Grading and collaboration policy

From 6.034 Wiki

Revision as of 17:56, 30 August 2012

Collaboration policy

You may collaborate with other students on your problem sets so as 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. We get very sore if we catch someone cheating.

Grade distribution

We do not grade on a curve, and because there will be little or no time pressure on the quizzes and the final, we expect the grade distribution to reflect understanding. In past years, we have seen a great deal of understanding.

Grading policy

Your grade in 6.034 will be calculated as 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 do not calculate class averages -- but rather on what the instructors consider the scores to mean:

You will get an A if your average score is above 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 transition points, your tutorial instructor can decide whether to round your grade up or down based on your class participation. See Winston's article in the Faculty News Letter for more discussion

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. If you do well on a quiz, you need not do the corresponding section of the final. You may decide not to take a quiz with a view toward taking the corresponding part of the final, but we do not recommend this option because the final is prepared in the expectation you will do at most three of the five parts.

Note that the maximizing is by quiz and final section, not by problem or topic. If you get a perfect score on one question of a quiz, and a zero on the other, you will have to do well on the entire corresponding section of the final to improve your score.

Absence

If you have to miss a quiz for any reason (sickness, family emergency, conference, job interview, another quiz), you need not contact us about how to make it up later. We will just tell you that you already have a way to make it up, which is to do the corresponding section on the final examination.

Regrades

Sometimes we will make mistakes when grading your quiz. You may submit your quiz back to us to be regraded, by talking to your TA. Regrade requests must be submitted before the next quiz. Regrades can only result in increasing your grade: even if we find something where your grade should have been lower, we will not take off additional points in the regrade.

Problem sets

Problem sets are submitted as Python programs, and are graded automatically.

Every problem set comes with a file called "tester.py", which you use both to test and to submit your code. It has an "offline" and an "online" (or "submit") mode, which may or may not contain the same test cases. When you use the online tester, you receive your grade automatically. You can always resubmit to try to improve your grade.

Sometimes, the tester will generate random test cases. The point is to make sure that your code is actually doing the right thing, not doing just barely enough to pass the public tests.

Hard-coding the answers is cheating. Don't do it.

Problem set grades

As stated above, problem sets count for 1/6 of your grade.

Problem sets are graded on a 5 point scale. If you pass all the online tests, you get a 5. If you miss one online test, you get a 4. (Remember that you can fix the bug and try again!) From there, your grade decreases linearly at a slower rate with the number of test cases you miss.

You can view all of your grades for submitted problem sets on the lab grades page.

It is your responsibility to make sure that your code was submitted correctly. We will not fix your grade when you realize a month later that you didn't actually submit your problem set.

Submitting your problem set code

When you test your problem set online, you also send a copy of your problem set directory to the server. Make sure that this directory actually contains all the code you wrote to solve the problem set. If you mess it up, submit again. Even though we have an automated grader, we do like to look at your problem sets ourselves sometimes.

Late problem sets

You can submit late problem sets at any time for some credit. Your grade for a late problem set has a half-life of one week. The equation is:

(your lab grade)*(0.5)^(t/7)

Where t is the number of days late. The table below shows examples of the maximum grade as a function of days late. No extensions are granted for problem sets unless there is a medical emergency with official documentation.