Late Visa

Special to Fall 2022

2022-09-02 Update

The Math Faculty sent an email today to students we know of who are facing visa difficulties. This page should be read in the context of that email.

2022-09-01 original post:

In Fall 2022 a number of students have had trouble getting visas to Canada on time. This document is meant to clarify what we can and cannot do for them. The situation continues to evolve and this document may change as well.

CS135 will be steering a middle course on this issue – neither ignoring it nor going so far as to mount a whole on-line version.

We are leaving most of the learning resources we had available at the height of the pandemic available to all students. You can certainly access them and use them to learn the lecture content, as students did during the height of the pandemic. You can see a sample at https://student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs135/smods/02-functions/ . You will be asked to log in, but it’s the normal UW credentials that you use for Quest and other systems. There will be a total of 19 modules released over the course of the term.

About 5% of the final mark is from “participation marks” earned in lectures. We take the best 75% (see slide 5 in Module 01), so there is some cushion for you to arrive late that is already built into the marking scheme.

We will be having at least some and perhaps all office hours using Microsoft Teams. You can certainly avail yourself of those from anywhere in the world. We will endeavour to schedule some office hours at times that are not the middle of the night for you.

At this time we do not expect recordings of lectures or tutorials to be made. One instructor plans to live-stream his lecture, if all the details can be managed. However, that will be late afternoon Waterloo time which may be an awkward time wherever you are.

Assignments are already completely remote. No accommodations are needed for them.

Exams are the big issue. Given the huge amount of work involved, we are not willing to prepare separate exams for you. We have two midterms, Oct 3 and Nov 7. Ideally you would be on-campus by Oct 3 to take the first exam. If not, our existing policies allow for up to one exam to be excused with appropriate reasons and documentation. Being delayed by visa issues would qualify. The weight of that exam would be prorated to the remaining two exams.

The Math Faculty has decreed that you must be here by Oct 24, which is well ahead of the second midterm.

If the pandemic forces all exams to be on-line, then you would participate with the rest of the class. That might mean writing your exam in the middle of the night.