Policies

Accommodations

I am committed to ensuring access to course content for all students. Reasonable accommodations are available for students with disabilities. Contact Lauren Kozak, Title IX Coordinator and Director of Disability Resources, to confidentially discuss your needs and the accommodation process. More information can be found at: https://www.wlu.edu/disability-accommodations/undergraduate-accommodations

If you have already been approved for accommodations, please meet with me within the first two weeks of the term so we can develop an implementation plan together. It is important to meet as early in the term as possible; this will ensure that your accommodations are implemented early on. If you have accommodations for test-taking, please remember that arrangements must be made at least a week before the date of the test or exam.

Attendance

You may notice that I do not factor in attendance and participation into your regular grade. This is on purpose. I design my classes so that you can't not participate. Class sessions are structured to help you advance your learning, not just for you to receive content. If you miss a lot of class, it will affect your grade because you aren't learning what you need to learn to fulfill assignments. But life happens and sometimes you need a day or two. Or a pandemic happens and we all need a break. I expect that you'll talk to me about these instances and take responsibility for catching up on what you've missed.

That being said, more than two unexcused/unexplained absences will start to affect your final grade. Unexcused/unexplained means you did not contact me before class starts. Each of these absences will lower your final grade by 1/3 (so B+ to B, or B to B-).

Plagiarism

All writing should be your own or should be cited properly. The writing assignments in this course are different than what is required in other courses, so we will discuss proper citation procedures for writing for the Web, writing in a group, and writing technical documentation. For more info: http://libguides.wlu.edu/plagiarism.

Writing code does involve a lot of copying and pasting from other sources. This is fine and normal! But you should give credit to the people and places where you get your code by using the comment tag <!--- here's my comment -->.

Similarly, the use of ChatGPT to write code is a new world that I have not explored in depth. We may do this in class together, but in general the understanding is that you will not be using text generators to write any of your assignments.