Class: Tuesday/Thursday, 2:40 - 3:55, Science Center 183

Professor: Kevin Webb

Piazza: Q&A Forum

GitHub: Swarthmore GitHub Enterprise

Gradesource: [TBA]

Office hours: Tuesday, 4:00 - 5:00 and Wednesday, 1:30 - 3:00

Office: Sci 255

Welcome to CS 45. This course will introduce fundamental ideas in operating systems. The structure of this course may be different from many other CS courses at Swarthmore. We’ll be using a teaching model called peer instruction, which places a strong emphasis on classroom discussion and student interaction.

The course is composed of the following:

By the end of the course, we hope that you will have developed the skills to:

This is a tentative schedule; it may change as we go. All readings refer to the textbook unless otherwise indicated (e.g., there’s a link to some other source).

Grades will be weighted as follows:

To prepare for paper discussions, you should bring a marked/annotated/highlighted copy of the paper to class with you. You should mark or briefly note:

This course features regular lab assignments that account for the largest component of your course grade. Lab attendance is required by all students, unless you have already completed and submitted the lab assignment for the week. Additionally, the cs labs are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for you to use for CS 45 lab assignments. While you must attend the lab session for which you are registered, you may optionally attend additional lab sessions, provided space is available. In case of space constraints, students registered for the lab will have seating priority.

Lab assignments will typically be assigned during the lab sections on Friday and will generally be due by midnight on Thursday 2 weeks later. You are strongly encouraged to start early!

Even if you do not fully complete an assignment, you should submit what you have done to receive partial credit.

To help with cases of minor illnesses, athletic conflicts, or other short-term time limitations, we will drop your three lowest reading quizzes and participation grades. You are still responsible for the material, and you should review any missed materials via the class recordings as soon as you can.

All students start the course with two "late assignment days" to be used at your discretion, with no questions asked. To use your extra time, you must email your professor after you have completed the lab and pushed to your repository. You do not need to inform anyone ahead of time. When you use late time, you should still expect to work on the newly-released lab during the following lab section meeting. The professor will always prioritize answering questions related to the current lab assignment.

Your late days will be counted at the granularity of full days and will be tracked on a per-student (NOT per-partnership) basis. That is, if you turn in an assignment five minutes after the deadline, it counts as using one day. For partnered labs, using a late day counts towards the late days for each partner. In the rare cases in which only one partner has unused late days, that partner’s late days may be used, barring a consistent pattern of abuse.

If you feel that you need an extension on an assignment or that you are unable to attend class for two or more meetings due to a medical condition (e.g., extended illness, concussion, hospitalization) or other emergency, you must contact the dean’s office and your instructors. Faculty will coordinate with the deans to determine and provide the appropriate accommodations. Note that for illnesses, the College’s medical excuse policy, states that you must be seen and diagnosed by the Worth Health Center if you would like them to contact your class dean with corroborating medical information.

If you believe that you need accommodations for a disability, please contact the Office of Student Disability Services (Parrish 113) or email studentdisabilityservices@swarthmore.edu to arrange an appointment to discuss your needs. As appropriate, the office will issue students with documented disabilities a formal Accommodations Letter. Since accommodations require early planning and are not retroactive, please contact them as soon as possible. For details about the accommodations process, visit the Student Disability Service Website.

You are encouraged to contact me privately to discuss your academic needs, but all official disability-related accommodations must be arranged through the Office of Student Disability Services. To receive an accommodation for a course activity you must have an official Accommodations Letter and you need to meet with me to work out the details of your accommodation at least two weeks prior to any activity requiring accommodations.

Academic honesty is required in all your work. Under no circumstances may you hand in work done with (or by) someone else under your own name. Your code should never be shared with anyone; you may not examine or use code belonging to someone else, nor may you let anyone else look at or make a copy of your code. This includes, but is not limited to, obtaining solutions from students who previously took the course or code that can be found online. You may not share solutions after the due date of the assignment or make them publicly available anywhere (e.g. public GitHub repository).

Discussing ideas and approaches to problems with others on a general level is fine (in fact, we encourage you to discuss general strategies with each other), but you should never read anyone else’s code or let anyone else read your code. All code you submit must be your own with the following permissible exceptions: code distributed in class, code found in the course text book, and code worked on with an assigned partner. In these cases, you should always include detailed comments that indicates on which parts of the assignment you received help, and what your sources were.

Failure to abide by these rules constitutes academic dishonesty and will lead to a hearing of the College Judiciary Committee. According to the Faculty Handbook:

The spirit of this policy applies to all course work, including code, homework solutions (e.g., proofs, analysis, written reports), and exams. Please contact me if you have any questions about what is permissible in this course.