Ethics for Nerds

Hello everybody,

The essay results are out now! You can see your results along with some feedback on your personal status page. If you have any questions regarding you essay, please get in contact with Sarah.

 

You also should be able to register in the LSF now.

If you want to participate in the re-exam:

• Register in the LSF until Sunday (September 13), and
• register in the dcms until Sunday (September 13).

If you want to participate in the re-exam, but do not know whether you can do so due to pandemic related issues, please

• write Sarah an email as soon as possible (even if you are not yet sure whether you can attend or not), and
• register for “The pandemic likely keeps me from taking the re-exam!” on your personal status page before Saturday (September 12). 

Hello everybody!

You can see the result of your exam on your personal status page.

As you know, we will have our exam inspection on Monday, August 17. In order to make everything pandemic-compliant, you will have to register for a specific slot on your personal status page. Only then will you be able to attend the exam inspection. The inspection will take place in HS002 in E1 3.

Also, the same that held during the exam will hold again here.

1. You have to wear a mask.

Please note that it is absolutely necessary for you to bring your own protection mask with you. Students who have a doctor’s certificate that they cannot wear protection masks have to bring their own face shields and wear these instead of a mask. You will have to wear your mask during the entire exam inspection.

2. You must not participate in the exam inspection if you are to suspect that you are infected with SARS-CoV-2.

If your answer is "yes" to one or more of the following questions, then you are not allowed to attend the exam inspection. If you provide a doctor’s certificate to the examination office later on, the examination attempt will be cancelled and will not count.

• Did you have definite contact with a Covid-19 patient, who was tested positive, in the last 14 days?
• Do you have any of the following symptoms?
  • Cough / Husten
  • Sore throat / Halsschmerzen
  • Nasal congestion / runny nose / Schnupfen
  • Diarrhoea /Durchfall
  • Fever /Fieber
  • Aches and pains / Gliederschmerzen
  • Loss of smell (e.g. no longer able to smell burnt food) / Geruchsverlust
  • Loss of taste (e.g. unable to distinguish when food is burnt) / Geschmacksverlust”

Also, you cannot take part if you have to be in quarantine according to a German or a Saarland regulation at the time of the exam inspection.

Take care! :)

In case that you did not get your email with your seating information, you can see your seating here, too. (But please make sure to only come to the exam if you are admitted and properly registered!)

Matriculation numbers between 0 and 2569000:

• Exam Room: Günther-Hotz-Hörsaal (E2.2)
• Entrance: upper doors of the lecture hall and not the doors that lead to the foyer

Matriculation numbers between 2569000 and 2578000:

• Exam Room: HS II in E2.5
• Entrance: You will have to use an entrance to the lecture hall that you probably have never used before. At the back of the building (next to the library), there is a door that directly leads into the lecture hall from the outside. It is a little hidden under some stairs, so you should plan for enough time to find this entrance. But don't worry, we will clearly mark this door to make sure that you find it.

Matriculaton numbers between 2578000 and ∞ :

• Exam Room: HS I in E2.5
• Entrance: Please use the door that is opposite of the Günther-Hotz-Hörsaal, and not the main doors upstairs or any other entrances to the building.

Those of you who have extra time as part of a Nachteilsausgleich are writing in the Günther-Hotz-Hörsaal.

 

Hello everybody!

The first Ethics for Nerds exam of the summer semester 2020 will take place tomorrow, on August 5, 2020. Please be at your lecture hall at 14:00. The exam time will be 120 minutes for everybody. We plan to start at 14:15. However, keeping distance to each other and following the safety instructions has priority, so we may start and finish later.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there are several university-wide safety instructions that you have to follow in order to be allowed to write the exam. Please carefully read all of the following as well as the first page of the exam, that you can find in the materials section of the dcms. Before the exam, you will have to sign the first page, and we think that you should know beforehand what you are signing there. As a special gift from us to you, it also already contains the table of all issues including how many points each issue is worth.

What to do before the exam

• Thoroughly read the first page of the exam (see Materials in the dcms)
• Memorize which exam room you are in and the way to get to your exam room. (You will get a separate email with this information.)
• Monitor your symptoms – you are not allowed to take the exam if you have any Corona-symptoms (for more information, see section “exclusion from the exam”).

What to bring to the exam

• A face mask that properly covers both your nose and your mouth
• Pens (non-erasable pens in dark blue or black)
• Your student ID card
• Your cheat sheet
• Something to drink if you want to
• Something to eat if you want to (but no noisy food or packaging, please)
• Your mobile phone with the Corona app, if you want to (we recommend you to do so!)

What to do when you come to the exam room

• Make sure that you use the correct entrance to the lecture hall. You will be told which entrance to use in a separate email.
• Wear your face mask (covering both your nose and your mouth!) at all times until the staff allows you to take it off. It is strongly recommended to keep you face mask on during the whole exam.
• Make sure to keep your distance at all times.
• When you enter the exam hall, you will get a seating ticket with a row and a seat number. Go to this seat immediately.
• Take all your belongings (including your bag and any electronic devices that you carry) with you to your seat.
• Everything else that you will need to know will be said by the staff in the lecture hall.

Exclusion from the exam

If your answer is "yes" to one or more of the following questions, then you are not allowed to attend the exam. If you provide a doctor’s certificate to the examination office later on, the examination attempt will be cancelled and will not count.

• Did you have definite contact with a Covid-19 patient, who was tested positive, in the last 14 days?
• Do you have any of the following symptoms?
  • Cough / Husten
  • Sore throat / Halsschmerzen
  • Nasal congestion / runny nose / Schnupfen
  • Diarrhoea /Durchfall
  • Fever /Fieber
  • Aches and pains / Gliederschmerzen
  • Loss of smell (e.g. no longer able to smell burnt food) / Geruchsverlust
  • Loss of taste (e.g. unable to distinguish when food is burnt) / Geschmacksverlust”

Please take this seriously, both for your own safety and the safety of others. Also, you always must follow the instructions of the staff members in the lecture hall. Otherwise, you can be excluded from the exam.

If you have any more question, get in touch with Sarah.

See you tomorrow!

Hello everybody!

The first Ethics for Nerds exam of the summer semester 2020 will take place on August 5, 2020 from 14:15 to 16:15.

Writing an exam during a pandemic is quite a bit more complicated than writing an exam under normal conditions. So, you will also get a little more information than usual. This is the first part of our information pack for you, that contains the two most crucial bits of information, which hold for all exams in the department. More course specific information (like in which lecture hall you will be writing) will be send to you later.

1. You have to wear a mask.

Please note that it is absolutely necessary for you to bring your own protection mask with you. Students who have a doctor’s certificate that they cannot wear protection masks have to bring their own face shields and wear these instead of a mask.

2. You must not participate in the exam if you are to suspect that you are infected with SARS-CoV-2.

If your answer is "yes" to one or more of the following questions, then you are not allowed to attend the exam. If you provide a doctor’s certificate to the examination office later on, the examination attempt will be cancelled and will not count.

• Did you have definite contact with a Covid-19 patient, who was tested positive, in the last 14 days?
• Do you have any of the following symptoms?
  • Cough / Husten
  • Sore throat / Halsschmerzen
  • Nasal congestion / runny nose / Schnupfen
  • Diarrhoea /Durchfall
  • Fever /Fieber
  • Aches and pains / Gliederschmerzen
  • Loss of smell (e.g. no longer able to smell burnt food) / Geruchsverlust
  • Loss of taste (e.g. unable to distinguish when food is burnt) / Geschmacksverlust”

Take care!

Dear everybody!

More detailed information on the exam will follow (especially what you have to know for exams during the pandemic), but just to avoid any confusion: You are allowed to bring one handwritten DIN A4 ‚cheat sheet‘ to the exam. You are allowed to write on both sides. Though you will have to know the basics, the exam is a lot more about applying skills you have acquired throughout the semester than about reproducing facts, as you probably know already if you looked at the mock exam. The best kind of exam prep is to practice (both the training exercises and the mock exam), and not to learn things by heart. 
 

We wish you a good exam phase!

 

PS: The mock exam only contains real exam questions from last year, and this year’s exam won‘t dramatically change in style (though probably a bit).

 

Dear everybody,

Upon your request, I made a sample solution for the assignment. Also, a fellow student of yours send me a very persuasive argument that led me to re-correct all the assignments with less than 5 points and be super-duper pandemic-worthy nice in the correction. For some of you, this makes a difference. Those of you who did not pass before can now see your updated points in the dcms along with a new feedback pdf (the new corrections are in blue).

But I again want to stress that this assignment is not representative of the exam. Please take a look at the mock exam in the materials and compare the difficulty there. You will see that it is much harder than the assignment. So, please, study well for the exam, especially if you struggled with the assignment!

Best wishes,
Sarah

Hello everybody,

The results for the assignment is online. You can see your results and can also download the correction as a pdf on your Personal Status page. Remember that the re-assignment is due on July 25.

Each exercise (except for Issue 2h) asked for something very crucial. Please carefully look at the exercises where you lost points, even if you achieved many points on the assignment.

Best wishes!

Hello everybody,

A few reminders of upcoming deadlines:

tomorrow: our course evaluation closes
You’d do us a great favour if you took part in it!

July 15: the assignment is due
Remember that you can only take part in the re-assignment if you handed something in for the main assignment.

July 17: the dcms registration for the essay and the main exam closes
If you are not sure yet whether you want or can take part, please register in the dcms anyway; you will be able to deregister in the dcms even after July 17. Also, do not confuse the dcms registration with the LSF registration. You need to register in the LSF separately.

Also, the essay was released yesterday. We recommend to take a look at it soon.
Have a nice last week of Vorlesungszeit!

Best,
The Ethics for Nerds team

Dear everyone,

We have some information that we want to share with you:

First, the calendar has been updated. The most important dates are:

1.7. Release of Assignment
8.7. Release of Essay
15.7. Assignment Deadline (end of day)
5.8. Exam
17.8. Exam Inspection
19.8. Essay Deadline (at noon!)
21.9. Re-Exam
2.10. Re-Exam Inspection

All deadlines are in German time.

Second, please make sure to register in the LSF in time. If you are not registered in time, you will not be able to write the exam. You can see the registration deadline in the LSF. Usually, it is a week before the exam. There is no way of registering, if you miss this deadline. Certain students, like Erasmus students and students from certain subjects, might not be required and able to register in the LSF. They can take part in the exam without a registration and will receive a ‘Schein’ (paper certificate) from us after the course.

Third, please register in the dcms for the essay and the main exam until July 17. If you are not yet sure, you can register now and de-register even after July 17 without any consequences.

Finally, please fill in the evaluation that is linked in the Materials section. This would help us a lot.

Best,
the Ethics for Nerds team

Hello everybody,

Under Materials, you will now find a link for the course evaluation. Please take the time to fill it in and thereby provide us valuable insight in how you like the course. It would be especially great if you also used the text boxes and write something about your personal experience. The evaluation will be open until July 10.

Best,
your Ethics for Nerds team

Hello everybody!

You should now all be able to register for the main exam in the LSF (if you were not able to do so before). The main exam is going to be on August 5 from approx. 14:00 to 16:00, and the re-exam will be on September 21 in the same time slot. It will be a written exam and it will take place at the university. You can take any of the two exams, or both of them.

Please make sure that your university credentials in the dcms are up to date until then, especially your matriculation number. If your matriculation number, your name, or your email-address are wrong, e.g. because you had to register with mock-credentials, then please write an email to Sarah. If your term of study or your study subject are wrong, you do not have to update those, as those are for statistical purposes only.

Best,
The Ethics for Nerds team

Hello everyone!

Our Q&A session is moved to 9am once again on both Mondays and Wednesdays until the demand form them increases. If you have a question, please be there until 9:20. We will stay until all your questions are answered and end the session then. If you cannot attend in this time slot, but would like to, please post us an email.

Also, we now have a Youtube channel. You can find links to continuously updated playlists in the materials. :)

Best wishes
The Ethics for Nerds team
 

Hello everyone,
 

Welcome to Ethics for Nerds if you are new, and welcome back if you already participated in the Optional Preparation phase.

The official start of the course will be on Wednesday, May 6 at 1pm with a kick-off meeting in our Big Blue Button room. It is linked both in the materials in the dcms and in the forum (it's the same that we also use for the Q&As). There, we will talk about some organizational matters of the course. But first and foremost, we will use the opportunity to get to know you and to introduce ourselves, such that you know who is behind the disembodies voices from the videos. But don’t worry: if you cannot attend this for some reason, you can also watch a video of the event later.

Before Wednesday, you do not have to do anything for the course yet. You especially do not need to come to any of the Q&As, if you do not have any specific questions. Also, if you feel a little overwhelmed by the Materials section of the dcms, that's ok. You do not have to look into any of that until after our kick-off. But if you are curious, there already are some materials online which you are invited to take a look at already.

There are quite a few more registrations than we had anticipated – which we are very happy about! But this also means that we might need to make some changes to our initial plans in order to accommodate so many participants. By the end of the week, there will also be an up-to-date version of the Manual, which will explain all the relevant course elements and what you can expect during the semester. Until then, the current version of the Manual will be deprecated. Instead, all your organizational questions will be answered during the kick-off, or (in case you cannot wait that long) in the forum or if you post us an email.
 

Best,
the Ethics for Nerds team

PS: For everyone who is waiting to hand in their training exercises, we have to ask you to be patient for a little longer. The organization that resolves around the training exercises is one of the things that might need some tweaking in order to account for so many participants. If you do not want to wait, feel free to post any solutions to the forum and get the feedback of your fellow students (and probably from us)!

Hello everybody,

We adjusted the times of the Q&As as we got through with your questions very fast today. If the demand increases, we will have longer Q&A sessions again.Q&As are Mondays and Wednesdays from 9am until everyone’s questions are answered. If you want to join, please be there before 9:30 am. Remember that you can use the Q&A to ask anything about the course and its content or just anything you want to discuss with us.

Stay healthy!
The Ethics for Nerds team

Dear everyone,

Just a quick update on some important things:

The Manual

We uploaded a document called “Manual” in which you can find all kinds of helpful information on the course. It especially contains a growing diagram of our recommendation of how to work your way through the material of the course. It will be updated at least weekly.

The Q&A Session

Q&A sessions take place on Mondays and Wednesdays from 8:30 to 10:00 in the dlirium, the chair’s BigBlueButton instance. The link will be published in the forum in time. You will also find a thread where we invite you to post any questions you plan on asking in the Q&A the night before the Q&A. You are very much welcome to the Q&A even if you did not post anything in the forum, but you can very much help us to structure the Q&A better if you post your questions ahead of time.

The Timetable

The timetable now contains all relevant dates.

Study Groups

The forum contains a subforum where you can search for other students that are interested in forming study groups. As of now, there are more then 120 students registered. So, if you are looking for someone you can share you learning experience with, you will most likely find someone there.

Stay healthy and see you on Wednesday!
The Ethics for Nerds team

Hello everyone,

last night the university has communicated new rules regarding online instruction taking place before May 4. The following induces some changes and some clarifications regarding the organization of our course.

1. Participation before May 4 is entirely optional. (We call this  “Optional Preparation” in the sequel.)
2. What we offer during Optional Preparation is  a selection of the contents from the regular course.
3. Everything offered in Optional Preparation will again be presented as part of the regular course starting May 4.
4. Participating now in Optional Preparation will make you acquainted with the course matter, and thus be of help (which is our intention). Not participating will not be a disadvantage for the upcoming regular course, since the course matter will unfold in the regular pace then.

During Optional Preparation, you will get new videos and accompanying materials offered every week, we offer Q&A sessions where you can ask us anything, and you can use the forum for all kinds of questions.

You will, however, not be able to hand in your solutions to feedback exercises during Optional Preparation.

New materials will be uploaded every Wednesday at 2:15 pm (starting today).

Stay healthy!
The Ethics for Nerds Team

Things change fast, and some of the below only holds for the main course that starts on May 4. Before this, we are in Optional Preparation.

 

Dear everyone,

What would have been the start of the semester is approaching very fast. So, we want to update you on what will for now be our mode of operation.

Basically, you will get access to some videos which are lecture-like and additional exercises that accompany the video to practice what you learned. Each week, you will get new videos and exercises. You will have different formats of getting feedback. In detail, all the building blocks of the lecture are:

Videos. Those videos are basically what a lecture would be like, but oftentimes we split the videos up into multiple parts for your convenience. New videos are released on Wednesdays (when our lecture would have been).

Exercise Sheets. Exercise sheets contain, you guessed it, exercises.  Most of them are voluntary training exercises. For many of those you will get a sample solution. Some exercises from the exercise sheet are marked as feedback exercises. Those you can hand in via the dcms and receive feedback on them. There are no deadlines for these exercises. You can hand them in whenever you want to and we will give you feedback on your work within the next week (given at least that all of us are available, i.e. not ill).

Forum. The dcms forum is a place where you can ask questions, discuss with your fellow students as well as with us. It will be moderated, and we try to answer any questions within at most 24 hours. We will also occasionally open threads with additional exercises or discussion questions that you can discuss as a group. Discussing with others, be via text or via voice or video chat, is very crucial to succeeding in this course. So please try to actively participate in forum discussions.

Q&A Sessions. Starting with the second week, we will have virtual Office Hours in BigBlueButton, a conference platform. We will tell you in time when those will be and how you can access the platform. There, you can discuss with your fellow students in small groups or work on the exercises and it also is your opportunity to ask us questions. You can especially discuss solutions on training exercises with us, that are not feedback exercises. Besides this, you basically can ask us anything on the content of the course you want to know. Because the course is asynchronous and you can work on whatever topic interests you most right now, there is no fixed topic for any of the Q&A sessions. There will be a thread in the forum where we kindly ask you to post any questions at least a day earlier such that we can cluster the questions and answer them in a more efficient manner.

ATTENTION: the following information on admission and grading is preliminary and will be fixed only when the semester officially starts. It also is subject to change depending on incoming university or state regulations. However, we will try everything such that it will not get more demanding than the following (e.g. we will not suddenly announce additional admission criteria).

Admission. For admission, you have to hand in a single assignment mid June. You will have the opportunity to re-submit two weeks later if it turns out that you failed the first time.

Grading. You will be graded on two things: an exam (or re-exam, depending on where you performed better) and an essay. You will have the opportunity to hand in a mock essay for prior training and feedback. The essay deadline as well as the exam will be in late July or in August.

 

If it becomes justifiable again to meet in person, we will transform this lecture mode into a regular lecture mode with presence time. We will, of course, notify you of any operational changes.

Even though we have plenty of teaching experience, nobody from the team has ever given a remote course before. So, this is as new to us as it is to you. We try our best in making the new situation work. If it turns out not to work the way we wanted to, the above is subject to change. In the case of any alterations to the course format, you will of course be notified. We also very much encourage you to give us feedback – both positive and negative. Write us, what you like about the course, what you do not like, what you struggle with and what you think we could do better. We can improve only if we know what you like and what you do not like. To give us feedback, you can write us an email, talk to us in the Q&A, or use the anonymous feedback function in the dcms. (And yes, the feedback function really is anonymous. So, if you have any request of which you want an answer form us, please choose some other way of communication.)

And last but not least: Welcome to Ethics for Nerds! :)

Stay healthy,
The Ethics for Nerds Team