Performance on the mid-term examination, held in class on 13 October, the final examination, held on 18 December, at 9:00am, and the seven problem sets will contribute to determining a student's grade for the course. The grade itself will be determined by a variety of factors.
Please note the date of the final exam. It is NOT possible to take the exam early.
Grades will be recorded on the course's Canvas site. Pay no attention to Canvas's report of your cumulative grade. It is useless.
Problem sets may be submitted on paper in class or on Canvas. They are due at the beginning of class on the day specified. Late problem sets will be docked one point for each day they are late. (See the grading scale here.) That said, we are quite prepared to grant extensions, so long as they are requested in advance, that is, by no later than 5pm the day before the problem set is due. (Such requests should be directed by email to the instructor, cc'ing your grader.) Extensions will not be granted after that time except in very unusual and unfortunate circumstancess.
Because we are so reasonable, exploitation of our reasonableness will be taken badly. Do not make a habit of asking for extensions. We will grant one without any reason, and maybe another, but after that we are going to start asking for reasons.
Students seeking accommodations due to a disability or medical condition should contact the Office of Student and Employee Accessibility Services (SEAS). Students in need of short-term academic advice or support can contact one of the deans in the Dean of the College's office. Students seeking psychological support services should contact Counseling and Psychological Services.
The grading scale for the problem sets is described on the problem sets page. The assigned problems for each set can also be found there.
Students should not use any electronic devices in class, including laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. (Digital paper is fine.) Research has shown that using such devices not only adversely affects one's own performance—students who take notes on a computer process the information less completely than those who take notes by hand—but that it also adversely affects the performance of other students whom it distracts. (See here and here, for example.)
Students who for some reason need to use electronic devices in class should speak to the instructor.
Brown's Academic Code details standards we are all meant to follow, and have agreed to follow, to ensure that the work we present as our own really is our own. Specifically:
A student’s name on any exercise (e.g., a theme, report, notebook, performance, computer program, course paper, quiz, or examination) is regarded as assurance that the exercise is the result of the student’s own thoughts and study, stated in his or her own words, and produced without assistance, except as quotation marks, references, and footnotes acknowledge the use of printed sources or other outside help. (Emphasis added)
Ideas, someone once said, are the currency of intellectual work, and stealing ideas is theft. Plagarism is stealing ideas: claiming as your own what was the fruit of someone else's work. It is not the worst thing one can do, but it is pretty bad.
What this means in practice is that, while you are more than welcome to discuss the problem sets with other students, brainstorm together about solutions, and so forth, you should do the exercises on your own. It is, after all, only by doing the exercises that you can learn how to do them---which is what you will need to do on the exams.
Nowadays, there are other temptations, in the form of tools like ChatGPT that can write papers or do logic problems all by themselves. My own view is that the Academic Code clearly prohibits the use of such tools to do one's work. But whether that is true or not, let me be clear about my own standards: It is absolutely prohibited to use ChatGPT and similar tools in any way to complete the work for this course. I am aware that ChatGPT can be used like a search engine, but there is a slippery slope here, and I suggest we not get onto it.