It is our expectation that for most groups, all of your teammates will pull their weight, and so you will be able to simply give 20 points to each member. But if you have as teammates, Sam Slacker, Annie Average, Hugh Helpful, and Connie Conscientious, for example, then you might allocate your 80 points as follows:
Annie Average | 20 |
Sam Slacker | 10 |
Hugh Helpful | 25 |
Connie Conscientious | 25 |
If on the next assignment Sam starts pulling his weight, you should reflect his new performance (and not his past record) in the assessment for that assignment. We will use this information in determining final grades. By the way, many engineering companies use peer review to determine annual raises, and so making your peers think you are useful is a good skill to have.
We will use flexible slip dates for the implementation assignments, which are also always due at 11:59PM. Each team is given an automatic extension of 5 calendar days. You can use the extension on any assignment during the semester (in increments that are rounded up to the nearest integer). For instance, you can hand in one assignment 5 days late, or each of five assignments 1 day late. For project assignments, the slip time will be deducted from each team member's dates. This should let you schedule due dates around the due dates for other courses. No assignment will be accepted more than 5 days late.
After you have used up your slip time, any assignment handed in late will be marked off 10% per day. Extensions will not be granted.
After you turn in the design document, your TA will conduct mandatory graded design reviews with each group, where you will be asked to explain and defend the design you are using for implementing each assignment. All project members must attend the meeting or your project grade will be penalized.
The intent of the grading for the project is not to differentiate among those students who do a careful design and implementation of the assignments. In other words, don't implement some complex feature just because someone else in the class is implementing it. Our expectation is that most of you will get close to full credit on each assignment. Rather, the grading is to help identify those students who (i) don't do the assignments or (ii) don't think carefully about the design, and therefore end up with a messy and over-complicated solution. You cannot pass this course without at least making a serious attempt at each of the assignments. Further, the grading is skewed so that you will get substantial credit, even if your implementation doesn't completely work, provided your design is logical and easy to understand. So don't pull an all-nighter just to fix the last remaining bug in your solution.