Course Requirements, Grading, and Policy

Table of contents

1. Participation
2. Preparation
3. Reading Responses and Discussion
4. Leading Discussions
5. Tip for Discussion Leading
6. Grading
7. Due dates and Late Policy
8. Disability, Religious, and Family Accomodations
9. Original Work Policy and Plagiarism

Participation

You are expected to attend and actively participate in every class session. To make the most of this class and not disrupt others, I expect you to be on time and ready to discuss the readings. If you can’t make it because of sickness or a family emergency or similar, please let me know before class.

Preparation

I expect you to be well-prepared for each class. This means that you thoroughly read all assigned readings, prepare a reading response, and spend time thinking about the paper. Ideally, you will read the paper a few days before class and review it again a day before so that there is enough time to connect the ideas from this paper to other work.

Reading Responses and Discussion

For each class, you should write a reading response as detailed on this page.

Leading Discussions

Each of you will serve as a discussion leader once during the term. For some classes, two students may be asked to lead the discussion together. Your responsibilities as a discussion leader are:

• Read and understand the papers for that class, along with any supporting material that you think would provide helpful background. Please also read the optional readings for that day, if any.

• Take on the role of a reporter. This includes summarizing the key take-aways, running a background check on the authors, and preparing a few thought-provoking questions.

• Prepare a 2-3 minute informal talk. I recommend no slides to maximize the time for discussion, but feel free to use them if you think it helps. Do not talk longer than 3 minutes! If you have more to say, you can integrate it in the discussion later (e.g., when the discussion dies down, you can bring up another fact you found).

• Lead a ~30 minutes discussion after your talk. To keep the discussion going, read all reading responses by the other students and integrate them into the discussion. For each topic, you should prepare 4-5 discussion questions about the papers or overall topic. These must not be trivial questions with easy answers, but creative, deeper questions that result from your attempts to understand the material, or its implications, or its connections with other work. The quality and originality of your questions will reflect your effort in thinking about the material.

Tip for Discussion Leading

• Break students up into small groups (3-4 people max)
• Initiate discussion with example answers to the questions you pose.
• Introduce hypothetical or real-world examples (e.g. products or recent events) to frame the discussion
• Tie your questions to research that you or other folks in CSE may be conducting.
• Keep a timer!

Grading

You should do good work in this class because you care about the project you picked, because you want to learn how to design effective online experiments, and because you want to advance research. That said, the university makes us use grades, so here is how I will assess your grades:

• 15% Reading responses (see this page for how they are being graded)
• 15% In-class contributions
• 10% Discussion lead
• 60% Research project and paper:
  • 5% Idea Fair
  • 7% Project Proposal (Abstract and Related Work section)
  • 8% Methods (or similar)
  • 15% Project Fair Round 1
  • 25% Project Fair Round 2 (including final project paper)

Due dates and Late Policy

Since we will be discussing each of your milestones in class, all deliverables have to be submitted before 9 am on the morning of the class. I will not be able to grant any exceptions (unless there are personal or family emergencies), so please make sure that you plan ahead if you have conflicting deadlines.

Reading responses are due by 6pm on the day before class. Late reading responses will not be graded, but you are allowed to pass on three of them as explained above.

Disability, Religious, and Family Accomodations

If you have any need and/or questions about disability or religious accommodations, please refer to university policies regarding disability accommodations or religious accommodations and feel free to contact me. For any family accomodations (e.g., child care), please do not hesitate to contact me so that we can work something out.

Original Work Policy and Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the use of another person’s words or ideas without attribution to their source. In American intellectual culture, this is considered a form of cheating, dishonesty, and/or theft. At the University of Washington and in professional settings generally, plagiarism is an extremely serious matter.

In your writing for this course (and in most professional settings), please paraphrase whenever possible. This helps you process and understand what you have read. If truly necessary, you can quote published work, but quotations must be clearly marked and properly attributed. You may obtain copy editing assistance, and you may discuss your ideas with others — but all substantive writing and ideas must be your own or else be explicitly attributed to another, using a citation. The exact form of the citation is not important; what matters is that you provide sufficient detail for someone else to easily relocate your source, even years later (so URLs alone are insufficient).

All cases of plagiarism will be reported immediately. There will be no warnings, no second chances, no opportunity to rewrite. Consequences can range from failing the assignment (a grade of zero) or failing the course to expulsion from the University. If you have the slightest doubt about whether you are using the words or ideas of others appropriately, please ask.