Grading and collaboration policy

From 6.034 Wiki

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
m (timely manner)
(participation)
Line 23: Line 23:
|}  
|}  
-
You will get an A if your average score is more than about 4.5, a B if it is between about 3.5 and about 4.5, and so on.
+
You will get an A if your average score is more than about 4.5, a B if it is between about 3.5 and about 4.5, and so on. If you are near one of the halfway points, your tutorial and recitation instructors can decide whether to round your grade up or down based on your class participation.
-
<!-- Not finalized yet: If you are near one of the halfway points, your tutorial and recitation instructors can decide whether to round your grade up or down based on your class participation. -->
+
== Quizzes ==
== Quizzes ==

Revision as of 16:21, 12 September 2007

Your grade in 6.034 will be calculated the average of six scores:

  • max(Quiz 1, Final part 1)
  • max(Quiz 2, Final part 2)
  • max(Quiz 3, Final part 3)
  • max(Quiz 4, Final part 4)
  • Final part 5
  • Average problem set grade

All of these scores will be on a 1-5 scale, averaged together like a GPA. The 1-5 scale is not based on a class average -- we will not calculate class averages in this class -- but based on what the instructors consider the scores to mean:

5 Thorough understanding of the topic
4 Acceptable understanding of the topic
3 Some understanding of the topic
2 or 1 Poor understanding of the topic

You will get an A if your average score is more than about 4.5, a B if it is between about 3.5 and about 4.5, and so on. If you are near one of the halfway points, your tutorial and recitation instructors can decide whether to round your grade up or down based on your class participation.

Contents

Quizzes

There are four 1-hour quizzes, held in the same time slot as lectures. There are also five sections of the final, where the first four correspond to the four quizzes.

The grades you receive for topics 1 through 4 are the maximum of your quiz grade and your grade on the corresponding section of the final. This means you're allowed to have a bad day.

If you accidentally miss a quiz, there is no need to contact us about how to make it up later. You already have a way to make it up, which is the final.

Problem sets

Problem sets are submitted as Scheme programs, and graded automatically, out of necessity. This could be good news for you: there's no human in the loop to be offended by your coding style. Or it could be bad news, because a computer can't give you partial credit if you mess something up.

Every problem set comes with a file called "tester.scm", which makes sure your code does the right thing on several provided examples. Your code should pass every test case in the tester before you submit it.

A "hidden tester" will also be used in grading. It will contain essentially the same kinds of test cases as the public tester. The point of the hidden tester is to make sure your code is actually doing the right thing, not doing just barely enough to pass the public tests.

Hard-coding the answers to public tests you would otherwise fail in your code is cheating. Don't do it. We look at people's code ourselves if it seems there's something funny going on.

Problem sets are graded on the same 1-5 scale. Here's what it means:

5 Passes the public tests, misses at most one hidden test
4 Passes the public tests, misses some hidden tests
3 Passes the public tests, but messes up on the hidden tests (by getting many test cases wrong, going into an infinite loop, using up too much memory, etc.)
2 Fails a few public tests
1 Fails many public tests, or messes them up by going into an infinite loop, etc.

Time and space limits

If your code takes an unreasonable amount of time to run through the tester -- perhaps because you wrote an infinite loop, or you're trying to solve a problem by brute force -- we have no choice but to assume you fail all the tests. Anything else would be asking the TAs to solve the halting problem.

To give yourself a good margin, assume that your code should pass the public tester in less than 10 seconds and consume less than a megabyte of memory.

Late problem sets

You'll notice that a half-finished problem set will probably get you a grade of 1 or 2. If you can't pass the public tests, you may be better off working on it past the due date, with the cost that your grade will be decreased by 1.

Sometime after midnight on Wednesday night, we run the script that collects problem sets from students' home directories. To handle late submissions, we will run it again on Friday night. If your late submission performs better than your on-time submission, you'll receive your late submission's grade minus 1.

If you hand it in later than that, the TAs will have to go out of their way to collect your problem set again. Send an e-mail to 6.034-tas@mit.edu and tell them. You'll receive your late submission's grade minus 2, and you should no longer expect to receive your grade in a timely manner.

Collaboration

You may collaborate with other students on your problem sets, to come up with general ideas on how to implement things, but your code must be your own. Aside from the standard code that comes with the problem set, all the code you submit must have been written by you, with an understanding of what it does.

Personal tools