Note: The syllabus is subject to change. We will adjust the coverage of the material adaptively based both on student and instructor feedback, as well as developments in the field. Policies will stay largely stable however.
This course will use several platforms:
Math 53 and EECS 16B and EECS 126 and EECS 127 and CS 189 is the recommended background.
Prerequisites are not enforced for enrollment, but we encourage you to consider taking some of the classes listed above and save this course for a future semester if you feel shaky on the fundamentals.The course assumes familiarity with programming in a high-level language with data structures. Homeworks and projects will typically use Python. We encourage you to check out this tutorial if you haven’t used it before. Students who have taken Berkeley courses like CS 61A and CS 61B are well-prepared for the programming components of the class.
We do not have the staff bandwidth to help students with material that they should have mastered before taking this course. If you choose to proceed with this course, you are accepting full responsibility to teach yourself anything in your background that you are missing. We will not be slowing down to accommodate you, and questions pertaining to background material will always have the lowest priority in all course forums.
This class includes more or less weekly homework assignments (written and coding components), a course project, a midterm exam, and a final exam. These are all mandatory.
Weekly homeworks will involve both written and coding components. Homeworks will be nominally due on Sundays at 10:59 PM.
Homework exists mainly for you to learn. We encourage collaboration in teams of 2-4, but everyone turns in their own submission.
We require students to not only do the homeworks, but to carefully understand the solutions. You are required to critically evaluate your homework and to make sure that you can actually do every problem on the assignment for your learning. To do this, we recommend that you redo any part of any question that you didn't get right the first time in light of what you have learned from the solutions.
HW Party: Weekly on Thursday around noon (Typically 11:30-2pm in the Woz Lounge of Soda Hall), course staff will provide an collaborative space and extra support to help students work together and finish the assignment. More details will be posted on Ed.
As a design course, EECS 182 requires all students to complete a final project done in teams of four.
The Midterm will be held in-person, on the Berkeley campus, on Wed, Oct 11 from 7-9pm. There will be no alternative exams or remote options.
The Final will be in our designated slot based on the lecture time, namely Thu, Dec 14 from 3-6pm. The exam will be in-person on the Berkeley campus. There will be no alternative exams or remote options.
If you cannot make these exam times, you should drop the class and take it in a future semester. Again, there will be no alternative exams or remote options (except as mandated by DSP). Please do not email the staff requesting alternative exams.
Exams in EECS 182/282A will be challenging and serve as the main evaluation criteria for this class.
We expect students to participate in the class in a way that contributes to a positive and inclusive learning atmosphere for fellow students, and helps everyone deepen their mastery of the subject. Actions done in furtherance of these goals earn positive points. Bad citizenship and non-constructive behavior gets negative points. Doing nothing gets zero points. More details will be provided in a relevant Ed thread.
Late HWs and Projects will generally not be accepted, unless you have a DSP accommodation.
Please have your DSP advisor submit a letter.
Weights (undergrad students):
Weights (graduate students):
This class is not graded on a curve. We follow fixed grade bins, and your grade is determined on how well you do, not how well your peers do. Everyone can earn an A. Everyone can fail. The course staff sincerely wants ALL of you to succeed in this class.
Grade | Overall Percentage |
---|---|
A | [90, 100] |
A- | [88, 90) |
B+ | [84, 88) |
B | [75, 84) |
B- | [68, 75) |
C+ | [65, 68) |
C | [62, 65) |
C- | [58, 62) |
D | [53, 58) |
F | [0, 53) |
The instructors may adjust grades upward based on extra credit, etc. Individual categories of the grade can go negative. The grade of A+ will be awarded at the instructor's discretion based on exceptional performance.
If you are taking the class PNP, you will need to attain a letter grade of C- or higher AND pass the final to pass. If you are a graduate student taking the class SUS, you will need to attain a letter grade of B- or higher AND pass the final to pass.
Regrade Policy: If you believe an error has been made in the grading of one of your exams, you may resubmit it for a regrade. Regrades for cases where we misapplied a rubric in an individual case are in scope but you cannot argue about relative point values within the rubric, as the rubric is applied to the entire class. Because we will examine your entire submission in detail, your grade can go up or down as a result of a regrade request.
We encourage you to work in groups of 2-4 students in completing the homework—however, each student must write up their own solutions and submit individually. You should never directly copy solutions from other students or material from books/online resources. As per standard academic practice, you should should acknowledge any collaborators on an assignment and credit any external sources that you used in your writeup. A failure to cite or acknowledge collaboration is grounds for immediately failing the course.
Because of the nature of the material, we encourage students to explore playing with ChatGPT and other large language models as well as code models, but suggest that you first solve the problems yourself before feeding them to an LLM. The point of feeding them to an LLM is to better understand LLM behavior. Since the HW counts for zero percent of your grade, asking the LLM to do it when you don't know how has the same effectiveness as choosing to drive a lap around your neighborhood instead of going for a run. The point isn't the destination, it's the workout and the journey.
The course staff do not have the bandwidth to give you an individualized course or to engage in one-on-one tutoring. You are expected to keep up with the course, take notes, and do all the assignments. At any time when you approach staff for help, you should expect to be able to pull up any homeworks that have been due or to pull out your notes from lecture and/or discussion. If you have not kept up, you will immediately move to the absolute bottom of the queue for getting help. If you cannot devote time and effort to the course, or if you lack the background to keep up, you should not be taking this course.
Please follow the University Policy on Notetaking. You are encouraged to use course materials to teach something to a friend, for personal use, in your research, etc. However, you are strictly prohibited from uploading course-related material (including your own solutions and notes taken from discussion or lecture) to websites such as CourseHero or Chegg, which monetize on copyrighted material without instructor permission. Doing so will be considered academic misconduct and will result in a referral to the Center of Student Conduct. It is also grounds for immediately failing the course.
Here are the policies that govern admission into classes. The course staff does not control enrollment!
For students on the waitlist, please participate in the course as though you are in it. We expect many students to drop as is typical in advanced high workload courses of this type. If pre-pandemic past experience is any indication, enough students will drop so that everyone on the waitlist who is still interested will likely get enrolled. Of course, we don't know how well pre-pandemic experience extrapolates to now, so reality might be different.
For concurrent enrollment students, your applications will be processed by whatever process the department sets up. We hope that everyone gets in who is adequately prepared to take the class and put in the work that will be demanded from you. We are basically awaiting funds from the department to let us do this.