Course requirements and grades
You determine your own course grade by satisfactorily completing a number of assignments in the following categories:
- individual assignments completed in class: (up to) six assignments
- four lab notebooks completed outside of class (group submission)
- helping lead one class, extending one of your coding assignments
- a multi-step course project
- class attendance and participation
All assignments will be graded satisfactory/unsatisfactory according to an explicit specification of requirements: if you complete all requirements, the assignment is satisfactory.
For in-class assignments, lab notebooks, and for each step of a five-step course project, you earn two points. The first point is for a complete, on-time submission. If your work also satisfies all the requirements for a satisfactory submission, you earn a second point. If your work is complete and on time, but some part of it is not satisfactory, you will have an unlimited number of opportunities to revise the submission by a given deadline. For example, for short, in-class assignments, if you complete the work and earn the first point for the assignment, but have an error, you would typically have about a week to resubmit the work with corrections. To resubmit an assignment, bring the revised work to office hours, or make an appointment to go over the revised work with Prof. Smith.
Attendance points
Being prepared and attending class earns up to 6 points in this category of your final course. We have 27 scheduled class meetings. This table summarizes the scale of attendance points:
| Class meetings | Points earned |
|---|---|
| 26+ | 6 |
| 25 | 5 |
| 24 | 4 |
| 23 | 3 |
| 22 | 2 |
| < 22 | 0 |
Project
- proposed topic
- initial code submission
- presentation for external reviewer
- final submission
Determination of final course grade
Your course grade will be recorded from this table. In the row for each grade, the numbers in each column represent the minimum number of points required in that category.
| Course grade | Up to 6 in-class assignments (12 possible) | 4 lab assignments (8 possible) | Multi-step project (10 possible) | Extending an assignment (2 possible) | Attendance (6 possible) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 11 | 8 | 10 | 2 | 6 |
| A- | 11 | 8 | 9 | 2 | 6 |
| B+ | 10 | 8 | 9 | 2 | 5 |
| B | 10 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 5 |
| B- | 9 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 5 |
| C+ | 9 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 4 |
| C | 8 | 6 | 7 | 1 | 4 |
| C- | 8 | 5 | 6 | 1 | 3 |
| D | 7 | 4 | 5 | 0 | 2 |