CS452 - Real-Time Programming - Fall 2010

Administrative Details

Described in excruciating detail here.

Instructor

Bill Cowan, [wW][mM][cC][oO][wW][aA][nN]@cgl.uwaterloo.ca, DC2111, x34527.

Teaching Assistants

Location and Times of Lectures

Lecture Notes

Important Dates

Course Newsgroup

Course E-mail

Textbook

Other Useful (?) References

Course Web Pages

Assignments & Exam

Printed Notes

Marking Scheme

Please Note. The assignments in this course are cumulative. Therefore it is important that I manage the course so that almost all students succeed on almost every assignment. This suits me just fine: students learn a lot from doing an assignment on which they succeed or almost succeed. But this causes a problem: assignment and project marks don't vary a lot, even though it is quite obvious, to you and to me, that some students have achieved quite a bit more than other students. My solution to this problem is to give a take-home examination with relatively open-ended questions, and to mark it in the European style, that uses the entire range of marks, so that a passing mark is about 5 out of 30, with marks spread out up to almost thirty based on students gong beyond routine answers to the questions.. Based on several terms of experience this solution has two extremely important properties.

  1. The marks it gives correlate well with my perceptions of how much students have learned in the course. This includes groups where I have perceived the contribution of the partners to have been unequal.
  2. The mark range it gives corresponds well with faculty and school expectations for a fourth year specialist course.

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