It is more important to do the basic/required parts of the assignment correctly than to have extra bells and whistles. It is very depressing to give someone an F for failing to meet the basic requirements when they have written 5000 lines of code to make a spiffy extra feature.
That said, we encourage you to do more than the minimums. It makes it more interesting for you. It makes it more interesting for us. You will learn more. You will have more fun.
Extra work “above and beyond” the call of duty is its own reward. We will not reward things with grades above an A. You can’t undo a past mistake by doing extra stuff on a future assignment. There are two slight exceptions to this:
- If you take more time to do a project (hand it in after the deadline), then we’d like to see that you do something with this extra time.
- We will note assignments and projects that are exceptional. In the event that your grade is on the borderline, we might consider this.
You will not be evaluated on your artistic skill. While it is disappointing to have a technical masterpiece that creates an ugly result, that is OK. We hope that you’ll try to do the best you can with the artistic parts. It’s more fun to make pictures / objects that are nicer to look at.