Project Mechanics

Forming Teams

The project is to be done in teams of four to five. The assignments will be the same for either size team. Groups of five will have less coding to do per person but will also have to manage the interactions between more people. You can have groups of 1-5. Your should form a project team as soon as possible. If for any reason you need to switch groups, you need to get explicit permission of both the TA of your previous group and the TA of your new group. In general, switching teams will only be approved effective after the current assignment is completed.

Group Evaluations

In order to encourage every member of the team to contribute equally, you will submit a group evaluation form after each phase of the project. Each of you is required to individually submit a form with a quantitative assessment of the relative contributions of each of your teammates, excluding yourself. You have 100 points to allocate among your teammates, proportional to how much they contributed to just this assignment.

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 equal 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 100 points as follows:
Annie Average 25
Sam Slacker 10
Hugh Helpful 32
Connie Conscientious 33

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.

Also we want to have you rate each of your partners according to his or her absolute contribution to the work of this assignment. Each score should be between 0 and 100. A rough scale would be as follows:
actively and engergetically got everything wrong and cost us time and effort 0
stayed out of the way and didn't make things worse 25
competent and satisfactory contribution to the effort 50
very competent, good insight, worked hard. 75
genius; was able to complete assignment online, immediately, and then explained to us what s/he did. 100
Most of your scores should be between 25 and 75 (and probably between 40 and 75). We will subtract credit if your scores seem to be excessively unrelated to reality.

Late Policy

All projects and homework will be due before class at 12:59pm. For the projects, design documents reflecting the actual implementation of your code will be due with each phase. Also, please take 5 min or so to fill out group evaluations within two days after each phase.

Don't be late! Nevertheless we understand that things will come up so we will use flexible slip dates for the implementation assignments, which are also always due at 12:59pm (right before class). 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% (linearly) per day. Extensions will not be granted. Please note that nothing will be accepted after Dec. 1, 2002.