Attendance

You are required to attend each and every one of the course meetings, arriving on time with your laptop computer and charger. Excused absences will be granted and documented in accordance with University policy as described in Article 1, Part 5 Class Attendance, of the Student Code.

You must file your documentation concerning an excused absence on the Physics Department's Excused absences portal within two weeks of your absence.

Excused absences fall into the following categories as defined by the code:

• illness
• emergency beyond the student's control (e.g. an auto accident or death in the family)
• required attendance at a University event (e.g. varsity athletics)
• serving as a volunteer emergency worker
• religious observance or practice: this requires you to file a "request for accommodation for religious observances form." The form must be uploaded to the Excused Absences portal no later than two weeks after the first day of class.

Homework Submission and Late homework

Homework assignments are due at the start of the weekly class meeting. They must be uploaded prior to the start of class, and a hard copy must be turned in as well. The hard copy will be the basis what is graded. Assignments that are up to one week late will receive at most 50% of full credit. (Toward the end of the semester, all assignments must be in by the last day of the semester - see calendar for details!) We will not grade assignments that are more than one week late.

Grading

• Homework: 70%
• Midterm Quiz: 10%
• Final: 20%
• Missing class: 5% off final grade

Your final numerical score is computed as

• 100+: A+
• 90-100: A
• 80-90: A-
• 70-80: B+
• 60-70: B
• 50-60: B-
• 40-50: C+
• 30-40: C-
• 20-30: D
• 10-20: D-
• 0-10: F

All problem sets count for the same amount. There may be some problem sets which may take two weeks (check the schedule when they are assigned). Even so, they count the same as one homework in the final grade calculation. Unless otherwise noted, every exercise in a problem set counts an equal fraction of the assignment and every part (a,b,c,...) of an exercise counts as an equal fraction of the exercise. 5 points of the problem set will be for mandatory questions (e.g. time spent on assignment, references, collaborators).

Sometimes there are typos in the assignment (although we are working hard to remove them). Please ask when confused! Don't spin your wheels a long time on something that might be a typo. These aren't trick questions - we are trying to ask reasonable things.

Calculators, smart phones, and network access to irrelevant content

You will be using your laptops in class. That's the only kind of networked device I will permit: cellphones, calculators, and smart watches are not to be in evidence in class, or during exams. Period.

Extra Credit

There will be occassional opportunities to get extra credit. This will include additional exercises/part of exercises as well as additional assignments. To zeroth order these exist because I think they are cool and useful for understanding computational physics but I can't justify within the 2 credit hours of the course.

Extra credit assignments will often be described poorly (maybe even something like, `get a full solar system simulation working'). If you have questions about it, please ask before you spend too much time on it. Also, we have no obligation to make extra credit typo-free. Please try to answer the question we mean to be asking.

For the extra credit, per exercise, the grading is all or nothing. We aren't going to hunt for typos and give partial credit for sortof working code. The amount of extra credit per exercise/etc is listed on the assignment.

About using code you find on the web

The quickest way to deal with the arcana of programing is to ask Google for examples of what you are seeking to accomplish. But you will need to use your judgment in doing this: the Google search “how do I use color maps in python?” is fine, while “show me a script that calculates pi” is not. And you should always credit the original source of code that you paste into your own programs in a comment that includes the URL for the original code. If an author says that his/her code is not to be copied or incorporated into your programs, then DON’T.

I have two principal goals in this course. I want all of you to become fearless coders with the confidence to walk up to baffling problems and pound them into submission. And I want you to develop numerical descriptions of cool systems normally thought to be too difficult for students at your level, whose analytic descriptions might obscure the underlying physics. For this to work, you’ll need to write your own code.

Academic integrity

You must never submit the work of someone else as your own. We understand that many of you will find it helpful to work with other students to master Physics 298 owl. But when you collaborate with your study group on homework assignments, you must be a full, active participant in developing the solutions that you submit for credit.

It is cheating to receive answers from another student and then use them as your own. It is cheating to submit as your own work solutions that you find by searching on the worldwide web (though see "About using code you find on the web"), or by subscribing to an online service that suborns cheating. It is cheating—and a violation of U.S. copyright law—to give (or sell) course material to someone else who intends to redistribute and/or sell it.

Cheating will be penalized harshly: I will award zero credit for any assignment in which a student is found to have cheated. I will also probably reduce your course grade by two letter grades (so that an A becomes a C), though I reserve the right to issue an F for the entire course to any student who is found to have cheated.

All activities in this course, including documentation submitted for petition for an excused absence, are subject to the Academic Integrity rules as described in Article 1, Part 4, Academic Integrity, of the Student Code.