September 26th, 2022
We will have weekly programming assignments. Each assignment is graded during an interactive, one-on-one session with your section leader, who rates it according to the following scale:
| ✓+ | A submission that satisfies all the requirements for the assignment, showing solid funtionality as well as good style. It reflects a job well done with the possibility for few minor errors. |
| ✓ | A submission that meets most of the requirements for the assignment, possibly with some problems. |
| ✓- | A submission that has problems serious enough to fall short of the requirements for the assignment. |
| - | A submission that has extremely serious problems, but nonetheless shows some effort and understanding. |
| -- | A submission that shows little effort and does not represent passing work. |
From past experience, we expect most grades to be check + and check. Dividing the grades into categories means that your section leader can spend more time talking about what you need to learn from the assignment and not have to worry about justifying each point. The overall goal is to maximize the learning experience in doing the assignments, and we have found the "bucket" grading system to work much better for programming assignments than assigning numeric grades from a pedagogical perspective over many quarters of experience. Note that buckets do not correlate strictly to letter grades as we consider the overall distribution as well as the difficulty of each assignment before mapping a letter grade to a bucket. If you have questions about how you are doing in the course feel free to check in with your section leader or with Elyse.
For each assignment, you must make an appointment with your section leader for an interactive-grading session. Your section leader will explain in section how to schedule these sessions and go over the grading process in more detail.