CS 293/EDUC 473 Logistics

⭐ The below is drawn from the requirements for CS224C and CS347.

Requirements

Class Participation (5%)

• Class participation grades are based on whether you productively contribute to the classroom discussions in lecture. This grade also captures your contributions in the presentation and leading discussion section. Finally, participation grades will also take into account how actively you contribute to the success of your project alongside your teammates.

Reading Commentaries (10%)

• A short (~200 word) written commentary on each required reading to be posted by 5pm the day before class. After 5pm, your commentary will be viewable by students in your section so that the discussant can begin work on their metacommentary. Late submissions will not be accepted. We will drop the three lowest commentary grades at the end of class: meaning, you may drop three readings’ (not three days') worth of commentaries.

• The response should *not* focus on summarizing the papers (we all have read it!), but instead raise questions that would be appropriate for discussion, or propose ideas to think about. The goal is to get you to think critically about the research that a paper presents and why that research is important.

• Don't:
• Nitpick low-level details
• Harp on already-acknowledged limitations or future work
• Bring expectations from other paper genres (an NLP paper may not need a user study, and education paper may not need elaborate technical details)
• Spend too much time summarizing
• Levy judgment (“I like this!”) without digging into the why or the implications of that agreement or disagreement
• Do: engage with the core contributions. To achieve this, we suggest the following three step process:
• Step 1: Ask yourself, what is the point that this paper is trying to make? (You don't need to write out the answer to this question in your commentary, but you do need to know the answer in order to write a good commentary.)
• Step 2: How effectively does it convince you of that argument? How could the argument be even more persuasive, on its own terms?
• Step 3: What are the implications of the argument? What future frontier projects might be suggested by this, to push the idea farther?
• Some example perspectives include but not limited to:
  • future research directions that this paper inspires for you
  • why the paper does/doesn't seem important
  • observations of novel methodology or methodology that seems suspect
  • why the paper is/isn't effective at getting its message across
  • how the paper has changed your opinion or outlook on a topic

• Reading responses will be graded on a check-minus/check/check-plus scale. The rubric will be:
  • Check-minus (B): Surface-level engagement with the readings, or a repeat of a style of critique that the staff told the class to avoid. Examples of surface-level engagement include: comments about whether the student likes or would use the technology, a summary of the paper rather than a reflections on the ideas, or critiques that engage only obliquely with the paper or indicate that the author didn't fully read it.
  • Check (A): Effective engagement with the readings. Example responses involving check grades often indicate that they understand the main ideas of the papers, and the reflections are reasonably nontrivial observations worth discussing.
  • Check-plus (A+): Excellent engagement with the readings. Check-plus grades are reserved for rare instances where a reading response really hits on an interesting, unique, and insightful point of view worth sharing.

Discussant (10%)

• Each student will be a discussant for assigned readings once during the quarter. Your goal as discussant is to help drive an engaged and stimulating discussion. Being a discussant will occur in two parts: (1) summarizing the commentaries of other students in your section into a metacommentary before lecture, and (2) leading discussion in class on that metacommentary and your own reactions.
• Students will work in pairs to serve as discussants for a particular class. Discussants should work together to make a clear and engaging metacommentary and lead the discussion (45 mins total).
• Your responsibilities as discussants include:
1. Create a slide deck as a metacommentary:
• Metacommentaries are summaries of others' commentaries: you will create this summary between when commentaries are due, and the start of the next day's lecture. After the day's commentaries are due, read through other students' responses. Generate a short slide presentation highlighting interesting or common ideas in the commentaries. Here is a template slide deck for you to use (credits to Michael Bernstein!) - feel free to modify the template as you wish, or make your own slides. Submit your metacommentary to the Discussant assignment in Canvas by the start of lecture. Bring your metacommentary to section as well, to use to lead the discussion.
• To create your metacommentary, first identify key insights from the critiques and cluster them around noteworthy themes. Organize the slides with headers around each of these themes, with excerpted quotes as bullets illustrating each theme. Themes should be clusters of what people said, regardless of whether you agree with the point of view or whether you think that it's an insightful perspective. That way, in class we can discuss themes and why each is or is not an insightful critique — feedback on the commentaries that is an important part of learning for the class. The themes don't need to be chosen based on popularity: feel free to create a theme around a single comment if you want, if you think it's an interesting perspective to discuss. Name the author of each quote, so that the staff can call to the student in class if they want to hear that person expand on the point in their own words.
• Second, create a group of star comments — particularly insightful or provocative ideas that you think will produce high-quality discussion amongst the class. Create a Star Comments theme for those star comments up at the top of the slide deck, and quote those comments in that section. The star comments are likely to cover different topics and themes. You may reuse comments from other themes as star comments section.
2. Lead the discussion in class using your metacommentary:
• As discussant, select some of the themes that are most worth discussing and launch discussion in section on each theme with your own summary and response. This does not need to be formal---aim for two minutes for a summary and your own thoughts and response. It should cover:
• A synthesis of the main points being raised in some of the themes, using quotes as relevant.
• Your response to the points being raised. Take a position! Stake out a thesis of your own. Do you agree with one side or the other—and if so, why do you find one of the sides a more compelling argument?—or can you offer an alternative perspective that the class didn't articulate?
• The discussion will work as follows: first, you will share your metacommentary. Then, we (the instructors) will use your metacommentary as a launching point for discussion. We expect that you, as the local expert, will contribute actively in this discussion. We may hop around between themes: if one comes up in discussion that you saw in the commentaries, speak up and share what you heard in the commentaries, and invite relevant section members to speak up.

Grading rubric

Typically, "proficiency" indicates that the work is deserving of some flavor of A, and "mastery" a strong A.

Category	Insufficiency	Adequacy	Proficiency	Mastery
Metacommentary 10 points	Commentary synthesis is incomplete or impossible to follow.	Commentary synthesis demonstrates minimal depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen.	Commentary synthesis demonstrates moderate depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen.	Commentary synthesis demonstrates exceptional depth in the themes identified and the quotes chosen.
Discussion: clarity 10 points	Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are incomplete or unclear.	Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are unclear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response.	Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are moderately clear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response.	Summary, reactions, and contributions in section are exceptionally clear at communicating the class's ideas and the discussant's response.

Homework (15%)

• There will be three homework assignments during the course. The homeworks are meant to help you prepare for your final project.
• Homeworks will be graded on a check-minus/check/check-plus scale. The rubric will be:
  • Check-minus (B): Shows insufficient effort in answering the homework problems. The results are inaccurate and/or incomplete.
  • Check (A): Shows effort in answering all required homework problems. The solutions are complete and most, if not all, are accurate.
  • Check-plus (A+): Shows a lot of effort in engaging with the homework problems, including the completion of bonus problems. The solutions are all complete and accurate.
• If you are taking the course for 2 units, you may skip homework assignments.

Project (60%)

• Please check out the details of the course project here.
• Please discuss your project idea with instructor/TA early on in the course.
• The project consists of five milestones:
  • Rationale (Lit Review + Motivation) (10%)
  • Experimental Protocol (10%)
  • Practice Pitches (15%)
    • Round 1 pitch (5%)
    • Round 2 pitch (5%)
    • Quality of feedback to peers (5%)
  • Final Pitch (15%)
  • Final Paper (10%)

This is the system we will use at the end of the quarter to map numerical final grades to letter grades. No curve is applied, and there are no other factors shaping the mapping from weighted averages (details here) to letter grades.

Grade range	Letter grade
≥ 100	A+
≥ 94	A
≥ 90	A−
≥ 87	B+
≥ 84	B
≥ 80	B−
≥ 77	C+
≥ 74	C
≥ 70	C−
≥ 67	D+
≥ 64	D
≥ 60	D−
< 60	No pass

Units

If you are taking the course for 3-4 units, the amount of work is the same. If you are taking the course for 2 units, you can skip the homework assignments.

Academic Honesty

• Please familiarize yourself with Stanford's honor code. We will adhere to it and follow through on its penalty guidelines.

• It is expected that you accurately represent your own work and the work of others in this class. Ideas should be your own. Any use of tools (e.g., ChatGPT) should be limited to clarity and credited appropriately in your submission.

Late Days

1. Each student will have a total of 4 free late (calendar) days applicable to homeworks and project milestones except the final project paper. Final project papers cannot be turned in late under any circumstances.
2. Free late days can be used at any time, no questions asked. Each 24 hours or part thereof that a homework or quiz is late uses up one full late day. Once these late days are exhausted, any assignment turned in late will be penalized 10% per late day.
3. If a group's assignment is late n days, then each group member is charged n late days.
4. Late days are never transferable between students, even students in the same group.
5. Late days do not apply to the final submission of the course project.
6. Reading responses do not have late days (since they are a prerequisite for coming to class, so responses posted after 5pm the day before class will count as not turned in.)

Policy on Submitting Related Final Projects to Multiple Classes

• On the one hand, we want to encourage you to pursue unified interdisciplinary projects that weave together themes from multiple classes. On the other hand, we need to ensure that final projects for this course are original and involve a substantial new effort.

• To try to meet both these demands, we are adopting the following policy on joint submission: if your final project for this course is related to your final project for another course, you are required to submit both projects to us by our final project due date. If we decide that the projects are too similar, your project will receive a failing grade. To avoid this extreme outcome, we strongly encourage you to stay in close communication with us if your project is related to another you are submitting for credit, so that there are no unhappy surprises at the end of the term. Since there is no single objective standard for what counts as "different enough", it is better to play it safe by talking with us.

• Fundamentally, we are saying that combining projects is not a shortcut. In a sense, we are in the same position as professional conferences and journals, which also need to watch out for multiple submissions. You might have a look at the ACL/NAACL policy, which strives to ensure that any two papers submitted to those conferences make substantially different contributions – our goal here as well.

Regrade

• It is very important to us that all assignments are properly graded. The teaching staff works extremely hard to grade fairly and to turn around assignments quickly. We know what you work hard, and we respect that. Occasionally, mistakes happen, and it's important to us to correct them. If you believe there is an error in your assignment grading, please submit an explanation in writing to the staff within seven days of receiving the grade. We will regrade the entire assignment to ensure quality.

• No regrade requests will be accepted orally, and no regrade requests will be accepted more than seven days after receipt of the assignment. Regrade requests must be respectful; we will not consider any regrade requests containing disrespectful language.

Names and Pronouns

• Use the names and pronouns (e.g., they/them, she/her, he/him, just a name, or something else) indicated by your classmates for themselves. If you don’t want to share a set of pronouns for yourself, that is perfectly acceptable, too. If your name or pronouns change during the course, we invite you to share this with us and/or other students, so we may talk with you and refer to your ideas in discussion as you would wish.