Submission and Assessment of Programming Assignments

Due dates, grace periods, and late submissions. Each programming assignment will have a due date announced in the course organizer. Submissions may be made at any time and as often as desired, as long as they are received before the due date. New submissions will just overwrite the previous submission. Once the due date arrives, a 5-day grace period begins. (Typically, due dates are at the end of the weekend (Sunday) and the grace period extends through the following Friday. All days end at midnight eastern time.) During the grace period, submissions are date stamped (NOT time stamped), and each date stamped submission in the portfolio will "cost" 5% of the grade off the top. Note these subtleties:

  1. Once a date-stamped submission has been made, all subsequent submissions on the same date will overwrite the existing one, and hence they cannot be counted against the grade. So, once you have submitted on a given day, all other submissions on that day are "free".
  2. The number of days between submission is also not relevant to the grade, so it is sensible not to submit after the deadline until you are confident the project will receive a good assessment.
  3. Beware of midnight eastern time - the date changes at that instant.

Once the grace period ends, submissions will be marked LATE and will not be assessed.

Assessment. Programming assignments will be assessed in two stages: (1) objective testing and (2) subjective assessment and grading. Both stages will be handled by a member of the instructional team. Stage (1) will be an scrppt-based process that builds the submitted assignment and, if the build is successful, subjects the executable to a series of tests, all under the watchful eye of an instructor. Stage (2) is carried out after testing: The instructor will read the test report, the source code, and other deliverables, and arrive at a grade for the assignment using a rubric designed for the assignment and the requirements stated in the assignment document.

Each assignment will have detailed assessment rubric modified from the following general guidelines:

 Assignment Assessment Guidelines - details may vary 
 Criterion   Approximate Percentage Points Range   
 Deliverables Received and Project Builds Cleanly     0 ... 25 
 Results of Testing   0 ... 25 
 Project Meets Requirements  0 ... 25 
 Software Engineering Considerations   -25 ... 25 

Software engineering considerations include readability, design, style, safety, and appropriate use of language and library features. Note that any choice you make is important and subject to evaluation. Thus every choice should be made thoughtfully and with a rationale that can be given for making that choice.

Once the assignment has been assessed using the rubric, a detailed grade report will be emailed to the student at the CS email address.