Grades

For three-credit students, the cumulative score for the semester is a weighted sum of component scores, with the following weights:

  • 15%: Quizzes

  • 45%: Machine problems

  • 10%: Exam 1

  • 10%: Exam 2

  • 20%: Final exam

For four-credit students, the cumulative score for the semester is a weighted sum of component scores, with the following weights:

  • 12%: Quizzes

  • 33%: Machine problems

  • 7.5%: Exam 1

  • 7.5%: Exam 2

  • 15%: Final exam

  • 25%: Literature Review

In addition to these things, extra credit is available for some of the machine problems. Extra credit will also be given (up to 1%) for students who answer a lot of questions on CampusWire.

More information on each of these things is available as follows:

Late Policy

Every assignment (every quiz, every MP, every component of the 4-credit project) can be submitted late, with a penalty: your assignment grade will be multiplied by \(\max(0.5,1-t/20)\), where \(t\) is the lateness of your submission in days. For example, if you’re late by up to one day, you can earn 95% credit; if you’re late by any number of days greater than 9, you can still earn up to 50% credit.

Late penalties are not applied prior to February 3. Any assignment due in January can be submitted up through February 2 without penalty. The lateness of such an assignment is the number of days after February 2 that the assignment is submitted.

Warning

Warnings about the late penalty

  • Gradescope does not show you the late penalty. If you want to know what your score really is, you need to check Gradescope’s lateness field, and calculate your late penalty yourself.

  • The late penalty is not waived for illness, or for any other reason. The late penalty is mild on purpose, so that it is possible to recover from an illness and still submit the homework for most of the available points.

Collaboration Policy

  • You may not share code with other students.

  • You may copy code from any source you find on the web, as long as your code contains comments giving the source URL.

  • Most other types of collaboration are allowed: please feel free to share verbal descriptions of solution ideas, block diagrams, limited bits of pseudocode, and pointers to web resources with other students.

Grade Cutoffs

Grade cutoffs are approximately as follows, where \(\mu\) is the class average, \(\sigma\) is the standard deviation. These thresholds are not guaranteed, but they rarely change by much.

\[ \begin{align}\begin{aligned}&A+:\min\left(0.99,\mu+1.5\sigma\right), A:\min\left(0.94,\mu+0.5\sigma\right), A-:\min\left(0.90,\mu+0.25\sigma\right)\\&B+:\min\left(0.85,\mu\right), B:\min\left(0.80,\mu-0.75\sigma\right), B-:\min\left(0.75,\mu-\sigma\right)\\&C+:\min\left(0.70,\mu-1.25\sigma\right), C:\min\left(0.65,\mu-2\sigma\right), C-:\min\left(0.60,\mu-2.25\sigma\right)\\&D+:\min\left(0.55,\mu-2.5\sigma\right), D:\min\left(0.50,\mu-2.75\sigma\right), D-:\min\left(0.45,\mu-3\sigma\right)\end{aligned}\end{align} \]