Instructor: Dr. J. Michael Meehan
Office: CF473
Office Hours
Phone: (360) 650-3795
Email: Michael.Meehan@wwu.edu

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Catalog Description
Class meeting times
Collaboration
Grading Policies
Other texts you may find helpful.
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Class meeting times

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Concepts of Programming Languages, 7th ed. Robert W. Sebesta ISBN 0-321-33025-0

Catalog Description

Grading Policies

At the beginning of each class I will give a quiz containing a few questions regarding the material you were assigned to read before coming to class. The accumulation of these quizes will constitute 1/4 of you grade for the course. Since people get sick and miss a class or two during the term I will throw out the two lowest quiz scores before computing the average. There will be no make-up quizes.

Your grade will be determined based on the following percentages.

• Quizes                     25%
• Midterm                  25%
• Project                    25%        
• final exam               25%

NOTE: I reserve the right to revise these percentages at any time during the term.

A final raw score value for the course for each student will be determined using the percentages above. The grade distribution will then be analyzed and a final determination of a letter grade will be made based upon the student's position within the distribution. The raw score numbers have no meaning in relation to a letter grade using the traditional scales of 90-100, 80-90, etc. The only way to approximate your eventual letter grade outcome for the course is to analyze your position in the distribution after each raw score has been achieved. For this reason, I will post the distribution of the grades on the course web pages for each graded component..

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Submitting Your "Project"

There is a Linux server in my office called django.cs.wwu.edu. If you do not have an account on it already you should send me an email requesting an account. These accounts are tied to the departments Kerberos authentication system which is used to authenticate you to all *nix and M$ sytsems. You need to simply tell me what your standard login id is and I will activate your account. Your password is whatever it is on the department servers. There is a Apache web server running on django. The URL of the form http://django.cs.wwu,.edu/~login-id will point to a directory named html under your home directory on django. This is where you should build your web documents for your project. Be sure to give the html directory and everything in it permissions that enable everyone to read those files or other won't be able to see your webs.  A command like chmod -R o+r  will do it for the files. For any directories reme\mber to give x permission. If you are not up on your *nix skills (shame on you)  do a man chmod command and read what it says.

Collaboration

OK here is the legal crap that has to be said so we can nail you butt to the barn if we have to.

There is an official departmental policy regarding cheating. It is posted on the wall across from the CS Department Office. READ IT. If you are found to have been cheating, you will receive a grade of F for the entire course not just the assignment in question. This is for real, no discussion, no second chance.

What constitutes cheating on a programming assignment?.

You can discuss the programming assignments with each other, in fact we encourage you to do so. You can even talk to each other about how you plan to solve the problem at the design level. When it comes time to write the code to implement the program, it had better be 100% your own code. Using code from someone else's program constitutes cheating. Ridiculous attempts at disguising purloined code will be detected and will only serve to guarantee to invoke the wrath of the teacher. We've seen it all before, so don't bother. We have programs which analyze the submitted program files and rank similarities.  These programs are quite good. They understand the grammar of the programming language and are not just text based comparisons. Thus, variable name substitutions etc. will not disguise reused code.

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Other texts you may find helpful.

 Programming Language Pragmatics, Michael L. Scott, Morgan Kaufman publishers, 2000

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