Course syllabi (#1425)

Topics/tags: Academia

I’ve been thinking a lot about course syllabi of late. In part, that’s because fall semester will soon be upon us, and I have to get my course syllabi ready. In part, that’s because I was scheduled to be part of the IPOP [1] Academic Success discussion, and course syllabi were a core part of the discussion.

For those who aren’t part of academia, a course syllabus is a document that lays out information about the course. Most typically, a syllabus contains both course policies and a schedule for the course. The schedule has the anticipated topics for each class as well as due dates for work. Of course, syllabus seems to mean list, so one could argue that the list of topics and work could suffice as a syllabus. Nonetheless, most folks use syllabus to mean the broader collection of policies and schedule [2].

Unfortunately, students often don’t pay enough attention to their syllabi [3]. That is, many don’t read through them to make sure they understand course policies, and they don’t refer to them when they have questions about policies or due dates for work. Few use the schedules as faculty hope, carefully copying due dates to their own calendars, and regularly referring to the schedules to determine what topics are being covered.

In any case, we were asked to talk about syllabi and to bring syllabi to our meeting with the students. I chose not to bring my syllabi, which are notably long. A colleague had suggested that I look for some Tutorial [5] syllabi. One of the first I found was a recommended one from a 2002 Tutorial. That syllabus had no policies, only the list of topics and work. It was only three pages. One from 2016 had three pages of policies and descriptive material (e.g., a description of the course and of Tutorial) and six pages of the schedule. Modern syllabi are much longer, at least if we follow recommendations. Why? Well, we are strongly encouraged to include policies about accommodations (including physical and religious), required Title IX text, notes about resources (e.g., libraries, the Math Lab, and the Writing, Reading, Speaking, Presentation, and Other Forms of Communication Center [6]), AI and academic honesty guidelines, and more. Once you gather all of that, syllabi can become somewhat overwhelming.

Let’s see what’s in my most recent syllabus for CSC-151

• Introductory information. This section includes the meeting times, my office hours [8] and office location, the names of our mentors, and times for mentor sessions and CS tutors.
• About this course. A short description of the course.
• Overview. A longer description of the course.
  • Introduction. A short statement of the goals.
  • Problem domain. A discussion of the problem domain we explore in the course. (For that course, it was image making.)
  • Why take CSC-151? Reasons to take the course.
  • Important notices. Things we want students to know.
• Time and Workload. A discussion of how students should be spending the twelve hours or so allocated to the course [9].
• Diversity and inclusion. Lots of issues.
  • Learning needs. Mostly a statement about accommodations and adjustments [10] for students with disabilities.
  • Religious observance policy. Your faith has priority.
  • Community guidelines. We are a community. Respect each other.
  • Title IX and pregnancy-related conditions. Text the College requires us to include, along with additional comments.
  • Basic needs security. You don’t learn as well if your basic needs aren’t taken care of.
  • Other accommodations and adjustments. The policies above don’t cover anything.
  • Title IX. I hope that you don’t experience Title IX issues. If you disclose assault to me, I must report it. Let me know how I can support you. (I include this both so that students know that I’m a required reporter and to reinforce that I try to be supportive.)
• Evaluation and Grading. How do I determine what grade a student has earned?
  • Deliverables. The kinds of work I expect: Reading problems, lab exercises, mini-projects, a group project, learning assessments, and metacognitive reflections.
  • Grading scale and policies. How I turn your individual grades into a letter grade.
  • Plus/minus grades. More complexity to the grading scale.
  • Reading problems, laboratory assignments, and metacognitive reflections. How these contribute to the grade.
  • Redos. What to do if you don’t get the grade you want on a piece of work. For learning assessments: Try again when next offered. For projects: Pay a token and try again.
  • Final deadline. 5:00 p.m. on Friday of finals week.
  • Tokens. The currency of the course. Spend tokens to redo things. Earn tokens by attending designated events.
  • Course breakpoints. A note that I’ll submit an Academic Alert if you seem to have fallen behind. I should probably title this Academic Alerts.
• Software, textbooks, references, technology, and such. Textbooks and readings, for a CS course.
  • Installing DrRacket. Instructions for installing the course software.
• Help, collaboration, academic honesty, and academic integrity. To help expedite your learning, you can rely on me, our class mentor, and your peers as resources in this course.
  • The instructor, course staff, and similar resources. Me, the mentors, the evening tutors. Also a bit about mentor sessions.
  • Peer learning. We generally let you talk to other people about the work you are doing. The one exception is learning assessments.
  • Sharing of course materials. Please don’t.
  • AI programming assistants. Don’t use them.
  • AI writing assistants. Cite them if you use them.
• Other issues. Because I haven’t written enough.
  • Asking questions. Questions are good. Ask them on Teams.
  • Technology. It will fail.
  • Mastery grading. More about the grading approach.
  • Multiple sections. I’m teaching three of them. They will (mostly) stay synchronized.
  • Names. I screw up. A lot.
  • Teaching is performative. A disclaimer?
  • Feeling overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed at this point. It’s okay if you are, too.
• FAQ. Because every document needs an FAQ [11].

That’s a lot, isn’t it? When printed, it’s about eight pages. However, the font I get seems moderately small, perhaps 10pt. Amazingly, I’ve even moved more details about some topics (e.g., academic honesty, AI, mastery grading) to separate documents.

As I started this musing, I had expected to use it, in part, to employ some of Cate Denial’s ideas from A Pedagogy of Kindness with regard to making a syllabus friendlier. Mine is, to put it politely, a wall of text [14]. While I think it’s worth rethinking the text, I’m not sure that her model of rearranging syllabi, which includes adding friendly icons, really matches who I am and how I teach. And there are a lot of icons to find. As I wrote the bullet points above, I realized that they would make a nice summary syllabus. I think I’m going to try that.

Time passes. Many days.

Okay. I’m done. I spent about a dozen hours rewriting my syllabus.

You can compare my new syllabus for CSC-151 to my syllabus from two years ago.

I tried to make it friendlier. In part, that involved adding the detailed table of contents (similar to what I had above). In part, that involved calling out topics that did not have explicit sections, such as the Final Exam (it doesn’t exist) and attendance policies (let me know if you’re going to miss class). In part, it involved making the learning objectives explicit. In part, it involved clarifying the many support structures and putting them early in the syllabus. My language has always been moderately supportive, so I didn’t feel like I needed to change much there.

I’m not sure that it’s within my skill set to incorporate pictures, as Cate Denial does. I’m also not sure that I want my syllabus any longer; with these changes, it’s up to 12 pages and about 10,000 words [15]. The Interweb tells me that a slow reader or someone reading aloud should be able to read it in an hour.

Of course, I also changed things that don’t necessarily make the syllabus kinder, but that I felt were appropriate to update. I’ve switched from weekly projects to bi-weekly projects. I switched project grading from Excellent, Meets Expectations, Redo, Incomplete, Missing to Satisfactory or Not-Yet-Satisfactory. Because AI now rules out take-home exams, I added in-class time for weekly quizzes, which will be the primary assessment. I also cut the number of learning objectives from twenty-four down to twenty so that there’s a bit more slack [16].

What’s the point of all this? I’ve been intending to make my syllabi and my course kinder. My policies have been kind. I think they’re kinder now. My syllabus was a wall of text. It still is. But it has a nice one-page introductory table of contents that lays out the key ideas. I think that’s kinder. I’m counting it as a success, at least if I ignore the time involved.

What’s next? That’s right, updating the schedule, writing the assignments, getting the software to work, setting up Teams and Gradescope, creating accounts for the students (which has to wait until students finish enrolling), and many other things I’ve forgotten. Yay!

[1] International Pre-Orientation Program.

[2] The etymology and meaning of syllabus, particularly whether or not it’s really a Latin word, is complicated. You might want to read this post by a classicist as well as their follow-up post.

[3] I fall in the camp that says “syllabus is an English word which uses a Latin-esque plural, syllabi [4].

[4] I also pronounce syllabi as sill a bye, even though the Latin pronunciation of that would be silly bee.

[5] Tutorial is Grinnell’s core required course, one that introduces students to college-level work and that sets up their first advising relationship.

[6] No, that’s not really what it’s called. But I’ve lost track of what tasks have been assigned to what was formerly just the Writing Lab or Writing Center. Maybe The Communication Skills Center would work [7].

[7] Whoops. The TLA for Communication Skills Center is CSC. That already stands for Computer SCience. (Don’t blame me, I don’t make the TLAs.) Perhaps Communication Lab. Of course, we also have a Communications Department, which is an administrative department that manages communication with the outside world. If I recall, we once had an academic department named Communications, but that was long before my time.

[8] Office hours are times reserved for meeting with students. Some suggest that we should call them Student hours.

[9] I’ve written previously about my concerns about the twelve hours allocated to the course. Students take different amounts of time. Different grades might require different workloads.

[10] An accommodation is a formally arranged approach to addressing a documented disability. I believe that it’s also important to make informal arrangements, even for those whose disabilities are not documented. I call these adjustments.

[11] Or is that a FAQ [12].

[12] I seem to have added the same joke to my syllabus. I’m nothing if not consistent.

[14] Is wall of text polite? Perhaps not, but it’s accurate. I suppose it’s not all that impolite to be accurate.

[15] Counting words can be hard because some of them are automatically pulled from other pages. We’ll stick with about 10,000.

[16] I realize that Grinnell prefers that we use Teams rather than Slack (or Discord, for that matter). In this case, it’s the lowercase slack, meaning that the requirements are a bit more forgiving.

Version 1.0 of 2026-08-23.