Grading Guidelines

Rather late in my preparation, I changed my mind about grading structure, and will try out a scheme that has been successful in my bachelor course, as it is more specific in the way it awards points compared to the often-seen system of subtracting points for things you do not like.

I have never tried it in the context of this fagpakke, so please forgive me if issues pop up - and be sure to give me feedback in case you experience any "injustice" or other issues.

Learning goals

The basic focus of any course is for students to learn something. But what?

For most exercises, I will try to make explicit what the learning focus is in the form of a couple of learning goals. For each learning goal, I will shortly outline what I expect you to deliver.

Example:

ClientProxy Code: Client side proxy code obeys the Broker pattern. The proper MarshalingKeys constant is used. Robert Martin 'Clean Code' properties are generally kept.

So - here I basically try to tell you that I will look over your source code in the relevant part of your ClientProxy implementation, and assess whether it follows the rules and constraints of the Broker pattern; that you use the required constant, and that the 'code is maintainable/analyzable'.

Assessment

I will for each learning goal make an assessment of your submission, give a grade, and provide a short argument for their findings.

For each learning goal, your submission will be evaluated on coverage of the learning goal and proficiency at the learning goal. This is completely similar to the way the normal Danish grade scale shall be used.

Coverage: How much of the learning goals are covered by your work? Basically a completeness measure - did you do all the required things?
Proficiency: How well do you apply the learning goals? Basically a 'error counting' issue, did you apply the technique correctly and how severe are the issues?

The grade scale is a downsized version of our normal Danish 7-level grade scale.

Thus 'Adequate' covers normal grades 02 and 4; while 'Excellent' covers 10 and 12.

Late hand-ins are automatically graded with 0 points unless you some special agreement with me.

Feedback

You do not learn much by just being whacked over the head. Also, you cannot focus your learning if you get 67 points in the code that must be fixed to get your submission approved.

Therefore I will try to just give one/two "key areas" of improvement, if there are any.

Feedback format

To make things easier and more consistent for you, I have designed an assessment sheet that we will try out. It is basically just an excel spreadsheet.

The sheet automatically calculates a score which will also appear as the score in BlackBoard. The score is just the sum, so if there are three learning goals, each giving 10 points max, then the max points you can get is of course 30.