Study Groups

Overview

We're happy to announce a bonus opportunity that will be available to you throughout the quarter:

Starting in Week 3, you'll find a weekly "Study Group" assignment in Gradescope. These will be due Mondays at 11:59 PM. You can earn a small bonus for holding a one-hour (or longer) study session with a group of at least 5 (but no more than 9) students who are currently enrolled in CS103. The study session must be held in person and should focus on material from the past 3-4 lectures.

At the end of the quarter, we will award a small bonus to those who participated in these study sessions. The weight of that bonus has not been determined, but more weekly study sessions = more bonus.

The goals of this bonus opportunity are as follows:

  • to encourage everyone to stay on top of the material from week to week,
  • to provide avenues for everyone to gain further reinforcement and deeper understanding of the material,
  • to incentivize people to get to know their classmates and establish community (and hopefully lifelong friendships!), and
  • to give everyone experience finding and/or organizing groups and navigating group social dynamics.

Additional details are included below. Please be sure to read all the requirements on this page carefully.

Ideas for Studying

There are a lot of different ways to approach group study sessions, and we encourage you to get creative to find something that works for your team! Here are some ideas:

  • Have each person do a "micro-teach" of a core topic from the previous week's lectures. Have everyone choose a topic ahead of time (and let the group know what topic they'll be covering), and then have each person spend 5-15 minutes summarizing or re-teaching key points or examples from their chosen topic. Teaching a concept is one of the best ways to solidify your understanding of it!

  • Have group members work individually or in small sub-groups to prepare and deliver presentations to the broader group that summarize key points from the lengthy guides we post each week and/or the supplementary information that we sometimes include in our slide deck appendices.

  • Work through some of the most complex examples from each lecture. Consider having some or all of your groupmates pick one or two problems that they'll present to the group, and then discuss any questions or points of confusion that anyone has about those examples before moving on to the next one.

  • Work collaboratively to assemble really awesome study guides that summarize all the key points from the past week's lectures with poignant lists, examples, diagrams, and illustrations. See if you can produce just a single page (or half page) of notes for each of the past three lectures. Having a discussion about how to distill each of these lengthy lectures down to a single/half sheet of paper will help solidify your understanding of the material as you review the concepts from class, parse out key points, and find ways to succinctly express those key points in writing or in pictures. You'll then have a super handy study guide – written in a way that makes the most sense to you and your groupmates – that can help you efficiently review key concepts as we get closer to each exam!

  • Have a discussion about what topics have been the most and least clear from the past week's lectures. Work collaboratively to clarify anything that anyone found tricky from this past week.

  • Work on supplementary examples or problems from the recommended readings for the course! Group members could each choose a problem ahead of time to present to the group (followed by group questions/discussion), or the group could just choose problems to work on together in person.

  • Do a mix of the above, or come up with your own creative ideas!

Other Notes and Requirements

Here are some additional notes and requirements for the study sessions:

  • Your study session should generally cover material from the 3-4 most recent lectures (as of the time when the study session takes place). Since the first one is due Monday of Week 3, it can include material from the entire first two weeks of the course.

  • Your study session must have occurred within the 7 days leading up to the submission bucket's deadline on Gradescope. For example, the study session due Monday, Jan. 26, at 11:59 PM, must take place sometime between 12:00 AM on Tuesday, Jan. 20, and 11:59 PM on Monday, Jan. 26. The only exception is the Week 3 submission, which can include study sessions from any day this quarter prior to – and including – Monday, Jan. 19.

  • Note that even though Jan. 19 is a holiday this quater, that deadline still holds for our Week 3 study group deadline.

  • No one may earn credit for more than one study session per week.

  • You don't have to keep the same group each week. Feel free to change it up as much as you like.

  • Please don't just have AI summarize key points from the week and feed those to your group. The act of summarizing key points yourselves is a really great way to get additional reinforcement with the material and engage with / think about the material in new ways. Outsourcing that processing to AI and then reading what it produces might seem like a good time-saving technique, but it short-circuits the learning process and would defeat the purpose of these study sessions.

    • That being said, if you have creative ideas for how you can incorporate AI into your study sessions without short-circuiting the learning process, just run those ideas by Anisha and Sean, and we'll sign off on them in advance if appropriate. We are particularly interested in methods that don't just ask AI for summaries or sample problems.

  • Note that we aren't apportioning credit based on who does what. For example, it's fine if one or two people take the lead on preparing some awesome examples or supplementary instruction, and everyone else just shows up to absorb that additional reinforcement, take notes, ask questions, and participate in whatever activities are planned by the people leading the study session.

  • Please do not work on or share answers to pset problems – even from psets whose deadlines have already passed.

  • We're unable to offer extensions for any reason, including unexpected illness or exacerbations of chronic conditions. Please plan accordingly.

  • You might want to plan to hold your session before Monday of each week, and possibly plan for a larger group than the minimum required, so that you can still get credit if someone is a no-show.

  • We trust that this goes without saying, but we like to communicate our expectations clearly in CS103: even though this is just for bonus points, falsifying information in one of these submissions would be a big no-no (Honor Code violation).

How to Get Credit (Submitting to Gradescope)

Submit the following to Gradescope by the Monday 11:59 PM deadline:

  • A clear photo of your group, taken during that week's study session, with each member tagged (i.e., add each member's name to the photo, or list the names in your write-up in such a way that it's clear who's who). All members must be physically present; no virtual attendees.

  • A short write-up about your group's study session, with the following information:

    • Date, start time, and end time.
    • Location where the study session took place.
    • A brief writeup. Give us an idea of what was on your agenda and who did what. We want this to be brief (no more than 300 words), but we also want to get a really clear view of what your group did.
    • Any artifacts your group produces (if applicable). We don't need to see write-ups of any problems you completed together, but if you created study guides, slide decks, or something similar that you're really proud of, feel free to share them with us! You can upload PDFs or screenshots of anything you created. If sharing a link to a document, please make sure that anyone with the link can click on it and view the item without having to request access.

  • Be sure to tag all group members in Gradescope when submitting.

  • Include the following statement in each submission (this doesn't count toward the 300-word limit): "On our honor, we affirm that everyone included in this submission was present in person for this study group session for at least 48 minutes and remained on task for that time." (This allows someone to be up to 12 minutes late, leave up to 12 minutes early, or take a 12-minute break, provided that your group members are fine with that. Your group retains authority to exclude people from the weekly submission if they did not participate in earnest – e.g. if someone is working on other things during the study session, you should discuss that as a group and exclude them from your final submission to Gradescope as appropriate.)

  • Make only one submission on Gradescope for your entire group.