Additional Course Outline Information
The Computer Science department has the following grading policy. In order to pass a course you must meet two requirements:
a) The university has adopted a common scale for converting marks to grades. According to this scale, an average mark of 50% is sufficient to pass the course (i.e. to achieve a C-), with an average mark of 55% a C grade is achieved and so forth. We apply this conversion scale to the average marks students achieve over all assessment items.
b) You must achieve an average mark of at least 45% on invigilated assessment items. Marks are sometimes scaled to achieve consistency between courses from year to year.
There are several important documents available online about departmental regulations, policies and
guidelines. We expect all students to be familiar with these.
Notices about this class will be posted to the class forum in the Learn system (learn.canterbury.ac.nz).
COSC students will also be made members of a class called “CSSE Notices”, where general notices will
be posted that apply to all classes (such as information about building access or job opportunities).
The topics covered in lectures will be as follows. The main references are for the current edition of the text book (2nd edition and online). Where a reference is given in square brackets, it is for the first edition.
• Introduction to algorithms, and the relationship with Software Engineering
• Algorithm analysis (Chapter 2 [4])
• Basic data structures – stacks and queues (Chapter 3 [2])
• Lists (Chapter 3 [7])
• Recursion (Chapter 4 [3])
• Searching (Chapter 5 [4])
• Sorting (Chapter 5 [4])
• Trees – binary trees and heaps (Chapter 6 [5])
• Graphs (Chapter 7 [6])
• Overview of major ideas in Computer Science
