Your overall grade will be determined as follows (subject to change if necessary, but change is unlikely):
We will have approximately 3 programming assignments (with phases) and 8 written homework assignments. Expect each written homework to contribute equally to the course grade. The first project will contribute approximately half as much to the course grade as the subsequent projects.
If you find an error in our grading, please bring it to our attention within one week of that item being returned.
Occasionally exceptional circumstances occur. If you contact the instructor well in advance of the deadline, we may be able to show more flexibility in some cases.
If you have a question about an assignment or exam that was returned to you, please don't hesitate to ask a TA or the instructor about it. Learning from our mistakes is often one of the most memorable ways of learning!
If after discussing your question with a TA or the instructor you feel that your work was misunderstood or otherwise should be looked at again to see if an appropriate grade was given we ask that you submit a written re-grade request as follows:
Note that when a written assignment, programming assignment, or test is re-graded, the entire work will be re-graded. This means that while it is possible to gain points, it is also possible to lose points.
See also Programming Guidelines for the course.
For each project the, approximate and subject-to-change grade breakdown is:
The reason why "so few" points are allocated toward program correctness and error-free compilation is because students who have gotten past CSE143 are smart enough to know how to get their code to compile and run against the general input (although testing "boundary conditions" is a skill which students should aim for), so program correctness and error-free compilation is neither a fair nor discriminating measurement of project quality.
The two biggest discriminating factors among CSE332 students are program design (such as style and architecture) and analysis (the README/writeup), which is why these factors are weighed a little heavily. Also, CSE332 is a course about data structures and the tradeoffs made during algorithm/data structure/abstraction design, so putting additional weight on program design, and questions about program analysis and weighing tradeoffs is more in keeping with the course goals.
We will keep track of any extra features you implement (the "Above and Beyond" parts). You won't see these affecting your grades for individual projects, but they will be accumulated over all projects and used to bump up borderline grades at the end of the quarter.