CS771: Course Etiquettes

General Etiquettes

1. Please pay close attention to the rules of the course, especially those regarding absence, make-up exams and use-of-unfair means.

2. Be polite and courteous with all your classmates, TAs and instructors.

3. It is good to be competitive but adopting unfair means will not be tolerated.

4. Please do not ask us to change rules unless there is widespread concern or negative impact of an announced rule.

Discussion Forum Etiquettes

Discussion fora on websites such as like SphinX, YouTube and Piazza are there to help you reach out to instructors, TAs and your classmates to discuss and clarify doubts. They often allow you to ask questions anonymously (i.e. without revealing your identity to your classmates), as well as ask questions to the instructors privately (i.e. without letting your classmates know that you asked a question).

However, as with all human interaction, to maintain order, we need to follow certain rules and etiquettes. A few are detailed below. Please follow them while using a discussion forum.

1. Do not use discussion fora at all during quiz/exam hours
   Discussion among students is prohibited in all forms during quiz/exam hours. Remember, course admins will be monitoring all posts (even deleted posts are accessible to course admins) to check for such violations.

2. Make all your posts public unless absolutely necessary
   If you have a doubt in a particular topic, chances are that many your classmates have that same doubt. It makes sense to clarify queries once for all students rather than reply to the same query privately several times. If you ask something privately and we find your query very general, we may change its visibility to public ourselves. Thus, it is better if you make your queries public yourself. Remember, you can always ask queries anonymously.

3. Be courteous
   Do not misuse the anonymity feature. Be courteous and polite in all discussions with your classmates, TAs as well as instructors. Remember, if we find a post especially rude or disparaging, there are ways to track that post (even if it is anonymous, even if it is deleted later on) by contacting the website admins.

4. Go through previous posts on the discussion forum before creating a new post to ask a question
   There is a chance an earlier post may have already answered your query. Please check this before posting a new query. If you are not satisfied with the existing reply, please continue the discussion on the old post itself rather than starting a new post.

5. Be up-to-date on discussions
   This will help you stay in touch with what all your classmates are discussing as well as may clarify some of your doubts for free. A good way to do this is to stay up-to-date with discussions.

6. Post a screen shot of any resource referenced
   Your questions should be self-contained. If your question relates to a certain section in a textbook or some page in the lecture slides, post a screen shot of the relevant part or else give clear indication of lecture number/page number etc. You can even include snaps of your handwritten notes from the relevant lecture. The instructors/tutors/TAs should not have to guess the topic/lecture number/textbook to which you are referring in your question.

7. Post all your work
   If you are getting errors/bugs in your code or getting stuck with some derivation or equation, show in your question, all the steps you took that led you to your current problem. For example, do not post one line saying “I want to solve problem X and did Y – can someone debug things for me?”. Very few of your classmates would be interested in entertaining such a vague question. Provide more details of what you did in your code, as well as what went in as inputs to your code, or else how to proceeded with the derivation and why you think you got stuck.

Project Group Etiquettes

The mini-project groups are meant to foster collaborative learning as well as distribute the course load. Past experience suggests that students often learn more from their peers as a part of group activities such as these mini-projects than they do by sitting in lectures or watching videos. However, to make this an enjoyable experience for all group members, please follow the following etiquettes.

1. Be in regular touch with your group members and talk to each other not just about the mini-projects but also about the course in general. Help each other clear doubts and gain understanding of the course material.

2. Contribute enthusiastically to the mini-project. Since all group members will get evaluated jointly for the mini-projects, it is important that eveyr member make contributions to the project e.g. problem solving, coding, debugging, code optimization, report writing, etc.

3. How to leave/change your project group:
   If you are unsatisfied with your current project group, you may leave the group and join another group. In order to do so, please send an email to the instructor informing the group name and group number of your old project group that you wish to leave and the group name and group number of the new project group that you wish to join. This email must be copied to all members of the old as well as the new project group.

4. Dealing with non-participating members:
   Occasionally we come across groups where a group member is not contributing to the projects and/or has otherwise lost touch with the other group members. Please note that there is no policy to evict a group member by force unless the member themself wishes to leave/change the project group. Thus, to handle instances of non-participating members, we instead recommend that the other group members “leave” the group en-masse and create a new project group amongst themselves. The procedure to leave your current group and create a new group is the same as mentioned in the previous point.

5. Project group sizes:
   Please note that the allowed group sizes are 4, 5, 6. Groups of size 7 or more are too large and will not be allowed. Groups of 3 or less are too small and may present a disadvantage to the group itself and thus, not recommended.