| 50%: | Technical Material |
|---|---|
| 30% for Exams (two @ 15% each) | |
| 20% for Lab assignments (four @ 5% each) | |
| 30%: | Communication Assignments |
| 5% for the Press Release | |
| 10% for the System Critique | |
| 10% for the System Enhancement | |
| 5% for the Presentation | |
| 20%: | Participation |
| 10% for participation in tutorial | |
| 10% for participation in lecture + weekly readings |
Exams: Exam 1 is held during the term. Exam 2 will be scheduled during finals week. Each exam will focus on half of the class' material, but keep in mind that later topics in 6.1800 build heavily upon the earlier topics. The exams will test material from lectures, labs, and the assigned reading.
Labs: There are four labs throughout the course of this class. These assignments will reinforce some of the abstract concepts from the lecture and readings and expose you to a variety of commandline tools for interacting with systems.
Communication Assignments: There are four communication assignments in 6.1800. The first two focus on understanding and critiquing existing systems. The second two are part of a team project where you will begin to design your own systems. This project extends over the second half of the semester and will be done in teams of three students, all of whom attend the same writing tutorial. Real-world systems are not built individually; it's always a team effort. Part of the project is to learn to work productively and effectively in this setting. We will give you tools for doing so in the writing tutorialss.
Participation: We expect you to be engaged and participate
in the class in multiple ways: through engagement in lectures, by
completing the readings for the class, and engaging in your workin
tutorials. We will assign your participation grades at the end of the
semester, but so that you know how you're doing throughout the
semester, we will you three preliminary participation grades for
recitation participation. We know that getting graded on participation
can be stressful in some ways, which is why patricipation
gets its own page on the website.
How We Calculate Your Final Grade
Your exam and lab grades are reported as numbers (out of 100%), but
you'll receive letter grades for all other assignments. To calculate
your final grade in the class, we do the following:
Policies
Late Policy: If you're unable to hand in a lab or a communication assignment on time, reach out to our course administrator, Taylor Braun. As long as you let your TA know before the deadline, you can assume that we will give you at least a 24-hour extension on the assignment. If you feel that a longer extension is necessary, we'll work with you (and perhaps S3) to come up with a plan. Note that some of the assignments have more detailed late policies, which will be explicitly posted on each assignment.
Collaboration: You may not collaborate on exams. On labs, it's okay to discuss ideas with your classmates, but you should not be collaborating on the actual answers. Take the first lab for example: it's okay to talk to your classmates about what pipes are, it's not okay to work together to come up with a command that answers some of the specific UNIX questions. On all communication assignments you are welcome to discuss ideas with others, but your writing should be your own and you should acknowledge all contributions of ideas by others, whether from classmates or from papers you have read.
AI Use: Like all systems, GenAI has benefits and harms. Using these tools can cause real harm in the world (theft of other’s work, theft of your own work, environmental harms, etc.) and can also harm your own learning. In this class, you’re allowed to use GenAI for the following:
- Spelling and grammar checks (e.g., Grammarly)
- Word-level suggestions
- Searching for sources (you must confirm and include the source)
- Looking for high-level information (e.g., Google’s AI summary); you would need to track that back to a real source if you wanted to cite it in any classwork
- Research (you must confirm and include sources)