Grading

Evaluation in this course will include three components:

1. Writing assignments: 30%
   • commentaries assigned; only the top six scores will count towards a student’s grade. Students may submit as many of the assignments as they wish. Students will receive regular, written feedback on their papers from one of the teaching assistants. The prompt for the weekly commentary or position paper will be provided each week at the end of class, and will also be posted online in the Slack channel. The response will be due every week on Monday at 11:59 PM via the Dropbox connected to the course via LEARN, in either .doc/.docx format or as a PDF.
   • The six (6) best commentaries or position papers submitted by a student will each count for 5% of the student’s final grade. Therefore, the written component of the course will account for a total of 30% of a student’s final grade. Should a student wish, they may submit any commentary or position paper to an instructor by email, in an editable word-processing format (i.e., .doc or .docx) for additional feedback (beyond that received from the teaching assistant), particularly with respect to improving their writing style.
   • The University of Waterloo’s Writing and Communication Centre (WCC) works across all faculties to help students clarify their ideas, develop their voices, and write in the styles appropriate to their disciplines. Centre staff offer one-on-one support in planning assignments and presentation, using and documenting research, organizing and structuring papers, and revising for clarity and coherence. We particularly encourage using the WCC for students whose English or writing skills are not at the level where they wish them to be. Staff from the WCC will offer a lab on how to create a thesis statement and develop arguments around it as one of the earliest third-hour meetings for CS 492.
   • Your weekly writing assignments should be approximately two pages (1000 words) long.
   • These assignments will be marked on a scale from zero to five.
   • We have provided some examples of strong essays from previous offerings of this course and related courses on the LEARN page for this course, and a rubric that offers advice on what makes a strong essay for the course.
   • A note on the use of generative AI systems: While you may use these systems to improve the quality of your writing, but you may not use them to create your arguments. For example, you may not supply the weekly prompt to a generative AI system, but you can draft your essay and ask a generative AI system to assist you in improving it. If you do use these systems, you must inform us that you have done so, and how you have used it. If you cannot fully explain the arguments in your own essay, and how you came up with them, you have misused these generative AI systems, and you should start your essay again. In other words, all ideas should be your own; you may obtain assistance in expressing your ideas, particularly if communicating in English is challenging for you.
2. Class participation: 20%
   • We will assess students’ participation based on thoughtfulness and quality, rather than on quantity. What we are looking for is for students who can demonstrate meaningful engagement with the material, justify their arguments, and respond respectfully to contrary positions presented by others. During the course of the semester, students are likely to be asked to advance or defend (either orally or in writing or both) positions that may differ from their own personal views.
   • Suggesting articles, podcasts, or videos for the “from-the-news” component of the class will count towards a student’s class participation grade, as will contributing meaningfully to discussions in the course Slack channel.
   • Students for whom English communication is challenging may need to work especially hard for this component of the course. Participation in the Slack channel or the Zoom chat thread (for the online version of the course) are particularly encouraged in these cases. Please let us know how we can help you participate if English is not your first language or you are introverted (for example, would you like us to call on you?)
3. Small-Group project: 50%
   • There will be a small-group project due at the end of the term that will involve a small team comprised between two and four students. Each team will submit a joint work product that may consist of a creative project, such as the development of an online program or tool, an application, a chatbot, a game, a website, a video presentation, or , if you must, a podcast.
   • We urge you not to do a podcast for this project unless you have something novel to say or a particularly unique style to present the topic; it is too easy to just make a chatty conversation with not much content, which will not garner a good grade. If you do a podcast, please focus on a small number of topics, find articles to discuss that are not in the course readings, keep a tight thematic focus, and find a very creative way to present the material.
   • The small-group projects will involve a technological issue of the sort addressed in the course, regarding a computing topic that connects to discrimination, privacy, and/or surveillance and how they connect to computing. Teams will identify their topic, confirm the appropriateness of the topic with the instructors, divide the labour among their team members, and accommodate different perspectives, viewpoints, and expertise of the team members.
   • If students encounter undue challenges in the small-group project work, they should contact the teaching assistants or instructors promptly; in particular, please do not wait until the week before the project is due to indicate that group members have been unresponsive to their assignments.
   • Students may, but are not required, to prepare a short presentation to give in the final class of the semester. For students who choose to present, this will contribute to their class participation grade.
   • The project submission has three milestones; these are descrived in detail on the project page.

This course has neither a midterm nor a final examination.

Rules for group work:

• The project should be work only done by your group members: in particular, nothing you submit for marking should be from anyone else. You may submit other people’s work that has been inspiration or that your project seeks to critique. The one exception to this rule is that you can use existing libraries or code bases, with proper acknowledgment; that said, the main intellectual contribution of your group project must be your own.
• For the weekly essays, they must be entirely your own writing; you may discuss your thoughts with your classmates through the lectures and in your own conversations outside class. A good rule of thumb is that if the instructors pull you aside and ask you to explain the arguments underlying your writing, you should be able to explain what you mean by every sentence; if not, you don’t understand your own writing, which suggests that it’s not sufficiently your own.