Syllabus

This course is a variant of Harvard College’s introduction to computer science, CS50, designed especially for business professionals. Whereas CS50 itself takes a bottom-up approach, emphasizing mastery of low-level concepts and implementation details thereof, this course takes a top-down approach, emphasizing mastery of high-level concepts and design decisions related thereto. Ultimately this course empowers students to make technological decisions even if not technologists themselves. Topics include cloud computing, networking, privacy, scalability, security, and more, with an emphasis on web and mobile technologies. Students emerge from this course with first-hand appreciation of how it all works and all the more confident in the factors that should guide their decision-making. This course is designed for managers, product managers, founders, and decision-makers more generally.

Instructor

David J. Malan
malan@harvard.edu

Head Teaching Fellow

Doug Lloyd
lloyd@cs50.harvard.edu

Expectations

You are expected to

• watch six lectures online,
• attend, live, at least five out of six sections online,
• submit, by the deadline, at least five out of six quizzes,
• submit six assignments online, and
• submit one exam online.

Grades

Final grades will be based on engagement with the course material (quantified as live and active participation in section and submission of the quizzes) (10%), assignments (60%), and the exam (30%).

Many questions on the assignments in this course are out of 3 points. When you receive your feedback on these assignments, these scores translate as follows:

• 3 is reserved for exceptional answers that demonstrate a full understanding of the material in a manner that exceeds the course’s expectations, which may sometimes involve external research. Please note that this does not necessarily mean a long answer; indeed, an overly long answer that introduces irrelevant information is not likely to receive a 3. Rather, a 3 is awarded to a thorough and well thought-out and prepared answer that focuses on the subject of the question being presented. Only a few 3s at most will be awarded per question.
• 2 is awarded for a good to great answer that demonstrates understanding of the material in a manner consistent with the course’s expectations. Most correct answers will be graded a 2, and a score of 2 should be considered your benchmark for success.
• 1 is awarded for a poor to fair answer that either demonstrates partial understanding of the material or otherwise contains an error that suggests a misunderstanding of a key detail.
• 0 is given to answers that are incorrect, exceedingly brief, or blank.

Lectures

Quizzes

Quizzes are short ungraded (we care about completion, not correctness) associated with each lecture that allow you to apply each week’s concepts before digging in deeper in section.

Sections

Lectures are supplemented by biweekly, 60-90-minute sections led by the teaching fellows. Sections are an opportunity to discuss the course’s material, ask questions, and explore related material. Students are required to attend, live and with webcam and audio enabled, at least five out of the six weekly sections unless granted an exception in writing by the course’s head teaching fellow before the end of the first week of the term. While recordings of sections will be made available within 48 hours, watching those recordings after the fact does not contribute to your engagement score.

Office Hours

Office hours are opportunities for guidance and feedback from the staff on assignments as well as for discussion of the course’s material more generally. Students are not required to attend these sessions if they do not feel they need to.

Assignments

Assignments introduce or reinforce material via exercises, readings, questions, and/or videos.

Exam

The (take-home) exam synthesizes and assesses mastery of the course’s material.

Lateness Policy

For each minute that an assignment or quiz is turned in late, the course will impose a 0.1% deduction on your grade for the assignment. (Therefore, once an assignment is 16 hours and 40 minutes late it will earn no credit at all.) Late work will not be accepted for the exam.

Extension Policy

Once during the term you may grant yourself a 3-day (72-hour) extension. That extension cannot be apportioned among multiple assignments or be applied to any of the quizzes or the exam. To grant yourself this extension, submit this form by the assignment’s deadline. No other action or confirmation from the course heads is required. If you try to submit the form multiple times, subsequent submissions will be automatically ignored.

The course otherwise does not allow for extensions of any kind on its assignments. Exceptions to this policy will be considered only (a) in situations of documented medical or family emergency, or (b) if the request comes to the course directly from your Extension School academic adviser, if you are a degree candidate. Extensions that are only requested after an assignment’s deadline, even via the above form, will not be considered at all. The only individuals authorized to grant extensions are the instructor and the head teaching fellow.

Accessibility

The Accessibility Services Office (ASO) is available to support all students who require accommodations due to disabling conditions; all such accommodations must be approved and coordinated by the ASO. If you require accommodations, please contact the ASO at 617-998-9640, or by email at accessibility@extension.harvard.edu.

Academic Honesty

The course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as “be reasonable.” The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on assignments is not permitted except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your code to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints.

Regret clause. If you commit some act that is not reasonable but bring it to the attention of the course’s heads within 72 hours, the course may impose local sanctions that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted, but the course will not refer the matter for further disciplinary action except in cases of repeated acts.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from the course’s heads. Acts considered not reasonable by the course are handled harshly. If the course refers some matter for disciplinary action and the outcome is punitive, the course reserves the right to impose local sanctions on top of that outcome that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted or for the course itself. The course ordinarily recommends exclusion (i.e., required withdrawal) from the course itself.

Reasonable

• Communicating with classmates about assignments in English (or some other spoken language), and properly citing those discussions.
• Discussing the course’s material with others in order to understand it better.
• Helping a classmate identify a bug in their code at office hours, elsewhere, or even online, as by viewing, compiling, or running their code after you have submitted that portion of the assignment yourself. Add a citation to your own code of the help you provided and resubmit.
• Incorporating a few lines of code that you find online or elsewhere into your own code, provided that those lines are not themselves solutions to assigned problems and that you cite the lines’ origins.
• Reviewing past semesters’ tests and quizzes and solutions thereto.
• Sending or showing code that you’ve written to someone, possibly a classmate, so that he or she might help you identify and fix a bug, provided you properly cite the help.
• Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted previously to this course, CS50 AP, or CS50x.
• Turning to the course’s heads for help or receiving help from the course’s heads during the quizzes or test.
• Turning to the web or elsewhere for instruction beyond the course’s own, for references, and for solutions to technical difficulties, but not for outright solutions to assignments.
• Whiteboarding solutions to assignments with others using diagrams or pseudocode but not actual code.
• Working with (and even paying) a tutor to help you with the course, provided the tutor does not do your work for you.

Not Reasonable

• Accessing a solution to some problem prior to its deadline.
• Accessing or attempting to access, without permission, an account not your own.
• Asking a classmate to see their solution to an assignment before its deadline.
• Discovering but failing to disclose to the course’s heads bugs in the course’s software that affect scores.
• Decompiling, deobfuscating, or disassembling the staff’s solutions to assignments.
• Failing to cite (as with comments) the origins of code or techniques that you discover outside of the course’s own lessons and integrate into your own work, even while respecting this policy’s other constraints.
• Giving or showing to a classmate a solution to an assignment when it is he or she, and not you, who is struggling to solve it.
• Looking at another individual’s work during the quizzes or test.
• Manipulating or attempting to manipulate scores artificially, as by exploiting bugs or formulas in the course’s software.
• Paying or offering to pay an individual for work that you may submit as (part of) your own.
• Providing or making available solutions to assignments to individuals who might take this course in the future.
• Searching for or soliciting outright solutions to assignments online or elsewhere.
• Splitting an assignment’s workload with another individual and combining your work.
• Submitting (after possibly modifying) the work of another individual beyond the few lines allowed herein.
• Submitting the same or similar work to this course that you have submitted or will submit to another.
• Submitting work to this course that you intend to use outside of the course (e.g., for a job) without prior approval from the course’s heads.
• Turning to humans (besides the course’s heads) for help or receiving help from humans (besides the course’s heads) during the quizzes or test.
• Viewing another’s solution to an assignment’s problem and basing your own solution on it.
• Viewing the solution to a lab before trying to solve it yourself.