Syllabus
The syllabus, time requirements, grading policy, information about accommodations, and more can be found in our syllabus.
Grading
Your final grade for the course will be based on the following items:
- 50% Programming Projects (4)
- 10% Liteminer (lab1 is 5% of Liteminer (so 0.5% of total grade))
- 13.33% Tapestry (lab2 is 5% of Tapestry (so 0.66% of total grade))
- 13.33% Raft (lab3 is 5% of Raft (so 0.66% of total grade))
- 13.33% PuddleStore (lab4 is 5% of PuddleStore (so 0.66% of total grade))
- 10% Homeworks (6)
- 10% Midterm
- 15% Final Exam
- 15% Post Lecture Quizzes
The Post Lecture Quizzes (PLQs) will be assigned through Gradescope shortly after each lecture. They will be graded on correctness, but the 4 lowest PLQ scores will be dropped.
Update: previously, course participation was worth 5%. This is no longer the case (your final grade will not be assessed based on course participation) and PLQs are now worth 15% of your final grade (up from the original 10%).
The written homework assignments, PLQs, and exams will all be done individually. Labs can be completed individually or in pairs (although each person should submit their lab to Gradescope). Programming assignments will be completed in groups of two (2).
Capstone
For those taking the course as a capstone, you will required to implement additional features on the following projects: Tapestry, Raft, AND Puddlestore projects. In particular, for each of the three projects, you will be given a set of optional features (one or more additional features) -- you will have to pick one to implement.
Course Communications
We'll be using Edstem discussion and Slack for almost all course-related communication. You can mark questions as private or public. Private messages are seen by all course staff, see the collaboration policy for guidelines of how to choose. You can also use cs1380tas@lists.brown.edu to e-mail the course staff regarding administrative issues. For sensitive issues that you would not like to discuss with the entire course staff, you may email the instructors and head TAs at cs1380headtas@lists.brown.edu.
Textbook
You can follow the content of the course using Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (5th Edition). We will indicate besides each lecture below which sections of the textbook correspond to the lecture.