We realize that we haven’t been giving people lots of timely feedback this semester. We apologize. We’ve tried to make this up with leniency (accepting late assignments, and being understanding that you might not realize that things aren’t the way the should be).
Here is what is going to happen with grading – note that this is in the spirit of what we said at the beginning of the semester, but with the details a bit more filled in.
The basic thing is that we’ll do grading holistically – we’ll look at the whole picture, and try to figure out what is going on. Each student is different.
- We are going to grade each of the “Programming Projects” on a letter grade (A-F) scale. The programming projects put together multiple assignments (there are 4: 3&4, 6-10, 11&13, 14). The grading scale is what we said in the syllabus – B’s for getting most of the basic stuff, better grades beyond that. These grades will be determined without regard for how late things are (although, extremely late programs are not accepted – don’t bother turning in P4 or P10 now).
- For the exams, we will look at your scores in light of everything else. If you did well on all the programs, but messed up on one exam, you were probably having a bad day and we can over look it. If you did badly on all of the programs, but did well on both exams, then maybe we should give you some consideration. In general, we really will consider each case seperately – in most cases, the exam scores are close to what everything else tells us, and the exam tells us what way to round the grades. But if your exam scores are very different from your other grades, we’ll look closely. In general, don’t expect your exam to change your grade by more than a half letter grade (e.g. B->AB), unless you totally ace both exams.
- For the other aspects (P1, P2, P5, quizzes, on-time performance on programs) – we’ll use this as a modifier to the Programming Projects grade. If you did well on projects but poorly on quizzes and exams, you probably figured out what was going on. If you did poorly on a few programs and did well at keeping up with class, we should probably give you the benefit of doubt. If you did badly on programs and weren’t keeping up with class aspects, well…
Sorry that this is fuzzy – but it’s actually harder to come up with hard rules than it is to just try to treat individual cases fairly. In most cases, people’s performance is somewhat consistent.
What this does mean is that you can expect to start seeing grades for your programming projects soon. So far, we’ve mainly been checking off “did you do something” – now we’ll more carefully check things. We’ll have a rubric that will check each of the key components of the project (including turning in the intermediate assignments). From these, we’ll assign a letter grade.
So, for example, your P3&4 grade (that will be delivered to you by email) will check if you had lighting, the painters algorithm, perspective, …
We expect to get you your P3&4 grade (and probably your P6-10 grade) by the last class (or at least the day of). We will hopefully get you P11&P13 grades shortly after that. The P14 grades will be made available to you before the exam (since we want to be lenient and accept late assignments).
