main-organization

Class Organization and Grading

This year, I am trying an experiment to organize the assignments in the class a little differently. In the past, there has been 3 big projects, 2 exams (one year we had 3), and a number of smaller things.

This year, I am trying to make more “smaller” projects that are not equal size. (3 smaller, and one not as small). The idea is to cut out a lot of the busy work in the projects, and let you focus on the important graphics stuff.

The 4 projects should (roughly) divide the class into sections. In each section we’ll have:

1. A “practice” programming assignment to make sure you can use the tools you’ll need later for the project.
2. A written assignment (to make sure you understand the theory behind the assignment)
3. The actual project itself (where you actually get to do the things)

Some parts might have an extra written assignment, or skip the practice, or …

Grading

The majority of your grade comes from the programming projects and the exams.

1. For the practice assignments, what we mainly care about is that you do them. Otherwise, it will be hard for you to do the real project. Therefore, we’ll do check/no-check grading.
2. For the homework, we do care that you’ve learned the material. However, it is too hard to grade these things precisely. And if we made the grades count for much, we’d have to spend our time arguing about grading. Therefore, we’ll use check/nocheck grading - BUT - expect to see similar questions on the exams.

For check/no-check grading, we’ll either mark your assignment “acceptable” (check), “unacceptable” (no-check), “nothing turned in.” We’ll also keep track of whether or not you turned things in on time. (So, technically its a 3 tier system check/no check/not turned in - but I call it check/no check).

Generally, for an acceptable assignment, we’ll expect that you made a good faith effort and followed through on the parts of the assignment.

If you do a particularly stellar job on one of the check/no-check assignments (like you make a particularly cool picture), we will note it. It won’t count directly towards your grade, but we’ll keep it in mind if you need the benefit of the doubt later.

To use this in your final grade: we will penalize your project score for the project associated with the assignment. An unacceptable will hurt your grade .25 (on the A=4 F=0 scale), a “nothing turned in” will hurt your grade .5. We reserve the right to penalize you less if we’re in a really good mood when we do final grading, but don’t count on it.

So the grading breakdown should be (subject to change if the actual assignments change):

• Imaging Project (w/written and practice) 1/6
• Construction Project (w/written and practice) 1/6
• Train Project (w/written - probably no practice) 1/6
• Town Project (w/multiple written and at least 1 practice) 20%
• Midterm Exam 10%
• Final Exam 15%
• Instructors discretion 5% (since those numbers don’t add up)

A Note on Grades

Each assignment is “curved” independently. The overall grades are sometime adjusted (upwards).

My philosophy on grading is:

• if everyone gets an A, I have a smart class (this almost happened once, but not in 559)
• if no one gets an A, I have made things too hard, and need to curve things.

In the past, the median grade has been an AB. Generally, people work hard in this class, and I think that should be rewarded.