Policies

Official Academic Guide course description

The subjects covered in this course include C and assembly language programming, translation of high-level programs into machine language, computer organization, caches, performance measurement, parallelism, CPU design, warehouse-scale computing, and related topics.

Prerequisites

CS61A and CS61B (or equivalents) or experience with a C-based programming language (e.g. Java, C++).

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Optional Reading

There is no official textbook for this class. However, there are three optional textbooks as additional references:

• P&H: Second edition of Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition book ("P&H"), ISBN 0128122757.
• K&R: The C Programming Language, Second Edition by Kernighan and Ritchie. Other C programming books are also suitable if you are already comfortable with them, but our lectures will be based on K&R.
• WSC: The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, which is freely available on our website.

Please contact staff on Ed if you have trouble finding or paying for these textbooks.

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Course Format

The following sub-sections contain an overall summary of the major elements of the course.

Lecture

We will have a 50-minute live lecture on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM PT, in VLSB 2050 and on Zoom. See Ed for the Zoom Webinar link. Recordings will be made available after the lecture on bCourses.

Discussion

Once a week starting Week 2, 1-hour discussion sections will be held on Mondays and Tuesdays. Discussion content ties lecture and homework together and involves more conceptual work.

This semester, we are offering two discussion formats: regular discussions and the mega discussion. Both are designed to help students learn the course material equally well. You can choose which format you want. It is possible to change formats until the semester add/drop deadline.

Regular Discussion

This section format is in-person and focuses on the discussion worksheet and group problem-solving, facilitated by a TA.

• To receive credit for discussion, you must attend and complete the attendance form.
• Receiving credit for any 10 (or more) discussions will earn a perfect discussion score for the course.
• You can only receive credit for the section you are signed up for. We will facilitate section sign-ups at the beginning of the semester.

Mega Discussion

This section format is on Zoom, where a TA walks through the discussion worksheet and answers questions via Zoom chat.

• Attendance will be optional.
• All students in mega will automatically receive full discussion credit.
• It is up to mega section students to keep up with weekly discussion materials as they see fit. Any Zoom-based mega section meetings will be webcast and recorded.

Choosing a discussion format

Mega discussion is only recommended for students with considerable prior programming experience who are confident that they can succeed in the course without the support of in-person discussion.

Both options are meant to be great. Mega discussion is designed to appeal to students who learn well from watching videos, working independently, and coming to drop-in office hours when they need help. But the smaller format of regular discussions has clear advantages for students who wish to work with others and get to know the course staff. Most students choose regular discussion.

Labs

Labs are self-service; all students must submit lab assignments to Gradescope. Lab content ties lecture and projects together and involves hands-on practice with the software tools needed to complete projects.

Once a week, 2-hour long lab sections will be held on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Lab sections are held "lab party" style for students to work together on the lab assignment. TAs may also facilitate small review sessions of pertinent topics. You can choose to attend any lab section you want, or work on labs asynchronously. We encourage you to work on the labs in small groups, but each student is required to turn in a solution that they have written themselves.

Lab assignments are autograded on Gradescope. Because there is no attendance credit for self-service labs, your lab score will be solely based on your test cases (i.e., if you pass 80% of test cases you will receive a score of 80% on that lab).

Homework

Homework is designed to let you practice the material covered in lecture. We encourage you to work on the homework problems in small groups, but each student is required to turn in a solution that they have written themselves.

Homework is submitted online through PrairieLearn and graded on correctness.

Projects

Projects are designed to give you heavy-duty experience with the application of course content. We'll have three projects throughout the course. Projects are submitted to Gradescope and graded on correctness. You may optionally work with one partner for each project.

You are responsible for:

• Creating your repository according to course guidelines; see Lab 0. (If applicable) You may not add, change, or remove partners after creating the project repo.
• "Activating" the submission you want graded on Gradescope; by default, Gradescope grades the last submission you made.
• Double-checking all of the work in your project repository and as submitted on Gradescope.
• (If applicable) Registering your partnership on Gradar. Adding another student to your Gradescope submission does not create an official partnership.
• (If applicable) Adding your partner to every Gradescope submission.

Exams

There will be one midterm exam, scheduled for Tuesday, March 18th, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM PT.

The final exam will be Wednesday, May 14th, 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM PT.

Exams are in-person only. One alternate exam will be offered for the midterm, but not for the final. It is your responsibility to ensure you are not enrolled in another class that conflicts with our final exam. All details will be released on Ed closer to the exam.

Office Hours

TAs and instructors will host mostly in-person and extremely few online office hours throughout the semester.

Instructor Hours: Instructor hours are in-person and group-based. "Concept OH" are CS61C concept-specific and for exam prep. "Tea Hours" are a separate set of instructor hours for general course questions, academic advising, or perspectives on academia/industry. These are not intended for conceptual questions. Feel free to bring tea/coffee and/or a reusable mug.

TA Hours: We use an OH Queue to process help tickets.

Please do not expect TAs to debug your code. This is not a good use of their time, and part of the goal of this course is to turn you into a great tester and debugger. However, the TAs can help you find and fix your bugs.

Therefore, before coming to office hours, you should have:

• Run valgrind and fixed all memory leaks and compiler warnings
• Written a test that isolates/demonstrates the issue (NOT a staff-provided test)
• Stepped through the test with a debugger to find the area of code with the issue
• Checked that the problem still occurs on the hive machines, unless the assignment supports local machines

If you have not completed all of the items above, a TA will request that you complete them before they can help you. There are instructions for testing as part of all project specifications, and the first few labs cover Valgrind, (C)GDB, and debugging.

Please mark your tickets as conceptual or debugging. For conceptual tickets, TAs will help groups of students at a time (shorter wait time) but cannot look at code. For debugging tickets, TAs will look at you or your group's code, but time per ticket may be limited if the queue is long.

If you are attending an online office hours block, you can find the zoom link on the EdStem. To receive help, enter any open breakout room, make a ticket on the OH Queue, and remember to note which breakout room you're in.

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Lateness and Accommodations Policy

The expected deadlines for each assignment are posted on the class website. Our assumption is that you will complete each assignment by its due date ("original deadline").

The course content builds on itself, and not completing an assignment will make it much more difficult to complete later assignments and do well on exams.

Lateness Policy

Everyone has 20 slip days, which can be applied to late submissions of projects, labs, and homework assignments.

• Each project deadline can have a max of 3 slip days applied.
• Each lab or homework assignment deadline can have a max of 2 slip days applied.
• Slip days are automatically applied at the end of the semester to maximize your final course grade.
• Slip days are rounded up to the nearest day - that is, an assignment that is 1 day and 5 seconds late will have 2 slip days applied.
• If you have no remaining slip days, 1/3 of your points will be deducted for each day late. The lateness penalty rounds up to the nearest day - that is, an assignment that is 1 day and 5 seconds late (with no slip days) will receive a 2/3 late penalty.
• No assignments will be accepted beyond 3 days after the original deadline.

We recognize that life can be unexpected. We've accommodated some flexibility in our lateness policies, as below.

Additional Extensions

The Additional Extensions form is for addressing any circumstances that cannot be resolved via the slip day policy above. This form is designed to lower the barrier to reaching out to us, as well as build your independence in managing your academic career long-term. Within one business day of filling out the form, a course staff will reach out to you and, as needed, provide a space for conversation and arrange course accommodations as necessary. When making extension requests:

• Send requests 24 hours before the original on-time deadline
• Send one extension request per assignment
• If your extension request is granted, then the extension is to the original on-time deadline, from which slip days can be used. We will prioritize using your slip days over providing additional extensions.
• Extensions will not be reflected on Gradescope or PrairieLearn.

You are responsible for reasonable, timely communication with course staff. Extensions requests are subject to more detailed review and may require a meeting with course staff or be denied. However, we will try to accommodate requests if they are reasonable. Simply submitting a request does not guarantee you will receive an extension. Even if your work is incomplete, please submit before the deadline so you can receive credit for the work you did complete.

Disabled Students' Program

As instructors, our goal is to teach you the material in our course. The more accessible we can make it, the better.

The Disabled Students' Program (DSP) supports disabled students at UC Berkeley. They offer a wide range of services and accommodations. If you are facing barriers in school due to a disability, apply to DSP!

Students registered with DSP can expect to receive an onboarding email within two weeks of sending us your formal letter of accommodation through the AIM portal.

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Grading

In order to foster a collaborative environment, CS61C is graded on a fixed scale. The course is graded out of 300 points, with the following mappings from points to letter grades:

At the end of the semester, the A+ bin, which is reserved only for students with exceptional performance in the course, will be determined by the instructors.

The bins will not change (i.e. we will not shift the bins or round at the end of the semester). Grade bins target a 3.3 GPA, assuming 65% average on exams and 95% average on other assignments. To normalize exam difficulty variance across semesters, we will do the following: if the exam average is higher than 65%, then nothing will change; if the exam average is lower than 65%, we will adjust the denominator such that the exam has a 65% average. Scores are capped at 100% (i.e. you cannot have a score over 100% from this).

Administrative Drop

You may be administratively dropped from the course if you do not submit any assignments by the start of Week 3 (February 3rd, 2025). If you are currently on the waitlist, or intend on enrolling later, you must keep up with all assignments. We will not be approving extensions for adding the course late, for any reason.

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Course Announcements and Computer Resources

Ed (EdStem)

All important course announcements will be made on Ed (the course discussion forum). We will be automatically enrolling everyone. We will not be answering private Ed questions unless directed by a staff member in office hours.

Ed Etiquette

Ed is a formal, academic space. Posts in this forum must relate to the course and be in alignment with Berkeley’s Principles of Community and the Berkeley Campus Code of Student Conduct. We expect all posts to demonstrate appropriate respect, consideration, and compassion for others. Please be friendly and thoughtful; our community draws from a wide spectrum of valuable experiences. Posts that violate these standards will be removed.

Many students use Ed for asynchronous assignment help. To help us help you:

• Search before posting. Your question may have already been answered by us or other students in the past. Reading other students' posts will let you refine your question, and gives us more time to answer new questions.
• Try to avoid open-ended or vague questions such as: "How does C work?" or "How come the solution to a discussion problem is this?". If you walk us through your thoughts and reference specific lines that you find confusing, we can better address the problem you are facing. Being specific helps us uncover any misunderstandings that you may have.
• Post questions about assignments as public follow-ups on the corresponding assignment post. For example, post your questions about Homework 1 on the Homework 1 post. If your question is too detailed or revealing to fit as a follow-up, your question would be better answered during office hours.
• Only post in the "answer" box if you are fairly certain about your answer. Do not post follow-up questions or +1 as an answer.
• No follow-up +1's. Instead, you should use the heart button on a question/follow-up. Excessive +1 follow-ups clutter the post and make it more difficult to get to the unresolved follow-ups.
• If you want a reply on a follow-up, mark it as unresolved, or we may not see it.

Computer Resources

• Computer accounts: You will need a CS 61C instructional account to access computer labs and instructional servers for assignments. Accounts are available starting on the first day of instruction, and will be covered in Lab 0.
• Computer labs: Registered students get 24/7 cardkey access to the computer labs in Soda Hall (Soda 271, 273, 275, 277, and 330), starting on the first day of instruction. Please be mindful of the fact that we share these lab spaces with other CS classes, and please follow the Rules of Conduct on EECS Instructional Computers.
• Remote lab access: You can also remotely connect to instructional computers for class work. This will be covered in Lab 0. If you're connecting from off-campus, you must be connected to the campus VPN (as described in Lab 00).
• Device lending options: Students can access device lending options through the Student Technology Equity Program (STEP program).

Note: If you are blocked from accessing course resources at any point, we suggest using the campus VPN.

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Collaboration and Academic Misconduct

We believe that most students can distinguish between helping other students understand course material and cheating. Explaining a subtle point from lecture or discussing course topics is an interaction that we encourage, but you must write your solutions strictly by yourself. You can get conceptual help, but you must not share, receive, request, or submit solutions from other sources, such as other students or Stack Overflow. You also may not tamper with any course infrastructure (such as hive machines and the autograder) or exploit loopholes that violate the spirit of the assignment. The word "solution" is defined as anything that may constitute an answer to a project, regardless of its correctness.

You must ensure that your solutions will not be visible to anyone else, including private tutors. If you use GitHub or another code hosting platform to store your solutions electronically, you must ensure your account is configured so your solutions are not publicly visible. Many platforms offer free private repositories that allow you to keep your solutions private.

For questions that includes any form of randomization (e.g. different variants for each student), you may not share the question, or anything related to the specific variant you received, with anyone else. This includes the question text, any data files provided, and your solution to the variant.

Here are some examples of what may be considered cheating:

• Sharing or receiving a solution from a friend
• Sharing or receiving a solution from a friend after the assignment is due
• Sharing or receiving a solution from a friend after the semester is over
• Submitting a solution from a friend to see what the autograder looks like
• Looking at a solution that is not yours for "ideas"
• Looking at a solution on an unattended laptop
• Using ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot's output as your solution
• Publicly posting your solutions for any reason, including for your resume
• Sharing code with another student who is not your registered partner on Gradar
• Forgetting to add your intended partner on Gradar and working with them as if you were partners anyway
• Working with a partner asynchronously on a partnered assignment
• Sharing a specific variant (including numbers and any associated files) of a randomized question

When in doubt, please reach out to staff first.

• If you suspect that academic misconduct has occurred, or violated our policies on accident (e.g. accidentally shared solutions with a friend for any reason), you must email cs61c@ immediately. Otherwise, it will constitute misconduct. As both current and former students, we understand that desperate times can lead to desperate measures. If you feel like you cannot succeed on your own in the course, please let us know! We are here to support you.

Partners

For assignments that allow partners, you may collaborate with an officially registered partner, but all work must be completed synchronously. The only time where you are allowed to work on a project asynchronously with a partner is within office hours. Collaboration policies still apply outside of your partnership. For example, you can collaborate on code with your partner, but not with anyone else.

Assignments that allow partners will specify how you can officially record your partner. This is typically done through Gradar, when you get your code repository. We do not recognize partnerships created elsewhere, including Gradescope partnerships.

Additionally, if you notice any work in your repository that you do not recognize, you must let staff know ASAP, otherwise, it may constitute academic misconduct.

Cheating Detection

We will be running advanced plagiarism detection programs. The tools and methods for detecting cheating have been developed over the course of many years, and attempting to obfuscate your code to avoid detection:

1. won't work, and
2. will be penalized.

Penalties

Plagiarism on any assignment will be reported to the Center for Student Conduct. The CSC treats most first-time offenses as a Non-Reportable Warning (see Section VI). Additionally we will assign a grade penalty. The minimum penalty for cheating on an assignment is negative points. For example, if an assignment is worth 10 points, you will receive -10/10 points on the assignment, regardless of your original score. This means even if there is just a 50% chance that you are caught it is better to not do the work than attempt to cheat. A second instance of plagiarism on an assignment will result in an F in the course.

Submitting Work from Past Semesters

If you have completed assignments during past semesters and would like to reuse your work, you do not have to let staff know ahead of time. However:

• We cannot promise that the assignments are identical across semesters.
• If you would like to submit a project using work from past semesters, you cannot have a project partner this semester. If you had a project partner while working on your project originally, you may submit the portions of the projects that they completed.
• By submitting work from past semesters, in part or in whole, you are claiming that the work submitted is completed entirely by you (and if applicable, your former project partner). If you are unsure if the work is your (and if applicable, your former project partner's) original work, we'd recommend redoing the assignment from scratch.

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Course Climate and Inclusion

We recognize that our students come from varied backgrounds and have widely varying experiences.

Faculty and staff are committed to creating a community where every person feels respected, included, and supported. We recognize that incidents may happen, sometimes unintentionally, that run counter to this goal. There are many things we can do to try to improve the climate for students, but we need to understand where the challenges lie. If you experience a remark, or disrespectful treatment, or if you feel you are being ignored, excluded or marginalized in a course or program-related activity, please speak up.

To help accomplish this:

• If your name and/or pronouns differ from those that appear in your official records, please let us know.
• In scheduling exams, we have attempted to avoid conflicts with major religious holidays. If, however, we have inadvertently scheduled an exam or major deadline that creates a conflict with your religious observances, please let us know as soon as possible so that we can make other arrangements.
• If you feel like your performance in the class is being affected by your experiences outside of class (e.g., family matters, current events), please don’t hesitate to come and talk with us. We want to be resources for you. The sooner we are made aware, the more options we have available to us to help.

Professionalism and respect for diversity are not just matters between students; they also apply to how the course staff treat the students. The staff of this course will treat you in a way that respects our differences. However, despite our best efforts, we might slip up, hopefully inadvertently. We (like many people) are still in the process of learning about diverse perspectives and identities. If you are concerned about classroom environment issues created by the overall class dynamic or by the staff, please feel free to talk to us about it.

If something was said in class (by anyone—staff member or fellow student) that made you feel uncomfortable, please talk to us about it. Sometimes, you may not be comfortable bringing this up directly to us. Here are some options:

• via the 61C incident reporting form
• via email to our instructors, head TAs, or another member of staff you're comfortable with
• via the EECS Student Grievance Committee
• via the department's Student Climate and Incident Reporting Form.

For exceptionally rude or disrespectful behavior toward the course staff or other students, we reserve the right to file a misconduct case with the Center for Student Conduct. You don’t need to be concerned about this policy if you treat other human beings with even a bare minimum of respect and consideration and do not engage in behavior that is actively harmful to others.

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Campus Resources

Your mental health is more important than this course. Seriously. UC Berkeley offers services to assist you with addressing mental health concerns or stressful events.

• Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) has multiple free, confidential services. An on campus counselor or after-hours clinician is available 24/7.
  • UHS Casual Consulting
  • UHS Crisis Management Counseling
• UHS's mental health resources offers guides, handbooks, and more.
• Support is also available for survivors of sexual violence or harassment. Note that course staff are Responsible Employees for such incidents. Campus also has free, confidential services available:
  • UC Berkeley Sexual Violence Services
  • PATH to Care Center: Reporting and Privacy
• The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour number any student or faculty/staff person can call to speak with someone about suicide: +1-800-273-TALK (+1-800-273-8255).

If you're in need of laptops, Wi-Fi hotspots, or other required technologies, check out the Student Technology Equity Program.

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We want you to succeed!

If you are feeling overwhelmed, visit our office hours and talk with us, or fill out the Additional Extensions Form. We know college can be stressful and we want to help you succeed.

Finally, the main goal of this course is that you should learn, and have a fantastic experience doing so. Please keep that goal in mind throughout the semester. Welcome to CS 61C!

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Acknowledgments

Portions of this policies page are derived from CS 61B's Spring 2024 policies page.