Georgia Institute of Technology

Privacy Technology, Policy, and Law
Spring 2013
Syllabus

CLASS PARTICIPATION:

Attendance is required. This class is discussion-oriented, and students must participate in class discussions. This will be done formally via the following "on call" group assignments as follows:

Students must be thoroughly prepared to actively discuss in class on their respective group "on call" days to which they are assigned. Preparation may include formulating and bringing discussion questions, reading supporting material to address weaknesses or concerns raised by the paper, and preparing examples to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the paper. If for any reason, a student is unable to be prepared for class on any given day, they must let the instructor know before class begins. Each student gets one excused pass if they are unable to be prepared on one of their assigned day, but this is contingent on contacting the instructors before class so that the instructors will know not to call on you.

EVALUATION PROCEDURE:

Final grades in the course will be determined as follows:

Note: class attendance is required. Attendance figures heavily into your class participation grade.

The grading scale for your final grade will be as follows:

Grading Breakdown

There are a total of 52 papers scheduled as required reading over the course of the semester. Fifteen of these, one each for weeks 2 through 16, must be formally reviewed and submitted. The lowest grade of these 15 paper reviews will be dropped. Overall, paper reviews are worth 10% of your final grade. Thus, each paper review counted for a grade is worth 0.714% of your final grade.

Class participation is worth 10% of your final grade. Course attendance is necessary, but not sufficient. Students must actively ask questions in class to earn credit in this area. We will consider days when a student is “on call” more heavily than days when they are not “on call.” However, not being “on call” is not a license to avoid the discussion. Every day counts for course participation. The “on call” days are simply weighted more heavily.

Late Policy

This course has two simple policies for late assignments. For late paper reviews, students will lose one point out of ten (a full letter grade) for each review submitted late, regardless of how late the review is submitted. The purpose of the reviews is, along with the “on call” list, to ensure that studnets come to class prepared for an in-depth discussion of the material.

For late projects, our late policy is much more strict. For each day a project is late, students will lose 10% of the total value of the project, which is a full letter grade. We have scheduled the due dates for this class to ensure that students have plenty of time to complete their projects on time. However, if, for any reason, you feel that you can’t complete a project on time, please contact the instructor. We can be flexible, but only if you let us know about your concerns in advance. Once the project is due, the late policy will take effect.

Course Projects

There are three course projects and one project presentation that students must complete. They are due on the following dates and worth the following percentages:

Extensions are available on an individual basis. Please contact the instructors if you feel that you absolutely need an extension for a particular project.

Finally, extra credit will be awareded to students’ final grades for those students who write a one page, two-column IEEE-formatted paper about one specific thing they disagreed with from the optional course text.