# CS 3110 Recitation Guidelines
This semester's 3110 recitations are structured as hands-on labs. The
labs complement the lecture: they review some material, go deeper into
other material, and introduce new material. The hands-on experience
you get in the labs is essential to mastering the content of 3110.
Working together is a great idea, and solving the lab exercises with
a partner is strongly encouraged. Feel free to mix it up and change
partners at any point. You may discuss your lab work with anyone in the
course.
**Difficulty.** The lab exercises are annotated with a difficulty rating:
* One star [✭]: easy exercises that should take only a minute or two. Get
in the habit of working these as soon as you reach them.
* Two stars [✭✭]: straightforward exercises that are not intended to be tricky
and should take only a few minutes. If you get stuck on these, ask
for help early.
* Three stars [✭✭✭]: exercises that might require additional time or thought outside
of recitation. You might want to skip these on your first pass through the
recitation and come back to them later.
* Four [✭✭✭✭] or more stars: challenging or time-consuming exercises provided for
students who want to dig deeper into the material.
Some exercises are annotated "advanced" or "optional". **You should
complete the non-optional, non-advanced, one and two star exercises for
each recitation before the next recitation occurs.** Otherwise you risk
falling behind in the course.
This annotation system is new this semester, so it's possible we'll misjudge
the difficulty of a problem from time to time. Let us know if you think an
annotation is off.
**Solutions.** Solutions to some but not all of the lab exercises will
be posted in CMS sometime after the lab occurs. Typically we'll provide
solutions for the one through three star non-optional, non-advanced
exercises. These solution sets do not yet exist—your TAs are
writing them afresh this semester—so please forgive any delays.
You may not post your solutions or repost our solutions anywhere,
especially not in public repositories where they could be found by
search engines. Some of these exercises have been used as homework and
exam problems in the past, and some of them may again be used in the
future.
We also warn you of the danger of looking at solutions before solving
problems yourself. It's easy to convince yourself that the solution
looks right, but it's hard to internalize a solution when you didn't
come up with the idea yourself.
**Exams.** Lab exercises are a good source of exam questions.
A good way to study for an exam is to finish any
exercises you haven't already completed, as well as to rework previously
completed exercises. You might even discover better solutions when you
revisit old exercises.