This page is for students enrolled in university courses for which I am an instructor. Some of the information is quite generic, and other parts are UMass-specific.

Important: Before contacting me with any question about the running of the course, please read the syllabus (distributed in Canvas) and check whether your question has already been answered there or on this page below. Contact should be in person immediately after a lecture, in a scheduled office hour, or via a public Piazza message or private Piazza message to instructors. Note: I cannot commit to responding to  personal email, owing to the large amount of email I receive. I receive many basic questions over and over every semester, and this page is an attempt to make better use of our time. Questions whose answers are obvious from the syllabus or already answered on this page will be bottom priority and may even just be ignored.

QUESTIONS ABOUT ME

• What is that accent? I grew up in New Zealand.
• Do you care about students? Very much, particularly about their learning. It is a privilege to teach hard-working and interested students. However my teaching experience shows that for whatever reason, many students don’t get this impression. Perhaps it is a lack of skill in conveying empathy, or  even a lack of understanding of what students are going through. This can be a particular problem when communicating in writing, which is why I try not to get into long discussions online.
• What is your basic teaching philosophy? I see myself as a coach (think of a personal trainer for someone who wants to get fit). The student should set their own goals and I am there to help them achieve them. I am interested in students learning and gaining a feeling of achievement when they look back on the course. Sometimes this means moving out of their comfort zone, although I hope that the course is mostly enjoyable.
• What is the best way to have productive interactions with you?  Ignore preconceptions and what you may have heard from other students, and treat me with respect.  I will do the same to you. If a student asks for help and is working hard and really seems interested in the course, I will give them a lot. If they waste my time and are not trying hard enough (e.g. by asking questions that are already answered on this page or showing that they have not even tried to think before asking) I will not respond as positively.  I always listen to constructive feedback and strive to improve every semester in my teaching. You will be given more than one chance to give feedback. But many changes cannot be made until the following semester, and many will not make sense or will clash with other requirements (I have to teach for all students, not just you). Do not quibble – when I make a decision, respect my authority.  In general, seeing me after class or in office hours is by far the best way to interact.
• Do you have a sense of humor? Yes, although when teaching for a large and diverse group it is hard to avoid offending someone when making a joke, so I try to restrain it. 

QUESTIONS ABOUT COURSE GRADES

• What is the best way to succeed in this course? University is very different from high school – students have much more freedom, including freedom to make their own mistakes, and the need to take responsibility for them. Realize that you can’t be perfect, but try very hard. Remember that this is just one course and its effect on your life overall is not that much. Focus as much as possible on the process, and don’t worry so much about the outcome. Learn the definitions of terms immediately. Read the relevant part of the textbook before coming to the lecture. Attend every lecture. For every abstract concept introduced, make up your own concrete example and non-example of that concept. Use all your resources: lectures, office hours, discussions, Piazza, library, internet, and especially your own brain and fellow students. Spend enough time on the course (but not too much, and ask for help rather than spending many hours on a single assignment question!) Don’t leave assignments to the last minute – start early. Keep up with the course schedule and seek help quickly if you find you are falling behind. Look after your health: sleep, exercise, and eat well. Being a student is your most important job right now. Finally, and very important: have fun!
• What do I need to do to pass/get a certain grade for this course? For large classes, you will most likely be graded on a mixture of your absolute performance and your performance relative to other members of the class, as well as those who have taken it in recent years. I am trying to move to a more objective form of grading that sets out minimum standards for each grade, but this will take a few years to implement fully. I want a grade of C, for example, to mean that the student can actually get 100% on 50% of the exam, rather than just get half marks for every question. This will be much more informative for everyone. It requires much more time to set assessments that achieve this goal than with the traditional method.
• I got a low mark on an assignment. Should I be concerned? Ideally, we have completely objective grading as described above. However, it is not so easy to do this, and for various reasons (e.g. exam time was too short for the amount of computation needed) sometimes we need to scale raw exam scores. If your scaled score is still low, then maybe you should be concerned, but raw scores are not so important.
• Do you “grade on a curve”? Not really. There is no preassigned grade distribution – if everyone earns an A, they can all get it. However if we do need to scale individual assessments, previous years’ grading distributions are used to inform that.
• Do you make exceptions when it comes to grading? No. Grades are an imperfect way of signaling student performance, but they are meaningful and measure performance, not effort or what we may “deserve” or “need”. Asking for an exception to be made is considered to be irritating and even insulting by instructors. Don’t do it. All grade boundaries are in some sense arbitrary, but once I have determined them, they will not be changed.
• How can I improve my grade now that we are near the end of the course? I don’t usually allow missed assignments to be made up late (unless an extension was given before the deadline owing to medical circumstances, etc). Often, the final exam weight can be increased relative to other assessments if the performance on the final is very good. The best general advice is to ensure there are no errors in how your work has been graded during the semester (and make regrading requests before the cutoff that I announce in the syllabus), and work really hard for the final exam.

QUESTIONS ABOUT EXAMS

• What will the exams be like this semester? Unless otherwise specified the format and content will be very similar to last semester for the same course. I will often give a practice exam, which may or may not have solutions. If there are no solutions, you may want to work together with classmates to grade each other’s work. You can also ask about your proposed solution methods in office hours or via Piazza.
• Do you give practice exams? Yes, where it is practical. However experience shows that many students complain that the practice exams are not enough or are too different from the real exam. Such students may be studying wrongly, trying to match patterns in previous questions without really understanding what they are doing. Practice exams are intended to give you an idea of what it is like to perform under time pressure. The type of question and the content in the real exam may differ substantially from the practice exam. No exam can cover all the course content, but all course content is examinable.
• Why did the exam seem not to test what we covered in class? Most likely because you did not study effectively. Some students learn very superficially,  For example, they look at practice exams and learn the wrong lessons from them, focusing on form and not content. We strive for a deeper level of understanding (it may be useful for you to look at this and this ). I never try to trick students in short timed exams. More tricky questions are usually given for homework, where you have more time to think about them.
• How should I study for the exam? The standard advice is still good: read your notes thoroughly. Learn the definitions especially well. Try to do old exams under time pressure (see above for what practice exams are for). Grade them honestly and go over the parts you found hardest. Re-read the relevant notes. If still stuck, ask someone who knows. Study with classmates and try to test each other and create answers for old exams if they are not provided. Get plenty of sleep and exercise, and remember it is just one exam. If you have prepared well, you have nothing to worry about. This page has similar advice, and maybe some extra points.
• Why are you considering using multiple choice exams? The short answer is that it is very difficult for a large class to mark free answer questions consistently, when partial credit must be given. I strongly believe that multiple choice assessment is fairer. Note that it is a lot less work to mark the exam, but takes a lot longer to set it, so reducing teaching workload is not the main issue by any means. However it is certainly a better use of our time to think of good exams that test the required material efficiently than it is to write inferior exams and then spend many hours trying to mark them fairly. Good questions can be refined and reused more easily than free answer questions.

OTHER QUESTIONS

• How do I deal with the mathematical content in your courses? Many CS students are somewhat wary of mathematics. It is essential, and the courses I teach tend to concentrate on it. This page has a wealth of information that may help – I highly recommend that you read it.
• Do I really need to attend lectures? This is up to you, but I think it is important, which is why I usually incentivize it in the final grade calculation. Here are some reasons to attend: lecture recordings do not always work properly (e.g. sound issues) and may not always be made available immediately; in lectures, additional material that is not on the slides can be covered (I have been doing this a lot recently; much of this will not directly be on any exam but will help in understanding and is, frankly, interesting); there are self-test questions and small exercises to do; students can ask questions in real time and have them answered; after lecture, students can discuss anything course-related with the lecturer; the lecture rooms are designed for full attendance, and when they are half-empty it changes the whole atmosphere, reducing the quality for those attending (and leading to worse quality recordings); for some students (maybe most), it is easier to maintain a good work routine when attending the lectures (for example, it is easy to forget to watch lecture recordings – there is a reason people go to aerobics classes together and don’t just do it solo).
• What do I do if I have questions about material in lectures or discussions? Contact the person (via Piazza) who ran the lecture/discussion.
• What do I do if I think there has a been a mistake in grading my assignment? Submit a regrade request (usually via Gradescope) within a week of getting back the graded work.
• Do I need to follow the instructions for submitting programming assignments? Definitely. They will be marked either by computer (usually) or by human markers with no discretion. Please follow the instructions to the letter. The time for creativity is when you have to figure out how to solve the problem posed in the assignment, not when you present the solution.
• What do “standard input” and “standard output” mean? The input stream that is connected to the keyboard, and the output stream that is connected to the screen. If you are asked to write a program that reads from standard input, it should accept input from the keyboard. A program writing to standard output should print to the terminal. Of course in many operating systems these input and output streams can be redirected, so the actual input and output may well be files when the markers look at your program.