There will also be sessions (in finnish also) in which the answers of the home exercises of the course will be explained. Information about their dates and times will be given later.
During the course two kinds of home exercises are required. The basic exercises are personal and they deal with simulation of various algorithms by hand, i.e., you describe how a data structure is changed during the execution of a given algorithm when the data in the structure is provided. These exercises will be administrated by the TRAKLA system. It sends the exercises to the students registered on the course by email and receives their answers by email, too, and grades them. The foreign students are adviced to use the WWW-TRAKLA system, since better english documentation is available for it. In this system, exercises can be ordered by filling a WWW form and most exercises can be solved using a graphical editor, and thereafter the answer can be submitted to TRAKLA for evaluation.
The application exercises deal with designing and/or analyzing
new algorithms. You can do them in
a group of 2 or 3 students and the answers will be returned on paper.
More information will be provided in the newsgroup.
Lecture notes are in finnish. Some additional material will be provided for foreign students in english.
You should follow regularly the newsgroup opinnot.tik.dsaa in the Otax news server. All information concerning the arrangements of the course will be provided there in english. Look at also the WWW page in address http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~tik76122/.There is a link to information in english. The assistants will also answer questions sent to tik76122@hut.fi within a day or two on workdays.
The course bulletin board is located on the wall beside room Y163, but there will not be much information except for the results of exercises and examinations.
We encourage to use the WWW version of TRAKLA.
There are 5 rounds basic exercises and to pass you must get 50 % of the total points available. In addition, you have to get at least 25% of points from each round. The grades of this part of the course depend on your points in the following way: 50% of maximum points gives grade 1, 60% gives grade 2, 70% gives grade 3, 80% grade 4, and 90% grade 5.
There are 3 rounds of application exercises and they will be graded in the scale 0 - 3 - 5.
The final grade of the whole course is calculated, as follows:
min(1, E, B, A) * round(0.4 * E + 0.3 *B + 0.3 * A)
in which E denotes the grade of exam (may have value 0 - 5), B denotes the grade of basic exercises and A denotes the grade of application exercises.
Note that you must sign up for the exam at least 2 days before, in the TOPI system. Ask for english assignments from the lecturer about a week before the examination. English questions are not provided automatically. The first exam will take place on 18.5. The exam on 24.2 is not for this course. You have to pass the exam before May 99.
If you fail to pass the exercises during the spring, you can fill up, what is missing during the summer by doing extra exercises.