Policies

The mode of instruction for this class is remote synchronous.

Students are responsible for being available during the official class periods.

The class periods are 9:30-10:45am Tuesday and Thursdays for the 14 weeks of the semester, and the 2 hour official final examination block assigned by the registrar. There are also two evening midterms. If you cannot “attend” during these times, please do not take the class.

Unofficially, we intend to record the lectures and make these recordings available. See the page on Lectures.

So, …

• If you want to take this class while living in a distant time zone, be prepared that some activities will require you to participate in the mornings and evenings in Madison.
• You should not take this class and another class scheduled in the same time slot. That is against University rules.
• You should not take this class if you have responsibilities that mean you will not be available for exams.
• Staff availability (for consulting, office hours, etc.) will generally be in the Madison time zone.

Lectures: the lectures will be given synchronously - as live presentations via Zoom. Experience from prior classes is that many students prefer to “attend” these lectures. For example, live attendance provides the opportunity for interaction and a regular structure. However, we understand that some students prefer to watch the lectures asynchronously. Our intent is to make asynchronous viewing of the lectures possible. The course staff will make their best effort to make sure that all lectures are recorded, but there are no guarantees. Students are responsible for the material even if a recording is not available. For example, if there is a technical problem and a lecture is not recorded, students are still responsible for the material. (see Lectures for more detail).

We will track participation in synchronous class activities. This includes general attendance, responding to polls, participating in breakout discussions, etc. This will count towards the “participation” modifier on your grade (see Grading).

Exams: There are two evening exams and a final exam. These must be taken within a window of time (5:45-9:00pm for March 8 and April 26, and the official University final period). The exams do not use the entire time period (see Exams)

Optional activities, such as office hours and help sessions, will be held at other times.

If you have other responsibilities during the class periods (for example, you have a job or another class)… be aware that you will need to take the exams during the scheduled times, and that we will not make exceptions for students who chose to take the class despite not being available during class time.

Exam Schedule

• Exam 1: Wednesday, March 8th, 1 hour within 5:45-9:00pm
• Exam 2: Wednesday, April 26th, 1 hour within 5:45-9:00pm
• Exam 3: Sunady, May 7th, 1 hour within 12:25-2:25pm (official assigned Final Exam slot, may be changed by the Registrar)

We don’t really distinguish between Quizzes and Surveys - I use the term interchangably. They use the Canvas “quiz” mechanism. In Canvas, they are “graded surveys” because we do not keep track of your score, only whether or not you complete it. On this page I’ll use the term survey.

In class there are also “Workbook handin surveys” - but those are different things.

We will not grade the end-of-week surveys. You will receive credit for completing it. We may check your answers to confirm that you made a legitimate attempt. If you do not complete the surveys, your grade may be affected (see Grading). You may miss two surveys without penalty, beyond that you may lose 1 point (from your overall score) per survey that you miss.

Sometimes, the end-of-week surveys will be anonymous (Canvas will tell us who has completed a survey, but will not allow us to connect responses to students). The survey will explicitly say that it is anonymous - by default quiz/surveys are not anonymous.

Surveys will be made available Friday morning and are due by the end of Friday. However, we will accept late surveys through the weekend (at least Sunday). We will not accept late surveys after the cutoff - we allow you do miss 2 surveys.

We will use surveys to (1) give you a chance to self-assess that you are learning the material (to check before you have to solve questions for an exam); (2) to get some feedback on what students find difficult (in an online class we don’t get to see puzzled faces in lecture); and (3) to request feedback about how things are going.

Please request a regrade using the Regrade Form This will allow us to keep track of requests and process them in order. Regrade requests via Piazza or email will not be accepted. A course staff member (usually a TA) will respond to your request by email or Piazza.

You must request a regrade within 1 week of a grade being posted, and before the final exam (for grades released the last week of class).

Do not try to make a regrade request by Piazza, or by email, or by coming to office/consulting hours, or by scheduling an appointment for a 1-on-1 call. Please your request by the form. If we need more information, we will contact you.

There undoubtedly errors in grading, and students only point out the ones likely to be in their favor. Statistically, it is implausible that all of the grading errors are against the students. It is unlikely that we made exactly one error. Therefore, if you point out a grading error, we may look at the entire assignment to make sure there aren’t other grading errors, in fact we might need to look at other assignments to check for errors as well.

Regrading might cause us to perform more careful examination of your assignment than the original grading. For example, if we used “stochastic grading” and gave you the benefit of doubt during the first grading, we might be more careful in the regrading.

Resources to help you with problems are listed on the Getting Help page. That page lists various University resources for your health, wellness, and technology needs, as well as how to get help from course staff.

Medical and Personal Issues: If you have a medical or personal issue, contact the Professor as soon as possible so we can make arrangements. Because of the privacy concerns, this is a case where email is allowable. Generally, the course policies (see usual remedies) are sufficient for almost everything.

Technical Failures are never convenient. I have them too (for example, a neighborhood-wide internet service outage while I was trying to proctor the CS559 final exam in Spring 2020).

We expect that many people will have something unexpected happen at some point during the semester that interferes with class.

Unexpected events vary. They aren’t always bad. You might get a once-in-a-lifetime interview opportunity. You might get sick. You might need to take your cat to the vet, or find your dog who escaped. You might have a power or internet outage. Your roomate might pour a cup of coffee in your computer right before an exam.

If you miss something because of a technical failure or personal/medical issue, you should:

1. Let us know as quickly as possible. You might not be able to send us email or a Piazza message if your internet is out (since, generally, you need the internet to communicate with us), but make as best an effort that you can. You might be able to send email using your cell phone, or text message a friend who can send email to us.

2. Try to do the best you can to recover. You may not be able to listen or discuss in a synchronous lecture, but you can read the material and watch the video afterwards. If you can’t turn something in on time because there is a service problem, turn it in as soon as you can. (and let us know)

3. If you have a chronic problem, try to address it. If things fail once or twice in a semester, that’s expected. If you are often unable to participate in class, you may need to see if there is something you can improve about your technology.

4. If there is something major, let us know. For example, if there is a bad storm that disconnects you for an extended period of time, or you have a medical or personal issue that disrupts your work for an extended period of time.

Each problem situation is unique - and we will work with you to find a way to address it.

Usual Remedies

The class has flexible policies

1. If you miss a survey, you cannot make it up. However, we have drop 2 grading (you can miss 2 surveys with no penalty).

2. Workbooks have a lenient late policy. Turn workbooks in when you can, even if it is “very late”. Note: you cannot earn advanced points if you turn in a workbook late. You are better off trying to get caught up in class (earn the basic points for the late workbooks, and focus your energies on the current workbooks. We drop the lowest two workbooks (providing you score a minimum number of points). Clarification: if the Canvas hand-in survey is still open, you can turn it in late using that; only use the very late form if the hand-in survey is closed.

3. If you miss an exam, there is little we can do. Try hard not to miss exams. If something happens, discuss the situation with the Professor ASAP.

Over the course of the semester, you will make (or have made) cool stuff. You may want to show it to the world. These assignments can be useful as part of a portfolio, as things to show to prospective employers, or just to impress your friends. They are one of the few things that you do in a class that is fun to show to other people. You should (rightfully) be proud of what you’ve done.

And, because they are JavaScript, it is easy to share them with people via your personal web site.

However, because it is JavaScript, anyone and everyone can see the source code. Which means a student next year will have access to it. And we will give similar assignments next year. This is a conundrum.

I will not restrict you from posting your work on the open web – even though it contains a substantial amount of my work (both code and assignment design). However, I do ask your assistance in trying to make it harder for future students to use your work for their assignments.

There is a fine line between students who refer to other assignments for ideas and misconduct. Looking at an assignment to see an inspiring design is OK. Even glancing at the code to see how someone solved the problem can be an acceptable way to get unstuck. But some students do wholesale copying. This is their academic misconduct, but we ask for your help in trying to prevent it.

To help prevent misuse in the future:

1. Please do not post the workbook pages to the web. In general, it’s OK to post things in the for_students directory, but not the docs directory. You may use my code that appears in the libs directory providing you give it proper attribution.

2. Please let us know that the code is available - that way we can use it to check to see if future students are referring to it illegally.

3. Please do not advertise them as workbook solutions, but give proper attribution to the class and framework code. So, please say something like “This project was created for the Computer Graphics class at the University of Wisconsin in Spring of 2023 and uses the class software framework” rather than “This is a solution to Workbook 7 for CS559”.

4. Please label it clearly that “this code should not be copied for other student assignments” (or something like that). It is useful if this is in the comments in each file, but it should be at least on the web page. It turns out that this is useful as students will say “but I thought it was an example on the web that I could use.”

5. Please only post the “cool parts” of the assignment - not the little exercises where most people do very similar things.

6. Obfuscating your code would be the best thing. There are online obfuscators that are easy to use.However, this is extra work, and you might want your code to be visible (for example, to show to future employers). If you’re willing to do this, thank you. But this is a big ask.

Future students will find your code if it is on the open web, I would appreciate it a little harder for them to use it directly.

Having old assignments available is actually good for the class – it is good advertising, and can inspire people. But please help me discourage people from just copying your hard work as their own.

We do make changes to the workbooks that discourage copying old assignments, and use code checking tools to identify students who copy things.

Note: We may delete the GitHub repositories after class is over, so please keep a copy of your work if you want it.