Assignments and Grading

Assignments will be published here every Tuesday morning. Until then, all the links below will be broken.

• Homework Schedule: Weekly homeworks are assigned Tuesday and due the following Monday.
• Evaluation: Grades will be 50% homeworks, 50% final project. Mastery Points (see below) are required for an A+. The weekly graded homeworks are designed as building blocks toward the final project. There are 8 homeworks, and they each count equally. For samples of student final projects from previous years, see the project showcase page.
• Collaboration: You may work with a partner for both the homeworks and the final ray traced image. You may change partners as often as you wish throughout the quarter. As you are graded individually, you are not required to join the same grading session as your partner.
• Grading: Grading sessions will be held live over Zoom (video chat) on Mondays. All of the assignments will be graded in a live-demo format since graphics, like art, is partially about presentation. Computer graphics professionals typically deliver only the final image, with the coding behind the image considered disposable.
  You are required to attend and consult a CA for a (very) short live grading session. The CA will ask you to demonstrate your solution to the assignment, look at both the code and results, and ask you questions to assess your understanding of the material. Make sure you can answer questions about all parts of the assignment, regardless of which parts you or your partner may have done individually.
  If you cannot attend the weekly grading sessions, then it is your responsibility to contact the course staff email to schedule an appointment for grading that takes place before the grading sessions. We do not accept email submissions.
• Quiz Questions: As part of each HW grading session, there will be 1 (or more) randomly chosen quiz question(s) that you should prepare for ahead of time.
• Rubric: Assignments are graded on a 0-5 point basis. The rubric is provided in each homework handout. If your homework grades are not going well, then do not be surprised if your final image grade is lower than what you expect. Feedback is very important in computer graphics, so please take each homework seriously and attend the grading sessions each week.
• Honor Code: You may have notes available to glance at during the grading session. You may not read from a script, search the web, or have another person or live AI to help you answer questions.
• Engagement: During the Monday grading sessions, CAs are encouraged to further question, follow-up, look for tangents, etc. in order to create a more interesting conversation. Students who do exceptionally well (soft quota of 1 out of every 4 students) will earn an extra Mastery Point. These points are used to upgrade some students from an A to an A+ final grade (there is no other way to earn an A+ in the course).
• Late Assignments: As a general rule, no late assignments will be accepted. Exceptions will be made for unforeseeable circumstances and as required by university policy.

Academic Accommodations

If you need an academic accommodation, contact the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). The OAE will then prepare an OAE letter with the recommended accommodations. Send this letter to cs148-staff-aut2627@cs.stanford.edu as soon as possible.

• Contact the OAE to obtain an official accommodation letter if you have a health condition that may impact your coursework.
• Only accommodations explicitly stated in your current OAE letter will be accommodated. If you need additional or revised accommodations, you must request an updated letter from the OAE.
• The teaching team will not be able to approve any retroactive accommodation requests.
• If you have any questions or concerns regarding your accommodations, please contact your disability advisor.
• Deadlines and Assignments:
• Students with OAE letters must request a separate extension for each assignment (you cannot auto-apply your OAE extensions to all assignments).
• Students with the standard OAE extension accommodation must request an extension before the original due date, as it says in your OAE letter - for HW, this is by 11:59PM Monday. Retroactive extension requests made on Tuesday and afterwards will not be approved.
• The teaching team will only approve what is outlined in the OAE letter. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to your OAE advisor.

You need only submit your letter once per quarter. For urgent OAE-related accommodations needs that arise after the deadline, please consult your OAE advisor. If you are not yet registered with OAE, contact the office directly at oae-contactus@stanford.edu.

Hardware and Software

You are encouraged to do class assignments on your personal computer. Computers should contain a modern graphics card capable of running Blender. Blender is readily available on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, and the starter code has been tested on all of these platforms.