Lectures and Tutorials

It is strongly recommended that you attend all lectures and tutorials. Students who do so are generally more successful in CPSC 313 than students who do not.

Indeed, you should consider attending multiple lecture or tutorial sections, if you find certain material to be challenging! Repetition is often helpful, and different people explain things in different mays: It might make sense the second (or third) time around.

Tutorial Exercises

It is strongly recommended that you read, and try to solve, tutorial exercises before you attend the tutorials where they will be discussed! This is your best chance to learn how to solve a problem before you are required to do it for course credit, and there will not be time for you to do this during a tutorial if you have not tried to solve a problem before that.

Note that it is usually much easier to understand somebody else's solution for a problem than it is for you to solve the problem yourself, and students sometimes confuse one of these skills with the other. You do not want to discover that you really don't know how to do something during a test!

It might be helpful to join a study group consisting of students in this course and for your group to work on each exercise.

If you have time for it, then you should even write up solutions for tutorial exercises as carefully as you can, and then show you solutions to other students — preferably after these students have already tried to solve the same problem. Another person can often spot problems with your work that you might miss!

Of course this will take more time. However, you will probably be better prepared for class assignments and tests if you do this than if you do not.

It will often be useful for you to review your lecture notes before you try to solve a problem. It might also be helpful for you to refer to your notes, the textbook, and other reference material, as you try to solve it.

Please try not to be discouraged if you do not understand how to solve a problem right away, or if someone points out problems with your solutions! Most things get easier with practice, and it is often easier for you to spot mistakes after you have made them and somebody else has noticed once or twice!

Please do go to the office hours of either one of this term's CPSC 313 instructors in order to ask about problems on tutorial exercises or to show them your work! That is what the office hours are for.

Assignments

See the above information about tutorial exercises.

However, you should note that some things are not allowed when you work on an assignment for course credit. See the page on student misconduct for more information about this.

Quizzes, Midterm Tests and Final Examinations

Instructors in this course will give you as much information about what knowledge and skills are being tested, on a given quiz or examination, as they can. This will generally be discussed in lectures shortly before each test or included somewhere on the course web site.

Please read each question carefully. Ask about it if you do not know what a question means. Finally, think carefully about how to solve a problem before you begin to write a solution down.

If you cannot figure out how to solve a problem and you still have time left (that is, you have written solutions for all the problems that you can solve) then write a brief description of how you would try to solve this kind of problem. You will probably not receive full credit for this, but part marks might be awarded.

This is usually much better than other things that students sometimes do under these circumstances! In particular, it is better than presenting a solution for a different problem that you have seen already — because we are not interested in your memorization skills — and it is also better than trying to bluff, by writing down something that you know is wrong (and hoping that a marker will not notice this).

Getting Help

Lots of help is available if you need it!

Both instructors have office hours when they are available to ask students' questions about this course. Please feel free to visit either instructor to do this!

Note the additional resources for students that are available as well, notably including quite a bit of material that is available on reserve in the library.

Final Advice

Keep up with the work, and do the course work, including the tutorial exercises that are not for credit! It is not easy to catch up in this course, at the end of term, if you have not been spending time on it before that.

This page was most recently changed on Monday, January 10, 2005 by Wayne Eberly.