Q: How will I be graded in this class?
A: 50% assignments, best-(N-1)-out-of-N; 5% weekly exercise problems; 45% final exam – required, is a grading hurdle, see below. The rest of this post specifies details.
50% assignments, best-(N-1)-out-of-N; 5% weekly exercise problems; 45% final exam.
In order to pass the course, you must have secured 50⁄100 according to the breakdown above and have attended and scored > 40% for the exam.
There will be 8 submitted lab assignments throughout the semester – roughly one assignment per week that consist of a handful of questions. Lab1 and lab2 count as one assignment and are due on Monday of week 3 (see submission). In the rest of this post, N=8.
Your assignment grade is the average from the best N-1 out of these N assignments. In other words, the worst assignment doesn’t count, or you can miss one assignment without penalty.
We make available a few multiple-choice questions on Wattle with every section of the course. The main purpose is to help you practice computational thinking around each week’s material.
Q: Why 5%? We assign a 5% mark to encourage students to attempt and eventually get all answers right for each problem.
There will be a final exam held around the end of semester. Its details will be released closer to time. There will be no midterm exam.
Late assignments will not be accepted. However, we understand that sometimes things happen and you may not be able to make it in time despite best efforts.
In case you must be late: There is a hard cut-off of one day (i.e. 24 hours) for each assignment, after which late submission receives no grade. If you submit after the official deadline but before 24 hours have elapsed, your assignment will be graded as-is (say X marks), and you final grade will be 0.95 * X, i.e. part of a day counts as one day.
Your N-1 best assignments are considered graded, and the N-th is considered ungraded. That is to say, you can skip one assignment in the whole semester without penalty.
We expect individual assignments. That is, you are expected to write the submitted programs and written assignment independently. The only exception are assignments that explicitly allow pair-programming.
Team work / Pair programming There are a number of assignments where team work (with a team size up to 2) is explicitly permitted. Here is how this works:
Students are expected to uphold ANU Code of Practice for Student Academic Integrity.