Frequently Asked Questions for Fall 2020 Data 100

Data 100 will be taught entirely remotely for the fall semester, even if campus begins allowing some in-person instruction.

Q. I have a general logistics/grading/etc question not answered here. What should I do?

A. Since the course is very large (over 1,000 students) we ask that you don’t personally email the two professors for most such issues, instead you should post your question on the class Piazza as per these instructions.

You will receive a faster answer (most issues are handled by members of the instructional team and not directly by the faculty anyways), and it will leave us some bandwidth to resolve issues that require a direct response from us.

Q. I have added the course later in the semester. Can I catch up? Can I be excused for all late work

A. The answer to the first question is impossible to give in general, as it depends both on how late you add the course, and what your own background is. But as a general rule, the course moves quite quickly and covers new ground from the start. We estimate most students will probably struggle to catch up effectively if they join any later than the first few days of the semester, unless they have a particularly strong background already in the initial topics (probability, SQL, Python and Pandas).

As for the second part of this question - in fairness to our desire to apply our policies as uniformly and universally as possible, we do not make separate considerations for late work based on the date you joined the course. We offer fairly generous drop/late assignment policies which you can take advantage of and apply them to early work, but there are no extra allowances based on your start date.

Q. I would like to make a class-wide announcement about my project/group/initiative/etc.

A. We only allow posts made on Piazza and you must make it yourself, we do not make posts on your behalf. These are our guidelines for Piazza posts from student groups - they must be text-only posts (no videos) where the announcement:

Has to do with teaching or tutoring in a non-commercial setting, or
is directly related to the material in the course, or
is seeking to recruit students to help with the public good in a non-financial way (no solicitations for donations!), and in a context explicitly connected to their work in the course.

Q. What are the official prerequisites for this course?

A. The official list of prerequisites are:

Data 8.
CS 61A or CS88 or Engineering 7. We strongly recommend either CS 61A or CS 88.
EE 16A or Math 54 or Stat 89A. This may be satisfied concurrently with Data 100, but we strongly recommend that you finish a linear algebra course before taking Data 100.

Q. Will the official prerequisites be enforced?

A. The official prerequisites will not be enforced in terms of enrollment. However, we expect knowledge from the official prerequisites for the course itself. In particular, we expect students to have taken Data 8 and assume that students have mastered the content from it.

Q. What is the proctoring policy given the online nature of the course?

A. We will offer each exam on two timezones, to be taken synchronously. No Zoom/video proctoring will be used, but we will deploy multiple measures to detect cheating and will enforce the campus policies aggressively, including severe grade penalties and reporting to the Office of Student Conduct for further disciplinary action.

Q. What is the alternate exam policy?

A. Each exam will be offered in two timeslots, roughly corresponding to the morning and evening in Pacific Time, to accommodate for timezone differences. Everyone must be able to make one of these two timeslots; we will not be offering additional alternates to accommodate for class conflicts.

Q. When will the full schedule of labs and discussions be announced?

A. We are still developing the schedule, we will post a complete version with all our options for online-based labs, discussions and other activities by Friday August 21.