CSCI E-168

Assignments are given out about every other week, and for each one you’ll have a bit more than two weeks to get it done. All assignments are due on Mondays, by Noon EST. Our goal is to get graded assignments back to you in a couple of weeks, but sometimes it can take four weeks. I (John) am sorry about that, but the reality is that your staff is composed of professional software developers, and, as we all know, deadlines can wreak havoc with all of one’s priorities, including the obligations to one’s students.

Our official policy is that we don’t accept late work without an official excuse from Harvard Extension. In the cases where we bend our own rule, note that your submission may go to the bottom of the stack. For your own pedagogical reward, you really want to get assignments in by the due date.

Here are the components of the grade, and the contribution of each component to the final grade:

• Assignment 0: System Setup (0%)
• Assignment 1: One-Liners (15%)
• Assignment 2: Classes and methods (standalone app) (10%)
• Assignment 3: Standalone ActiveRecord (10%)
  • About testing this assignment
• Assignment 4: Models, Controllers, and Views (15%)
• Assignment 5: New features for Assignment 4 (10%)
• Final project proposal (10%)
• Final project (25%)
• Contributions to web-based discussion, section, etc. (5%)

If a student ends up with a total score teetering between two grades, we will study the one-liner contributed for Assignment 1. Note that we will let you update/replace your one-liner until the end of the course.

How we grade individual submissions:

We typically break the grade down into some components that simply regard factual matters about the correspondence of your solution to the problem; this might be based on the results of automated tests, which we usual hand out in advance.

We also inspect some of the code (not necessarily all of it), and assess whether the code illustrates the conventions of excellent Ruby and Rails software (”DRY,” concise, testable, etc.). The staff has meetings where we study submissions together and synchronize our grading patterns. Additionally, John takes a look at random submissions to ensure that students are being treated similarly.

Submissions are not graded on a curve. We attempt to observe Harvard’s ideas about grading (http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2009-10/policies/grades/), where an A represents “work whose superior quality indicates a full mastery of the subject and, in the case of A, work of extraordinary distinction,” a B represents “work of good to very good quality throughout the term; however, it does not merit special distinction,” and so forth down to what Harvard calls an “E” (which means: bad!). Clearly these are not necessarily “objective” standards, but they are Harvard’s. For point grades, A’s are in the 90’s, B’s are in the 80’s, and C’s are in the 70’s (etc.).

Students often ask if they can take on extra work to rectify a bad grade. Our answer is: No. The reason is that it is very difficult to understand your work compared to your classmates and our ideas of what is “excellent” if you’re doing something different. On the other hand, we do sometimes recognize improvement over the semester.