In the words of a wise man, "In Google+ I'd give that post a +1."  But also, "Don't rush when you think about these problems."

Thank you for your post. It's an excellent post. I want to encourage anyone who has a concern to express it here on the forum.

Here are a few thoughts about how I'm organizing the class.

WRT quizzes and grades:  

• Any question that a significant majority of students get wrong, won't be counted. The few students who get the question right will get extra credit for that question. 

• In computing a grade at the end of the term, the quiz scores will be normalized as a percent of the maximum possible score. (So quizzes with different numbers of questions will not count differently.) More importantly to you, the maximum possible score will be the score achieved by the 95^th percentile student. There are approximately 60 students in the two sections combined. The 95^th percentile score will be the score on the fourth-highest scoring quiz. That is, the top three (5%) quiz scores will be ignored, and the next highest quiz score will be taken as the maximum for percentage purposes. Students with higher scores will get percentages over 100%.

• The final grades will be curved up as needed so that no more than approximately 10% will get a grade of less than C. The 10% is not a fixed number. If everyone in the class does well, I'll be happy to give everyone a high grade. The 10% is not an exact number either. It may be that a few more than 10% do not get a grade of C.

More generally my goal is for you understand the material. Looking up the answer to a quiz question and writing down what you find does not constitute understanding. I believe that the only way to understand something is to think about it. I've been adjusting the difficulty of the quizzes and exercises in an attempt to encourage thinking -- and discourage rote memorization and looking up answers without thinking about them.

The work at the start of the term was probably too easy in this regard. Perhaps the past couple of weeks may have been too hard. I'll do my best to adjust. In making these adjustments I have to distinguish between asking too much of the class and the class not doing enough work. If the class does poorly because you do not make enough of an effort, that does not mean that I have been asking too much. So let me know if you put in the full 8 hours outside class and still find the work too demanding.  

From now on, I'll be expecting you to review the wiki page before the first class session. If I hadn't made that clear, I apologize. If you have questions about what's on the wiki page, please post a note on the forum or raise them in the Monday session with Kirti and Lincoln.

For this week, you should think about Kosaraju's algorithm between now and Thursday's class. You should start the implementation before class. Don't wait until the class to start thinking about it. Use the class time to refine you knowledge and to deal with problems you encountered in implementing it.