Rules
On this page you will learn about
- the rules for passing the course,
- the rules for exam admittance,
- the rules for grade calculation,
- the scheduling of the decisive events,
- other relevant or useful information.
Registration
You can register for this course until August 21, 23:59. You cannot unregister from it after that date.
Examination
There will be an entrance exam on September 4. The entrance exam will be 30 minutes.
A final exam will be held on October 6. In addition, there will be a re-exam (yet to be scheduled). The final and re-exam will be 150 minutes each. The points earned in the re-exam replace the points in the final exam only if higher.
Lecture period
Lectures and tutorials take place weekdays between September 6 and September 27.
dCMS
Our course management system dCMS is our and your portal to provide, present and collect all important information. All solutions to assignment sheets and project (see below) are to be submitted electronically via the dCMS.
Exercises and Assignments
During the lecture period in September, we will publish about a handful of exercise sheets, and about a handful of assignment sheets (as PDFs) using the dCMS under “Materials". No printed versions of sheets will be handed out. The sheets usually cover the topic(s) of the preceding lectures.
Solutions to exercise sheets do not have to be handed in. Solutions to assignments sheets have to be handed in, prior to the date stated on the assignment sheet.
Groups
Students submit project and assignment solutions in groups of up to five students. Forming the groups as well as deciding on their size is left to the students. Groups organise themselves; group members are altogether responsible for distributing the workload within the group. The groups are fixed with the initial submission of an assignment sheet. Later drop outs do not change the group size. The group size influences the grading via a bonus system, see below.
Cooperation
Discussions and collaboration of whatever form are obviously allowed within a group. For discussions outside the groups, we recommend the forum or the tutorial (in office hour style, see below) for discussion of the conceptual aspects of the project, exercises or assignments. Discussion - also across different groups - about project or assignments is encouraged, but sharing of implementation or solutions is not. Handing in a copied solution of (parts of) the project or assignment leads to an immediate exclusion from the course, and a notification to the examination board.
Practical project
A practical project will span the lecture period, where students demonstrate their ability to implement and work with the theoretical concepts brought to them in the lectures. The project consists of several tasks, each being detailed on a specific project task sheet. Programming will be carried out in Python.
In order to pass the practical project, each project solution has to be presented by the group to an examiner and successfully defended. For the project defense, starting from October 2 we will offer time slots. The solutions to the entire project have to be submitted before the defense. If needed, multiple defenses are possible with re-submissions of improved projects in between. A project has be to successfully defended ultimately before October 14.
Tutorials
During the lecture period we offer daily tutorials where the topics of the lecture are covered. These tutorials will serve as a forum to answer questions, discuss common problems from the assignments, and offer exercising based on exercise sheets. While tutorial attendance is optional, we recommend participation.
Some tutorials will take the form of an unstructured office hour, sometimes they are more structured. An office hour gives the opportunity to ask individual questions, get some help solving the assignments, and discuss your solutions with a tutor. You can also get limited help on the practical projects in the office hour from a tutor.
Admittance to Final Exam
In order to be admitted to the final exam and re-exam a student has to pass the entrance exam and 50% of the assignment sheets. Handing in no solution to an assignment sheet means failing it.
Passing and Grading
In the final exam (as well as in the re-exam) a maximum of 150 points can be earned. An exam is passed if 75 points or more were obtained. The course is passed if the final exam or re-exam are passed, and the project has been successfully defended.
Provided the final exam or re-exam and project were passed, the course grade will be determined by a monotoneously decreasing step function based on the sum of the points obtained, including a potential bonus. The function will be announced after the final exam, and might be updated for the re-exam.
Forum
A discussion forum is accessible via the dCMS. This provides the opportunity to discuss with other students, tutors, assistants and the instructor. The default setting for student users is to have the forum subscribed, such that they will be notified about new comments via email.
Bonus
Depending on the group size working on assignments and projects, a bonus of up to 10 points may be obtained. The points obtained will be added to the points earned in the final exam or re-exam for those exams that have passed the threshold. The following table states the bonus points obtained depending on the group size:
| Size | Bonus |
|---|---|
| 1 | 10 |
| 2 | 8 |
| 3 | 7 |
| 4 | 4 |
| 5 | 0 |
Note that these bonus points only influence the final grade. They are not decisive for whether or not an exam is passed.
Contents Overlap
The course offered covers a superset of the course entitled "Hands on Networking". Students who successfully passed that course can only upgrade that participation to a successful participation in the core lecture (aka Stammvorlesung) "Data Networks". Individualized rules will apply.