Grading#

This section of the syllabus describes the principles and mechanics of the grading for the course.

Learning Outcomes#

The goal is for you to learn and the grading is designed to as close as possible actually align to how much you have learned. So, the first thing to keep in mind, always is the course learning outcomes:

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

  1. Differentiate the different classes of tools used in computer science in terms of their features, roles, and how they interact and justify positions and preferences among popular tools

  2. Identify the computational pipeline from hardware to high level programming language

  3. Discuss implications of choices across levels of abstraction

  4. Describe the context under which essential components of computing systems were developed and explain the impact of that context on the systems.

These are what I will be looking for evidence of to say that you met those or not.

Principles of Grading#

Learning happens through practice and feedback. My goal as a teacher is for you to learn. The grading in this course is based on your learning of the material, whether it takes one try or multiple tries.

This course is designed to encourage you to work steadily at learning the material and demonstrating your new knowledge. There are no single points of failure, where you lose points that cannot be recovered. Also, you cannot cram anything one time and then forget it. The material will build and you have to demonstrate that you retained things.

  • Earning a C in this class means you have a general understanding; you will know what all the terms mean and could follow along if in a meeting where others were discussing systems concepts.

  • Earning a B means that you can apply the course concepts in other programming environments; you can solve basic common errors without looking much up.

  • Earning an A means that you can use knowledge from this course to debug tricky scenarios and/or design aspects of systems; you can solve uncommon error while only looking up specific syntax, but you have an idea of where to start.

The course is designed for you to succeed at a level of your choice. No matter what level of work you choose to engage in, you will be expected to revise work until it is correct. As you accumulate knowledge, the grading in this course is designed to be cumulative instead of based on deducting points.

No Grade Zone#

At the beginning of the course we will have a grade free zone where you practice with both course concepts and the tooling and assignment types to get used to expectations. You will get feedback on lots of work and begin your Know, Want to know, Learned (KWL) Chart in this period.

Grading Contract#

In about the third week you will complete, from a provided template, a grading contract. In that you will state what grade you want to earn in the class and what work you are going to do to show that. If you complete all of that work to a satisfactory level, you will get that grade. The grade free zone is a chance for you to get used to the type of feedback in the course and the grading contract template will have example contracts for you to use.

Most work will be small, frequent activities, but for an A you will also do larger, more in depth activities.

All contracts will include maintaining a KWL Chart for the duration of the semester, coming to class prepared, participating in class activities, and collaborating with peers to maintain reference materials.