General Information on CS H195
The one-unit CS 195 is meant to serve the needs of students who are here
to satisfy a requirement. It is meant to be relatively painless and perhaps
to spark an interest in the topic.
The three-unit CS H195 is meant to allow small-group discussion with the
students who are here out of serious interest. It requires more reading
and more writing (a term paper) in addition to the extra discussion time.
This course does not satisfy the humanities breadth requirement
for EECS students. The EECS faculty made this decision for two reasons:
First, you should take a real humanities course from a real humanities
professor. Second, we want this course to be for people with a genuine
interest in the subject, and small enough to allow real discussion, and
before this decision the people looking to kill two requirements with one
stone crowded out the ones who were really interested.
CS H195 has a textbook in addition to the reader:
- [ES]
- Computers, Ethics, and Society (Third Edition)
edited by M. David Ermann and Michele S. Shauf.
Oxford University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-19-514302-7
The course is graded P/NP. In addition to attending all class sessions and
doing the assigned reading, H195 students will submit the same assignments
as 195 students, except that one of the short papers is replaced by a longer
(5-10 page) term paper.
Term Paper
Each honors student
will pick one topic for more intensive study, leading to a term paper and
perhaps a presentation to the class. (Your topic may or may not be the same
as one of ours.) Since the term paper is your main written work in this
course, we want it to be good -- scholarly, honest, articulate, well-organized.
To this end, you will prepare the term paper in three stages:
- A one-page proposal (including initial bibliography) due week 5 (9/30).
- A first version (your best effort!) due week 10 (11/4).
- A revised version due week 13 (11/25).
We'll respond to each of these stages within a week. These are firm deadlines;
they are chosen to allow time for recovery if what you turn in is not of
acceptable quality. (In a typical semester we require post-final versions from
one or two out of 30 students.) Typical papers are 5 to 10 pages, but
don't pad; quality counts much more than quantity.
Here are links to a sample bibliography and a selection of sample
good student papers from past years:
- PDF right side up for online reading.
- PDF sideways for printing
(because the pages are presented 2-up).
