Post Spring Break Updates Proposal

I hope that this message finds you well.  If you are not well and think that I may be able to help, please reach out to me.

The TAs and I have discussed the policy changes which I am going to propose to you here.  One subject we debated was whether or not to maintain some semblance of a schedule. It has been argued that a schedule could both help students stay on pace, and aid the TAs and I in our efforts to effectively help everyone who needs it.  It is critical to note that we understand that everyone will be in different situations over the coming months. Critically, if you need additional time flexibility for some reason, rest assured there will be a mechanism to achieve that time flexibility.  If you are in less dire straits, one way to help us all out is to stay on top of things.

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I have done a great deal of thinking over the past week about how to best shape 231 and 425 for the remainder of the semester.  Shooting for normalcy seems like a mistake to me. Rest assured, I will not pretend that things are somehow normal. Still, I want to pass along to you my proposal for how I think 231 should proceed from here.  Of course, given that as COVID-19 changes the landscape, so too may this plan change. In many ways this is simply a best case scenario plan. We understand that the number one priority is everyone’s health and well being and not 231.

First, it seems useful to distill things down.  What, if anything, is important or useful about 231?  I would say that 231 provides students with the opportunity to learn a valuable skill: to become a better programmer in the context of parallel computing.  My proposal is to focus on achieving this one thing for the remainder of the semester. We are somewhat well equipped to do this. We have a number of programming assignments which are all designed to be completed individually.  We have an instructor and a set of wonderful TAs who are willing to help.

One pain point I can easily see developing is that things could get frustrating.  I strongly believe that much less is gained when someone simply tells you the answer to your problem.  It is far more effective, in my option, to have someone ask you questions or nudge in the right direction.  So, if it becomes frustrating when I or a TA keeps asking you nebulous questions instead of just telling you how to edit your broken program: 1) feel free to let us know that you are frustrated (feedback is always useful), and 2) please know that it would be much easier for us to just give you the answer, too.  I spent hours going back and forth with a student a couple of days ago on piazza on a problem. I’m might have been a bit frustrating, but hopefully it was more productive in the end. Helping everyone to complete all of the programming assignments without simply handing out the answers will be legit difficult to achieve, especially at a distance.  However, I propose that we try.

What will we cut out to make room for this hopefully productive struggle?  How about we cut the midterm and the final, for starters?  

Exams: The exams I give in 231 would not be effective, in my opinion, at a distance. So, I am proposing to remove these two exams and have the remaining 80% count as your complete grade.  I could go back and check, but I would guess that rarely, if ever, has anyone’s grade been improved by the exams. Still, if someone does not like their grade at the end of the semester, I propose that he or she would have the opportunity to take the exams next Spring (even if he/she has graduated).  If this resulted in an improvement, I would update their grade.

Extra Credit: While we are discussing the remaining 80% constituting the entire grade, the extra credit will still be worth 4.5% over the top.  As a result, it is now simultaneously both more valuable (since it is now worth 5.625%) and less valuable (since one of its rewards (besides simply the joy of building them) was to be able skip the final).

Attendance: I have no plans to run a synchronous course where everyone joins in a video call at the originally scheduled time.  There is enough evidence to indicate this would not be effective. I will be scrambling to try to keep the course somewhat asynchronously interactive, but I will not be taking attendance.  I suppose I could say that your Participation/Attendance from the first half should count as the Participation/Attendance for the whole semester. However, who is to say that just because someone missed 5 classes in the first half wasn’t going to have perfect attendance for the remainder?  It seems that the most reasonable thing to do here is to just assume everyone would have had perfect attendance for the remainder. This policy, combined with the three free misses, should leave most with the complete 10% in this category.

Prep: On the surface, it would seem that the S&Q mechanism might not need to change that much.  I believe the prep is useful. They are available online. However, the original “due by 3am” policy we had in the first half of the semester was to ensure that students could get more out of the class session.  Since there is no longer a strict class schedule, it makes sense to add some flexibility here.  

The updated proposed schedule can be found here: https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~cosgroved/courses/cse231/s20/calendar.html

Note: I have left the prep and when assignments go out on Tuesday and Thursday simply to provide a hopefully useful pace guide.  My current proposal is to make the S&Qs for the week due by Friday at 11:59pm. I am also proposing to add an automatic no penalty week extension for the S&Q preps. Of course, completing the prep earlier will increase the probability of your questions being included in whatever videos or other content we produce on the subject. 

Studios and Labs: Studios already have an automatic one week extension and labs already have the extra week for revisions.  As I stated above, we understand that we are all in different situations. If you find that your situation requires greater time flexibility, we will have a mechanism for you to receive it.  If you can stay on top of things, it will benefit everyone. 

Labs, Specifically: I have thought a lot about this.  I believe the qualitative feedback we provide is perhaps the most useful aspect of the course.  Still, the ability to go over the feedback in person was critical for clarification. I would like to keep this aspect of the course.  I really would. However, it seems somehow pretending we are in a normal situation, which we are not. I am therefore proposing that we change how labs are graded.  If you shenanigans-free pass all of the tests, you will get a 100% on the entire lab. We will use the original due date of the lab as a trigger to provide helpful feedback to everyone who has not passed all the tests.  In this proposal, there is no separation of 25% credit for the original submission and 75% credit for final revisions. Students will have until the revisions date to complete the labs with the full potential to receive a 100% on the entire lab.  Finally, students who have earned their 100% but would still like qualitative feedback can simply request it. We will be happy to provide it.

Advanced availability of assignments: Under normal circumstances, I prefer to release the assignments at a particular pace throughout the semester.  This is no ordinary semester, so I will do my best to make more assignments available sooner for anyone who would like to get ahead in 231.

Stressed? If you find yourself getting stressed out by 231, reach out to me.  I believe we can come up with something reasonable. 

Getting Help: We are working out how help can be best delivered. Look for more announcements (with one specifically about how we will start to provide help) coming soon.  I simply wanted to get the policy change proposal out first and then move on to help planning/scheduling. 

Resilience Required: There will undoubtedly be bumps in the road.  Questions of the form: “What on earth are we going to do when students have git conflicts?” have been rattling around in my brain a lot about recently. Although it will be painful at times, I am confident that we will get through this.

Please indicate your thoughts on this proposal below.  There is an additional link for anonymous feedback. As conditions change we may need to adjust.  Please trust that we will all be reasonable.

I hope that you all are safe, isolated, and well.

     Best wishes,
     Dennis