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 all of the assignments, there is a strict policy on collaboration. There is no collaboration on the homework assignments at all.

The only materials you may reference when writing homework solutions are course materials (lecture notes, homework solutions, and recitation guides). This policy extends to the Internet. Posting homework questions and/or course materials to online forums such as Stack Overflow, Chegg, Course Hero, etc. is both a violation of this collaboration policy and copyright infringement on the materials authored by the course staff.

If you would like to use part of a solution from a problem presented in lecture, recitation, or past homework solutions you may do so with attribution; i.e., provided you add a comment in which you make clear you copied it from these sources. It's especially important to tell us if you use our words because if multiple students do it for the same words, it looks the same as if you copied each other. Using our words with citation is fine, but copying each other is not.

If you are unsure of whethor or not something is allowed, please don't hesitate to make a private post on Ed.

Any violations of the collaboration policy will be dealt with severely.

Examples of collaboration which are NOT permitted include:

  • Discussing or solving problems with friends, whether enrolled or not enrolled in the course.
  • Posting questions on the internet or searching for solutions on the internet.
  • Borrowing a friend's solutions.
  • Giving your solutions to a friend. This includes screen sharing documents.

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.