There are four broad intellectual themes in the course:
The four themes have roughly equal weight in overall course grades, but we will expect different distributions across the themes for different grades.
Throughout the term, you will have access to a summary of your performance to date on each theme. There is no predetermined cutoff number for "solid" and "baseline" performance; that number evolves as we see how everyone is doing. As a general rule, however, the cutoffs are designed to give you room to make some mistakes early on. In past offerings, for example, the "solid" performance line has fallen in the 83-84% range, with the "baseline" cutoff in the upper 50s.
I grade this way because you are here to master certain topics and skills, not to produce scores on the collection of questions known as an exam. I believe that breaking down grades by content rather than individual assignments provides more useful feedback to both of us as to your mastery of course material.
Labs are primarily places for you to get practice and feedback (with the exception of the one lab used for the programming exam). You will submit lab work, but it will not be graded. Staff permitting, we will reserve part of each lab time for small-group review and discussion on your approaches to recent exercises.
Surveys will be given at the start of the course and at the end of each homework assignment. Your answers will indicate how you approached parts of the assignment. We will use these to give you immediate feedback on straightforward details about your work (then get back to you with comments on more subtle issues and an actual grade a few days later).
Repeated failure to submit labs and surveys may result in a penalty of up to 10% when we compute your course grades. We understand that you might miss one during the term for various reasons. Multiple misses will start to count against your course grade. This impact is usually most significant for those falling near the boundary between two course grades at the end of the term.