DSC 40B – Theoretical Foundations of Data Science II

📜 Syllabus

Welcome to DSC 40B in Winter 2022! This page should answer most of the questions you might have about how the course is run; check out the frequently asked questions for answers to some common ones. If you don't find what you're looking for here, feel free to make a post on Campuswire.

Here is what the syllabus will cover:

Instructors

This quarter DSC 40B is being co-taught by two instructors:

Prof. Yusu Wang
yusuwang@ucsd.edu
webpage
Lecture: 9:30 am T/Th in WLH 2207
Discussion: 1:00 pm on Friday in RWAC 0115
Prof. Justin Eldridge
jeldridge@ucsd.edu
webpage
Lecture: 12:30 pm T/Th in WLH 2204
Discussion: 5:00 pm on Friday in WLH 2204

Co-teaching means that the course topics, assignments, course staff, policies, etc., will be the same between the two sections. There will be two different lecture times and two different discussion times, but they will cover the same content on the same schedule.

Modality

We are excited to be back on campus and to teach in-person once again, and we've heard from many students who feel the same way. Still, we understand that the pandemic continues and that a good number of students may be unable to come to campus or may feel uncomfortable doing so.

As a result, we are structuring the course so that you will have the option to take it remotely or in-person (or a mixture of both). In particular, lectures will be delivered in-person at the regularly scheduled time and location, but we will not be taking attendance. The lecture content will be podcasted so that you will not need to be physically present to keep up-to-date. Exams, too, will be held remotely. Office hours will be offered in a mix of in-person and remote modalities. Because no component of the course will require physical attendance, you will not need to let us know or do anything extra in order to take the class remotely (or in-person, for that matter).

Getting Started

To get started in DSC 40B, you'll need to set up accounts on a couple of websites.

Campuswire

We'll be using Campuswire as our course message board. Campuswire is like Piazza, but unlike Piazza, Campuswire does not sell student data to third parties. You should have received an invitation via email, but if not you should get in touch with a course staff member as soon as possible, as we'll be making all course announcements via Campuswire.

If you have a question about anything to do with the course — if you're stuck on a homework problem, want clarification on the logistics, or just have a general question about data science — you can make a post on Campuswire. We only ask that if your question includes some or all of an answer, please make your post private so that others cannot see it. You can also post anonymously if you would prefer.

Course staff will regularly check Campuswire and try to answer any questions that you have. You're also encouraged to answer a question asked by another student if you feel that you know the answer.

Gradescope

We'll be using Gradescope for homework submission and grading. Most of the assignments will be a mixture of math and coding, and the coding parts are usually autograded via Gradescope., You should have received an email invitation for Gradescope, but if not please let us know as soon as possible via Campuswire.

Canvas

We'll use Canvas to display your overall course grade at the end of the quarter, but that's it; everything else will be available at dsc40b.com or Gradescope.

Required Materials

You will not need to purchase any materials for this course; we'll use lecture slides the main resource, as well as our own course notes. If you'd like additional textbooks to study from, we can recommend these:

Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, Vazirani; Algorithms
Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein; Introduction to Algorithms

These books are also excellent resources for interview preparation.

Lectures

Lectures will be held in-person at the regularly-scheduled time and place, but they will be podcasted and posted online for remote viewing. Attendance is appreciated, but not required.

Lectures will be at the following time and place:

Eldridge: 12:30 pm T/Th in WLH 2204
Wang: 9:30 am T/Th in WLH 2207

You will be able to find the lecture recordings at podcast.ucsd.edu.

Discussions

Discussions will be held in-person at the following time and place:

Eldridge: 5:00 pm on Friday in WLH 2204
Wang: 1:00 pm on Friday in RWAC 0115

The discussions review the materials from that week's lectures and prepare you for the homework. Just as with lecture, topics and techniques introduced in discussion might appear on the homework and in exams. In particular, some of the more difficult homework problems may be partially solved in discussion section to give you a good start.

Both discussion meetings will cover the same material, but we are holding both since some people might not be able to attend the other section due to scheduling conflicts. You may choose to attend whichever discussion section is most convenient for you, no matter which section you are officially enrolled in.

Attendance is recommended, but not required. The discussions will be podcasted, but the nature of discussion section (they usually involve a large amount of groupwork) means that the podcasted discussion might not be as useful as in-person attendance as in-person attendance.

Office Hours

Course staff, including tutors, TAs, and instructors, will hold office hours regularly throughout the week. Please see the office hours page for the schedule and for instructions.

Homeworks

There will be eight homeworks assigned throughout the quarter, plus one "super homework" (described below). Homeworks will be a mixture of written problems (which are manually graded by our tutor staff) and coding problems (which are autograded). Each homework will be due via Gradescope at 11:59 PM on the Saturday after it is assigned except otherwise noted, and you'll have roughly a week to complete each assignment from the time it is posted. Note that although the homeworks will be due on Saturday, they only cover material up to the Tuesday of that week, meaning that you'll have all you need in order to do the homework and turn it in before; we make the due date Saturday so that Friday's discussion will be more useful for tackling the homework.

The homework due date is carefully chosen to fit within a one week "cycle". On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you'll have lecture. That week's discussion will review the lecture topics with an eye towards practical application. The homework is then due the following Saturday, giving you some time after the discussion to complete it.

Homework Redemption

You should think of the homeworks as practice towards the goal of mastering the topics in DSC 40B. But the first time you practice anything, you're not going to be perfect. The key is to learn from the mistakes.

To encourage this, DSC 40B uses the concept of "redemption" on homework assignments. Under this policy, you may regain 85% of the credit for a homework problem that was previously done incorrectly by submitting an explanation of your mistake along with a correction. This policy encourages you to revisit homework mistakes in order to correct your understanding, and allows us to give quick, targeted feedback through grading.

Not all homework problems are eligible for redemption, unfortunately, as we do not have the resources to regrade longer, more involved problems. Those problems that are eligible for redemption will be marked as such. The homeworks late in the quarter may be ineligible for redemption due to insufficient time to request and grade redemptions before the quarter ends.

Problems that are eligible for redemption are graded as either right or wrong with no partial credit according to the following scale:

Green: You had the right idea, and you get full credit for the problem.
Yellow: Your approach showed effort, but wasn't right. For now it will receive zero credit, but you can receive full credit by submitting a proper "redemption request" (see below).
Red: You didn't answer the problem, or did not show enough work. No credit is awarded and you are not permitted to submit a redemption request.

If you got the problem correct, you'll receive the total number of points for it. If you didn't get the problem correct, even due to a relatively small mistake, you'll receive no credit until you submit a redemption request (see below). If your redemption request is accepted, you'll be given 85% of the credit for the problem. You can think of the 15% deduction as the cost of requiring a tutor to look over your redemption request — or, if you're a glass-half-full kind of person, as an incentive to get the problem correct the first time around.

Redemption Requests

To submit a redemption request for a Yellow solution, submit a regrade request on Gradescope or by attending a tutor's office hours. Your redemption request should answer each of the questions below:

What was the main misconception or misunderstanding that led to your answer being wrong?
How did this misconception cause the wrong answer?
How does fixing the misunderstanding lead you to the right answer?

The next section contains an example of a good redemption request.

The amount of detail needed in your request depends on how complex your mistake was; if it was a simple one, only one or two sentences may be necessary. A grader will review your request shortly (as long as you submit it within a week of the homework scores being posted, your regrade request will be reviewed). If you aren't able to identify what you did incorrectly, you'll be asked to attend a grader's office hours in order to discuss the problem in more detail.

Warning! We will not be able to handle redemption requests which are submitted more than a week after you have received your grade.

Example

Here's a simple example to demonstrate the redemption process. Suppose you're given the following simple problem:

Question: What is 3 + 5 * 2?

Let's say you misapplied the order of operations, giving you an incorrect answer of 16 (the correct answer is, of course, 13). Here's a good redemption request that uses the template above:

1) I misapplied the order of operations. 2) I added before multiplying, so I got (3 + 5) * 2 = 8 * 2 = 16. 3) Multiplication should be done first so that we get 3 + (5 * 2) = 3 + 10 = 13.

Again, the key isn't just giving the right answer — that's published in the solutions, after all. The important part (according to the research) is identifying why you made the mistake.

Slip Days

You have four slip days to use throughout the quarter. A slip day extends the deadline of any one homework by 24 hours. Slip days cannot be "stacked" or "combined" to extend the deadline further — the latest any one homework can be submitted is 24 hours after the deadline. Slip days are applied automatically at the end of the quarter, but it's your responsibility to keep track of how many you have left.

Slip days are designed to be a transparent and predictable source of leniency in deadlines. You can use a slip day if you are too busy to complete an assignment on its original due date (or if you forgot about it). But slips days are also meant for things like the internet going down at 11:58 PM just as you go to submit your homework. Slip days are to be used in exceptional circumstances, so you probably shouldn't get close to using all four — if you feel that you will need that many, send me a message and we'll figure something out.

Collaboration

You are highly encouraged to think about the homework problems together, but you must turn in your own solutions written in your own words. We feel that discussing homework problems is an excellent way to learn, but writing the solutions in your own words promotes a deeper, more solid understanding than discussion alone.

We recommend the following way of working on the homeworks. First, meet with your partner to discuss the solutions, but don't leave the meeting with anything written down. Wait an hour or so, then write up the solutions in your own words working from memory. In that hour, you inevitably forgot some of the details of the solution. If you find that you have trouble filling them in, its a sign that you might not have understood the solution as well as you first thought!

If you have any questions or worries about whether your collaboration constitutes a violation of academic integrity, feel free to ask us on Campuswire.

Regrade Requests

If you feel that the grader has made a mistake, you may submit a regrade request via Gradescope within one week of the grades being released. Note that part of your grade is clarity, so if your answer was mostly right but unclear you may still not receive full credit.

Regrade requests are not the same thing as redemption requests (though both are submitted on Gradescope in the same way). Any problem, whether or not it is eligible for redemption, is eligible for a regrade request if you feel that the grader has made a mistake.

The "Super Homework"

Instead of a comprehensive final exam, we'll have a comprehensive "Super Homework". The super homework will focus on the content from the last two weeks of the quarter, but it will also contain material from throughout DSC 40B. It will be about twice as long as a typical homework.

Because the super homework covers twice as much material as a usual homework, it will be worth twice as much. And because it comes so late in the quarter, we unfortunately cannot offer redemption on the super homework. However, you may still collaborate on the super homework as long as you write up solutions in your own words.

The "Super Homework" will be due on Saturday, December 10 (during finals week), but you'll have several days to complete it.

Exams

Midterms

There will be two midterm exams:

Midterm 01: Wednesday, October 26 (focuses on Lectures 01 — 08)
Midterm 02: Wednesday, November 23 (focuses on Lectures 09 — 15)

The exams will be held remotely. They will not be at a specific time. Instead, there will be a window of 24 hours during which you can start your exam, but once your exam is started you will have 90 minutes to finish it. There will be no lecture on the day of the exams.

Final Exam

The final exam for DSC 40B is a "no fault" final split into two sections:

An optional Midterm 01 "Redemption" section focusing on Lectures 01 — 08
An optional Midterm 02 "Redemption" section focusing on Lectures 09 — 15

If your score on the midterm redemption section is higher than your score on the original midterm, it will replace that grade. Getting a lower score on a redemption section cannot hurt you (but it will make us sad). As a consequence, the redemption sections are effectively optional.

Under this policy, a bad performance on an earlier exam can be erased by good performance on the same material in a later exam.

Example: You got an "F" on Midterm 1 and a "B" on Midterm 2. You decide to take only the first redemption section on the final (though you could have taken both), and you receive an "A". Your midterm scores are now "A" and "B".

The redemption exams for Prof. Eldridge's section will be held on Saturday, December 10 (as scheduled by the registrar). The redemption exams for Prof. Wang's section are planned for Friday, December 09 (as scheduled by the registrar).

Like the midterms, you will be able to start the exam at any point in a 24 hour period. Each section will be timed separately; you'll have 90 minutes for each.

Note that the topics from Lectures 16 and 17 are not on any exam. These will instead be tested in the Super Homework.

Grading

We'll be using the following grading scheme:

40%: Homeworks
10%: "Super Homework"
25%: Midterm 01 (or Redemption Midterm 01, whichever is larger)
25%: Midterm 02 (or Redemption Midterm 02, whichever is larger)

In a typical quarter, the midterm redemption policy has the same effect as a traditional "curve", therefore replacing the need for one. The standard grading scale (where an A is 93+, A- is 90+, B+ is 87+, etc.) will be used as a starting point, but once all scores are in, we will run a clustering algorithm to automatically find the best cutoffs for each letter grade. These cutoffs can only be lowered. For instance, the threshold for an "A" will never be higher than 93%.

Support and Resources

As instructors, our job is to foster an environment where everyone, regardless of identity, feels welcome and is able to focus on learning. If there is something we can do in this mission, or if there is something preventing you from succeeding in the class, please let us know. If you feel uncomfortable speaking with us or are searching for help on a specific concern, there are several campus resources available to you, including:

More generally, if you have any concerns about your ability to focus or succeed in this course, or just need someone to talk to, please contact us ASAP and we'll figure something out.

Illness

Because of the pandemic, we must prepare for the unfortunate possibility that you will get sick and be unable to participate in this class for long periods of time. The university has a mechanism for helping in this situation: the Incomplete. If you are unable to complete the course because of reasons outside of your control, you may be given an Incomplete instead of a letter grade. This simply means that you will complete the rest of the work at a later time. Once you have done so, your overall grade is calculated and your Incomplete grade is replaced.

An Incomplete does not allow you to re-do work that has already been completed, only to do work that hasn't been completed.