Syllabus

Instructor: Michael Xiao

Table of Contents

• Syllabus
  • Community Standards
  • Textbook
  • Weekly Sessions and Attendance
  • Ed Forum
  • The Required Components of Your Work
    • Homework
    • Exams
    • Grades
  • Collaboration and Integrity

Welcome to Data 88S! This page contains the nitty-gritty details of the class. Please read it carefully, and also read the companion page about the class.

Enrolled and waitlisted students will be added to our Ed forum.

Community Standards

Data 88S is an academic community; Ed is a formal, academic space. We must demonstrate appropriate respect, consideration, and compassion for others. Please be friendly and thoughtful; our community draws from a wide spectrum of valuable experiences. For further reading, please reference Berkeley’s Principles of Community and the Berkeley Campus Code of Student Conduct.

Textbook

The textbook is on the course website. Lectures and the textbook will be closely related in content and sequence, though the exposition and examples in lecture might be different from those in the text.

Weekly Sessions and Attendance

All sessions are in person and start at Berkeley time, that is, 10 minutes after the stated start time.

The class does not allow time conflicts. You are expected to attend all the sessions below. Each session will assume that you have attended the previous ones.

• Lecture meets Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM in Dwinelle 155.
• Discussion sections meet two times a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays.
• There will be numerous office hours held by the instructor and course staff; days and times TBA.

Student participation and informal conversation will be encouraged during all lectures and sections. You are expected not only to attend but also to participate. We will not take attendance. Rather, we’ll make sure that participating in the sessions is an effective and efficient way to learn.

Ed Forum

We will use our Ed forum extensively for communication, posting documents and information, and discussions with students. Please check Ed regularly, and please read the Forum Policies post carefully before posting.

The Required Components of Your Work

Homework

Homework will be assigned each Monday after lecture and will be due the following Tuesday at 5 pm. In some weeks there may be deviations from this due to exams or holidays; we will let you know.

Data 88S is essentially a math class. Homework will consist of math and interpretation. Your main tools for working will be paper-and-pencil or a tablet equivalent. Occationally, there will be code cells to help you obtain numerical values.

Late assignments will not be accepted. But if you have DSP accommodations for extended time on assignments, please make sure we receive your DSP accommodation letter by the second week of classes. We will contact you about arrangements.

Homework must be submitted on Gradescope. Please follow all submission instructions. Not doing so will result in no credit and no regrade request allowed for the work. It is your responsibility to make sure your submission is complete.

Homework will be graded based on correctness. We encourage you to use the plentiful support available from the instructors and course staff, and to get started as early as possible. Turning in work that you understand well and know to be correct is by far the most efficient way to succeed in the class.

Please keep in mind that homework assigned each week is based on the material covered in the same week, not in the previous week. The first one or two exercises (and possibly more) of each week’s homework will be based on material covered on Monday. So you will be able to start homework as soon as it is assigned, though many students prefer to wait till after section on Wednesday.

Exams

All of these will be in person and proctored.

• Midterm 1 on Wednesday February 26, during lecture (12:00 noon to 1:00 PM in Dwinelle 155).
• Midterm 2 on Wednesday April 9, during lecture (12:00 noon to 1:00 PM in Dwinelle 155).
• Final Exam on Wednesday May 14, 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM, Exam Group 11, rooms TBA. It is your responsibility to make sure you are not enrolled in another class that has a conflicting final exam.

There will be no alternate exams except as required by campus rules. If you have extended time accommodations for tests from DSP, please make sure that you have enough available hours around the times of the regularly scheduled exams.

Grades

We strongly recommended that you turn in all assignments even if you can only complete some of them partially. However, to give you some leeway in case of illness and emergencies, we will drop your two lowest homework scores in the calculation of your overall score.

Letter grades for the course will be based on your overall score in the class, calculated using the following weights:

• Homework 25%
• Midterm 1 20%
• Midterm 2 20%
• Final 35%

Clobber policy: If your final exam percentage score is greater than either of your midterm percentage scores then it will replace the lower of your two midterm percentage scores (only your Midterm 1 score will be replaced if both your midterm scores are equal). Here “percentage score” on an exam means your score on the exam as a percent of the total points on the exam.

Letter grades will be based on a combination of absolute cutoffs and the distribution of overall scores.

Collaboration and Integrity

You are encouraged to discuss practice problems and homework with your fellow students and with course staff. Arguing with friends about exercises is an excellent and time-honored way to learn. However, you must write up all your assignments on your own.

Copying assignments from other sources is not only dishonest, it also doesn’t help anyone. Each exercise requires its own combination of ideas, and each student needs practice in coming up with those combinations, or else they will be at a loss when trying to use the ideas in their future work. From a purely practical perspective, all students must work independently on Data 88S exams – no collaboration is allowed on tests. If a test is the first time a student works independently, then that test is not likely to go well.

Stat 88 and Data 88S materials including exams and solutions are the intellectual property of the course developers. From the campus statement on Academic Integrity: “… students may not circulate or post materials (handouts, exams, syllabi, i.e. any class materials) from their classes without the written permission of the instructor.”

We are tough with dishonest students and we hope that we will not be put in that situation in Data 88S. I expect that you will work with integrity and with respect for other members of the class, just as the course staff will work with integrity and with respect for you.