum of this weighted average, and just your normalized final exam grade.
After computing numerical grades for each student, letter grades are assigned on a curve. I generally look for gaps in which no student has a grade to make changes to the letter grades assigned, to avoid situations where just a few extra points over the entire semester would change the grade of a student. I reserve the right to improve a student's grade by up to 1/3 grade due to class participation.