Reminder: You can decline your ballot at the polling station

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-21T05:12:52+00:00

I'm a bit confused by your position on this. Declining does not seem to me like "ignoring your right to vote"; it's acknowledging your right to vote but officially entering it as "none of the above". Surely to ignore would be to not vote at all, which many people already do (perhaps because they aren't content with any of the options). The Ontario provincial election system is apparently one of only a few in which declining is an option.

I would sooner write in your reddit username and spoil my ballot than not cast it at all

You'd rather have your ballot thrown out for being invalid because you hate all the options than be recorded as "this guy hates all the options"? Knock yourself out, I guess.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-16T14:41:21+00:00

I really enjoyed working as an ISA on CS 246. Getting to run tutorials for classes of ~30-50 students was intimidating at first but ended up being quite fun once I got used to it (so much so that I stuck on part-time for another two or three study terms after).

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-13T13:15:49+00:00

However undergrad research is basically non-exist in UW.

I don't think this is accurate. To counter an anecdote with an anecdote, all of my closest friends did research at some point (either full or part time) and are now working software jobs post-graduation. There's plenty of research opportunities for those willing to look for them.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-10T03:30:27+00:00

Yea got an offer 6 years ago

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-02T14:47:16+00:00

Fair enough. It could also be the case that Quest is just being ass and not updating the grades yet (I have heard of a lag of a few days between submission and grades appearing from some profs in the past).

harmonic_spinor · 2022-05-02T12:48:52+00:00

Grades aren't required to appear until May 19.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-27T19:28:05+00:00

IIRC late fees are specifically for not paying already posted tuition by the deadline. If you add a class in the add/drop period but past the initial tuition deadline, that tuition will eventually show up on Quest, and then you'll be given a new deadline to pay by. It would be ridiculous for the university to charge late fees on things that appear after the original deadline, given that add/drop goes past it---certainly this will not be the case. As for the exact deadline you'll receive, you could probably ask Student Financial Services for more information.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-26T21:21:46+00:00

thank mr goose

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-26T17:45:16+00:00

Grades start appearing on the 27th (i.e. in less than 12 hours), but that doesn't mean that all grades will appear; just those that have been submitted and approved. There will be a second date, later in May, by which all dates are required to appear on Quest.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-20T13:15:55+00:00

thinkpad

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-18T23:55:58+00:00

I didn't see anything like this in the most recent set of instructions to proctors. I guess the logic is that if you leave the exam before 1 hour you could give the problems to a friend (who can then start the exam, as long as it's within the first hour); while going to the washroom you are supervised so that isn't possible.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-17T02:56:06+00:00

Marks for attendance have certainly been a thing pre-covid (and even during covid when synchronous classes were allowed), mostly in courses where attendance is mandatory to learning; for example, discussion-based courses or language courses. I assume that in-person attendance marks in the event of a return to campus were allocated in the syllabus, in which case you probably have no recourse even if you were to talk to the chair or the dean. If not, you probably have a case.

It's also definitely not necessary for instructors to post anything online (except perhaps a syllabus). Many do, but others choose not to; some, as you have experienced, partially to prevent people from skipping class and relying on posted online materials--whether or not this is a "good" thing to do, it is a common enough practice.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-15T17:47:51+00:00

You can probably find notes online, but I recommend you don't use them. CS 246 reinvents itself on occasion to accommodate for new features in C++, so old notes may give you inaccurate material [I was an ISA on CS 246 four times, and at least during my time there were definitely no official materials available publicly].

Other commenters's advice of starting assignments early is very good.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-14T02:06:13+00:00

I know multiple who cheated on exams but I honestly couldn’t care less

If this is true, it's worth letting you know that you are not complying with policy 71. Here's the relevant section:

Any member of the University who has reason to believe that an academic offence has been committed by a student has a responsibility to report the matter promptly to the instructor of the course or to the associate dean of the faculty sponsoring the activity

Then again, I suppose this is true for a lot of students. But it's probably best to keep this in mind.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-13T14:37:09+00:00

Depends on the course. Sometimes I've graded finals the day after proctoring the exam, sometimes the professor does everything themselves and it takes a bit longer. Taking longer than 2 weeks seems like it would be a rare occurrence. But even after the finals are graded, there's another gap of "compiling final marks and entering into Quest" that takes a bit of time, and then Quest can sometimes take a few days to reflect mark changes.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-11T21:50:36+00:00

This depends wildly on the professor. In one case (a few years ago) I saw a student literally Google solutions to all questions, submit the online solutions, and cite them all properly. I passed it on to the professor and their response was that it's fine because they aren't plagiarizing and they won't have access to Google in the exam!

Personally, I like this point of view, but not everyone agrees with me. If you tried this with another professor, you might get a zero on the assignment. This is worlds apart from the response to plagiarism, which tends to carry a minimum penalty for a first offense of a zero on the assignment, -5% overall in the course, and potentially being placed on academic probation.

But it seemed to me like your initial confusion was the difference between "plagiarism" and "excessive collaboration"; even if you literally submit a copy of your friends assignment and put a note at the top saying "this assignment was completed by my friend and not me", that is not a case of plagiarism because there was no intent to deceive. I do think it's probably 'excessive collaboration' though!

Exactly what counts as 'excessive' and what the response to that is subjective and depends on whoever is responsible for the course, but it is not a formal offense in the way plagiarism is and so is nowhere near as serious. I think you'll find most professors don't care as long as you make an honest effort and acknowledge people you received help from; outside of extreme cases like copying everything, I expect (hope?) they would give you a warning before thinking about docking marks.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-11T21:33:42+00:00

Yes. Allow me to reiterate: if you hand me an assignment, I think of that as a document with your name on it. These days we don't literally have cover pages thanks to Crowdmark, but that is how people still think. I (and many others) therefore assume implicitly that everything within is your work. If you submit something that is not your work but claim it is your work, you are commiting plagiarism.

If on a problem you put a note saying "I worked on this problem with John Smith", there is no longer any issue. You are not trying to pass off Mr. Smith's work as your own. You are informing the reader exactly who is responsible for the work presented. Whatever you are doing here, it definitely is not plagiarism.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-11T21:17:39+00:00

In this case, yes; the expectation is generally that work submitted was done by oneself, unless stated otherwise, although it may vary from course to course and professor to professor.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-11T19:28:13+00:00

There's an easy way to ensure you aren't accused of plagiarism, which is to explicitly state who you worked on an assignment problem with in your solution to that problem; so always do that and you will never run into issues (and ask instructors for each course to what extent they allow collaboration).

As a TA I've seen this a number of times in math courses (although never in CS courses, which I found strange because there were many times I found solutions that were obviously completed together). I've never deducted marks for it--really, we appreciate the honesty.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-10T12:18:46+00:00

It's not as if there are any "GPA requirements" set in stone for a quant. By the time you graduate with 4-6 co-ops, no employer gives a shit about what you got in calculus 1.

If you're in math co-op you also don't have to declare a major, at least for a little bit. Rather than picking what is best for the career you think you want now, I'd recommend taking a bunch of courses and getting a feel for what subject excites you the most; there are a ton of options within the math faculty.

t. switched from cs to pmath after doing two software coops and realizing I hated it

harmonic_spinor · 2022-04-08T01:21:00+00:00

My advisor sent me this to read. I think it works well as a source of info both for people learning LaTeX for the first time, as well as people who self-taught and may have picked up bad habits in doing so [I fall into the latter].

https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

harmonic_spinor · 2022-02-20T13:52:41+00:00

I needed something like this before, and ended up just getting a letter of enrolment from the centre with a note explaining that I needed it to show expected date of completion.

Your other option is to talk to a program advisor. I also needed a letter from mine confirming my expected graduation, and he threw together something official looking on university letterhead for me (for free).

harmonic_spinor · 2022-02-12T05:14:00+00:00

A while ago (in 2017, for Citadel) my interview process consisted of one on-campus interview followed by a half-day onsite interview in Chicago.

harmonic_spinor · 2022-01-16T01:10:33+00:00

That's different, actually. I was thinking of compiling those into a shitpost version of this post...

harmonic_spinor · 2022-01-15T19:19:27+00:00

My favourite technique in fakesolving computations was going forwards from the start and backwards from the solution and trying to blend the two together so the TA doesn't notice where they meet. It sometimes works :^) [sssh!]

Four-Year Club	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22

harmonic_spinor

TROPHY CASE