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Department of Information Technology

Computer Networks II spring 2011

Course information

Below follows important information about the structure and assessment of the course. You should read this through and make sure you understand how the assessment works - if you have any questions, contact the main teacher!

Admittance and Registration

In order to be admitted to this course, you must have passed a first course in computer networks - either here at Uppsala University, or in your bachelor degree from a foreign university. Students who do not meet this criteria at the beginning of study period 3 will not be allowed to register for this course. New students will not be allowed into the course after January 21:st, i.e, after the first week of the study period.

Admittance is handled by your student counsellor - teaching staff is not allowed to make decisions about who is allowed to take the course or not. If you were not admitted into the course due to missing merits, contact your student counsellor.

Course litterature

There is no official course litterature - the majority of readings are in the form of articles, whitepapers, web pages and slides that are linked to from the Schedule page. However, some of the readings refer to the book Computer Networking - A Top-Down Approach (5th edition) by Kurose/Ross, i.e., the same book used as course litterature for Computer Networks I at Uppsala University. If you have not studied Computer Networking in Uppsala before, you may want to get a copy of that book.

Teachers and Contact

Information about the teacher lineup and their office hours can be found here. If you need to contact the main teacher or any of the teaching assistans outside their scheduled office hours you should do so by sending them an e-mail in advance. Dropping by the offices unannounced will not be appreciated due to extensive workload in addition to this course - please respect this.

Course structure

The course is divided into two parts; a theoretical part (8.5 hp) and a laborative part (1.5 hp).

Theoretical part

The key thing to note about the assessment of the theoretical part is that if you settle with grade "3", you are assessed on the theoretical part solely on the written exam at the end of the course. If you aim at grade "4" or "5", there are additional assessment in the form of discussion seminars, unannounced pop quizzes and active participation in the peerwise system for this course. More details about this below.

Lectures

Lectures are not mandatory to attend, but if you miss one you may miss interesting and important details that will later be asked about in discussion seminars and/or the written exam. For each lecture there is a reading assignment which you are assumed to have completed before the lecture (details on the Schedule page). Slides may or may not be made available before or after a lecture.

Unannounced Pop Quizzes

There are going to be 4 unannounced pop quizzes during the course. This is a small 10-minute test that covers everything since the last pop quiz - including the readings for the lecture during which the pop quiz will take place. Pop quizzes are only necessary to take for those who aim at grade "4" or "5" in the course. Each quiz will consist of 6 multiple-choice questions where 3 correct answers are needed for 1 PQ point and 5 correct answers needed for 2 PQ points.

Discussion seminars

There are going to be 2 discussion seminars in the course, during which we discuss the last few lectures and the associated readings. Discussion seminars are 1 hour long and your participation awards you 0-3 SEM points depending on your performance. You only need to participate in discussion seminars if you aim at grade "4" or "5" in the course. You need to sign up for a discussion seminar in advance (see deadlines on schedule page; booking lists will be available on all lectures. Please do not sign up before you are sure you want to attend that seminar. If you have course collisions on seminar day, write so on the booking list!

The seminar starting times do not follow the conventional quarter-past-the-hour schedule. Respect their starting times and be there a few minutes before they start - arriving late at a seminar will affect your seminar grade negatively.

Active participation in Peerwise system

Peerwise is a web based system where students create and to explain their understanding of course related assessment questions, and answer and discuss questions created by their peers. Your participation in the peerwise system will be graded on a scale with 0-3 PW points. For high scores, you should create good questions, answer and discuss other students questions and spread your activity over the different topics covered in the course. You only need to participate in the PeerWise system if you aim at grade "4" or "5", but even if you settle with grade "3" you may want to use it as some of the questions from peerwise will be used on the final exam.

More details about how to use PeerWise in this course can be found here.

Written exam

At the end of the course, there is a written exam covering the material from lectures, discussions during lectures and the readings for each lecture. Your exam will be graded "U" (Fail), "3", "4" or "5". If you have not participated in unannounced pop quizzes, discussion seminars and the peerwise systems you may only earn grade "U" or "3" at the exam even if you answer problems required for grade "4" and "5".

About 80% of the exam will be released to students a few hours before the exam begins in the exam hall. During those hours, students are allowed to discuss problems with each other, search for information, read up on necessary stuff and prepare in the way you think is the best. The remaining ~20% questions on the exam will be purely theoretical questions that you need to answer without having seen them in advance.

The exam will have three parts corresponding to the grades "3", "4" and "5". Each part will be graded pass/fail. For grade "3" you need to pass the first part, for grade "4" the first two parts and for grade "5" all three parts. If you fail at one of the first two parts, following parts will not be graded even if you have answered the questions.

More details about the exam will be e-mailed out about two weeks before the exam.

Lab part

There are two lab assignments in the course that are awarded 0-3 and 0-2 LAB points depending on how well you do the lab. There are no rebounds for non-functional labs - instead, labs will get a lower grade if they have flaws in their solutions. More information on the laborative part of the course can be found on the labs page. As only 3 LAB points are needed to pass the lab course, it is enough if you do the first lab if you do it really well. See "Course grade" below for more information.

Each lab has a deadline associated with it. Submitting your lab before the deadline guarantees you to have the lab graded during the course, If you submit your lab after the deadline, we will grade it during the course if it reaches us before we have finished grading all the labs that were handed in before the deadline. If you submit your lab after we have finished grading, we will grade it at a later point - probably not until after the end of the academic year in August. If you submit your lab after the end of the academic year (i.e., after the last day of re-exams in August), it will be silently ignored and you will thus fail the lab part of the course.

Course grade

In this course, you can get grade "U" (Fail), "3", "4" or "5" depending on what grade you get at the exam in combination with how many extra points you have earned through participation in unannounced pop quizzes, discussion seminars and the peerwise system. The table below shows how many points you at least need for each grade. Note that there is a requirement not only for each type of points (PQ, SEM, PW, LAB), but also for the total amount of points.

Grade Exam grade PQ(8) SEM(6) PW(3) LAB(6)  Total (23)
"3" 3 -  -  -  3 -
"4" 4 4 3  2  4  14
"5" 5 6 4  3 5  19

(The number within parentheses show the available amount of points)

Cheating policy

DO NOT CHEAT. All cases of cheating will be reported to the disciplinary board. 'nuff said.

Updated  2011-01-20 07:33:38 by Lars-Åke Larzon.