DC3 Grades

by Mike Gleicher on May 12, 2017

We graded DC3 and the grades were posted to Canvas. We saw many interesting designs, and a range of ideas.

Unfortunately, in order to get things graded on time, we were not able to type up our notes on each assignment. So you got no feedback other than the grade.

  1. If you want feedback because you’d like to use this as an opportunity to learn more about visualization, let us know and we’ll set up a time to do this in person.
  2. If you want to talk about your grade and understand why you didn’t get a higher score… First, I checked (after posting grades): given the current grading spreadsheet, a 1/2 letter grade raise won’t change anyone’s final grade. So, arguing about your DC3 won’t raise your final grades. (we haven’t posted final grades, but they will be posted by noon).

For #1, we had asked about a demo session. Either, I didn’t spread the word well, or there is low interest. If more people sign up at https://beta.doodle.com/poll/hw8n5arw2mh4zyif#table, maybe we’ll do it. I’ll look at the list later today and guage interest. If there is no announcement, assume there’s no demo session.

If you’re curious, there was really no correlation between whether someone chose to write a tool or not – there were good and (less good) tools, and good and less good sketches/visualizations. Things without working tools often made up for it with really thoughtful analysis, critique, and creative design. (There were also some over-the-top tools, which also had really creative designs and really thoughtful analysis documentation – but we didn’t give people “more than As”)

Also, if you’re curious… less good tool submissions generally just made standard plots using standard plotting packages, and usually had minimal documentation (often below the minimum requirements). There were some assignments that had very creative uses of standard designs, using multiple visualizations to address a range of questions.

And since you’re probably not curious… a challange was the range of skills that people had. Someone with good implementation skills could build a nice system – independent of their skill at designing good visualizations. Fortunately, the most impressive systems (almost always) implemented well thought-out designs, and documented their rationales well. And we tried to reward good visualization design – even if the implementation wasn’t well integrated etc. (At the extreme, some sketch designs – implemented with colored pencil and post-it notes – got As).

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