Welcome

Welcome to the Fall 2024 iteration of CIS 1600!

If you're new here, welcome!

It is required that all students join the course Ed. It will be used for course announcements and Q&A.

All homeworks will be submitted and graded through Gradescope. The Gradescope course code can be found on Canvas.

Most questions should be directed to Ed. However, if you need to get in contact with the course staff for an urgent or personal matter, please email the head TAs at cis1600@seas.upenn.edu (do not contact this email address with waitlist related queries).

Course Description

This course introduces you to math concepts that form the backbone of the majority of computer science. Topics covered include sets, functions, permutations and combinations, discrete probability, expectation, mathematical Induction and graph theory. The goal of the course is to ensure that students are comfortable enough with the math required for the rest of the undergraduate program. CIS 1210 and CIS 3200 and many others heavily rely on concepts taught in this course.

Grading

Your final grade will consist of:

  • 20% - Midterm 1
  • 20% - Midterm 2
  • 30% - Final Exam
  • 25% - Homework
  • 5% - Recitation Attendance/Participation

To guarantee a passing grade, you will need both:

  • An average homework score that is greater than or equal to 40%, excluding dropped homeworks
  • A cumulative exam score that is greater than or equal to 1.5 standard deviations below the course average cumulative exam score

Course Policies

Collaboration Policy

For each assignment going forward (starting with 7H), you may organize into collaboration teams of 2 or 3 current students (you can use Ed #945 to search for teammates). You may only be part of one team and must list all team members on your homework submission, whether or not you specifically spoke with them for each homework assignment. You may have different teams for different assignments. See examples on Ed #945. Collaboration can only consist of discussions. After you have discussed ideas with your collaborators, you must write your solutions on your own. You are not allowed to write up the solutions together. Sharing of solutions essentially as they are written in a LaTeX file, an email, a PDF, over Zoom, or elsewhere is not allowed. This includes submitting solutions that you might obtain from the web or from people not enrolled in CIS 1600. The result will be penalties that may go as far as failing the course and/or being reported to the Office of Student Conduct. It is still not allowed to do the following:

  • Discussing and/or solving homework problems with friends not enrolled in the course
  • Posting homework questions to the Internet
  • Searching up homework solutions on the internet or ChatGPT for answers
  • Borrowing your friend's homework solutions from last year
  • Looking at someone's final solutions (or LaTeX file)

Note additionally that it is your responsibility to keep your answers to yourself-- if we find that a student copied your answers, even if you didn't directly give those answers to them, you will be penalized as if you directly gave your answers to that student. So, make sure you don't leave Overleaf open on your laptop if you aren't working on it directly.

Students caught violating the collaboration policy will be harshly penalized and may fail the course. Please refer to Ed #945 for more information on the collaboration policy

Regrade Request Policy

Every time we release grades for homeworks, we'll make an Ed post announcing all of the homework grade statistics. This post will also contain a regrade request deadline. All regrade requests must be submitted before this deadline without exception.

In order to submit a regrade request, you will need to get your regrade request approved by a TA during either office hours or at the end of your recitation. Regrade requests that have not been approved by a TA will be automatically rejected. Once a TA has looked at your regrade request and acknowledges that the question should be regraded, please submit a regrade request on Gradescope that includes the TA who endorsed your request and an explanation for why you submitted the regrade request.

Note: We will always release a rubric for each homework question highlighting what specific things we were looking for in a proof, as well as what specific rubric items you lost points on. While not absolutely necessary, it would help make the regrade request approval process easier if you came with a specific rubric item in mind that you feel your solution adequately addressed.

Recitation Attendance Policy

Every student will have one recitation absence excused for the semester. Additionally, in cases of emergency or conflict, you are allowed to attend a different recitation section for the week. This recitation swap can only be used twice a semester, so make sure that you are saving them for actual emergencies or conflicts.

If you'll be attending a different recitation for the week, you must email both your official recitation TA and the TA of the recitation you want to attend at least 24 hours before the recitation begins. Any requests made last-minute will automatically be rejected, and any student who attends a recitation without letting their TA know will not get attendance credit for that week.

Any subsequent absences beyond the one free drop and the two recitation swaps will count as absences and be reflected in your recitation attendance grade.

Textbook

There is no required or recommended textbook for this course. A textbook that can be referred to for extra reading is ''Mathematics: A Discrete Introduction'' by E. A. Scheinerman.