Writing Problem: Analyze This

Reflect on your experience.

This course’s philosophy on academic honesty is best stated as "be reasonable." The course recognizes that interactions with classmates and others can facilitate mastery of the course’s material. However, there remains a line between enlisting the help of another and submitting the work of another. This policy characterizes both sides of that line.

The essence of all work that you submit to this course must be your own. Collaboration on problems is not permitted (unless explicitly stated otherwise) except to the extent that you may ask classmates and others for help so long as that help does not reduce to another doing your work for you. Generally speaking, when asking for help, you may show your code or writing to others, but you may not view theirs, so long as you and they respect this policy’s other constraints. Collaboration on quizzes and tests is not permitted at all. Collaboration on the final project is permitted to the extent prescribed by its specification.

Below are rules of thumb that (inexhaustively) characterize acts that the course considers reasonable and not reasonable. If in doubt as to whether some act is reasonable, do not commit it until you solicit and receive approval in writing from your instructor. If a violation of this policy is suspected and confirmed, your instructor reserves the right to impose local sanctions on top of any disciplinary outcome that may include an unsatisfactory or failing grade for work submitted or for the course itself.

Odds are, particularly if you find yourself among those less comfortable and this is your first course in computer science, you’ve made a remarkable amount of progress as a programmer, perhaps much more so than you predicted. But as the above quote illustrates, merely knowing how to write code does not a good programmer make. Many members of the CS50 staff have been programming for upwards of ten years, and as any of them will quickly tell you, their learning never ceases. There is always an opportunity for growth and improvement, and often times the largest amounts of growth and improvement come from taking the time for some self-reflection.

In this writing problem, we want to provide you with a structured opportunity to perform some of this self-reflection. There are no wrong or right answers to any portion of this problem; rather, the most important thing is that you analyze your own experiences in CS50 AP over the last several weeks or months with a critical eye.

Open a text editor and create a file called ‘analyze’ (be sure that the file extension is either .doc, .docx, .pdf, or .txt). In 500-1,000 words, prepare an essay on your experience, expectations, growths, triumphs, and struggles up through this point in the course. You can spend as much time as you feel is appropriate on each of these questions, but over the course of your writing you should touch on at least the following topics:

This metacognitive assessment is but one step in not necessarily becoming a better programmer or a better computer scientist, but really becoming a better learner. The better you understand your thought process, the easier it becomes to determine how to best understand something that may initially confound you. Once you’ve figured that out, your horizons can expand infinitely.