CS2113/T - Admin: Grade Breakdown

To receive full 5 marks allocated for participation, meet the criteria A, B, and C.

A Earned more than half of weekly participation points in at least 10 weeks.

Weekly quiz(es), if any:
- Quizzes open around the lecture time and stay open until the next lecture starts. In some weeks, there will be two quizzes (because two smaller quiz is easier for you to manage than one big quiz).
- When awarding participation points for quizzes, we look for two conditions:
  - Condition 1: submitted early i.e., within four days of the lecture i.e., lecture day + three more days (reason: to encourage learning the weekly topics before doing the weekly tasks)
  - Condition 2: answered correctly i.e., least 70% of the answers are correct (reason: to discourage random answers)
- You earn:
  - 3 points if you satisfy both conditions.
  - 2 points if only one of the conditions is satisfied.
  - 1 point if submitted but both conditions are not satisfied.
Weekly programming exercise (if any):
- 3 points if you submitted correct solutions for at least 75% of the exercises
- 2 points if you submitted correct solutions for 50-74% of the exercises
- 1 point if you submitted correct solutions for 25-49% of the exercises
TEAMMATES peer evaluation sessions: 2 points per session
Other weekly activities:
- There could be other activities related to the lecture, tutorial, or the administration of the module.
- Refer the activity description for evaluation criteria.
- Each activity earns 2 points unless specified otherwise.

Lecture in week N:

In-lecture quiz and other activities are counted for week N lecture participation.
Post-lecture quiz (if any) is counted for Week N+1

B Received good peer evaluations

-1 for each professional conduct criterion in which you score below average (based on the average of ratings received).

Q The team members' conduct in the project and during tutorials,

Evaluated based on the following criteria, on a scale Poor/Below Average/Average/Good/Excellent:

Peer Evaluation Criteria: Professional Conduct

Professional Communication :
- Communicates sufficiently and professionally. e.g. Does not use offensive language or excessive slang in project communications.
- Responds to communication from team members in a timely manner (e.g. within 24 hours).
Punctuality: Does not cause others to waste time or slow down project progress by frequent tardiness.
Dependability: Promises what can be done, and delivers what was promised.
Effort: Puts in sufficient effort to, and tries their best to keep up with the module/project pace. Seeks help from others when necessary.
Quality: Does not deliver work products that seem to be below the student's competence level i.e. tries their best to make the work product as high quality as possible within her competency level.
Meticulousness:
- Rarely overlooks submission requirements.
- Rarely misses compulsory module activities such as pre-module survey.
Teamwork: How willing are you to act as part of a team, contribute to team-level tasks, adhere to team decisions, etc. Honors all collectively agreed-upon commitments e.g., weekly project meetings.

No penalty for scoring low on competency criteria.

Q The competency of the team member demonstrated in the project and during the tutorials,

Considered only for bonus marks, A+ grades, and tutor recruitment
Evaluated based on the following criteria, on a scale Poor/Below Average/Average/Good/Excellent:

Peer Evaluation Criteria: Competency

Technical Competency: Able to gain competency in all the required tools and techniques.
Mentoring skills: Helps others when possible. Able to mentor others well.
Communication skills: Able to communicate (written and spoken) well. Takes initiative in discussions.

Q [Optional] Any ANONYMOUS feedback you want to give the classmates you reviewed above?

Q [Optional] Any CONFIDENTIAL comments about any team members?

C Tutorial attendance/participation not too low

Low attendance/participation can affect participation marks directly (i.e., attended fewer than 7) or indirectly (i.e., it might result in low peer evaluation ratings).

In addition, you can receive bonus marks in the following ways. Bonus marks can be used to top up your participation marks but only if your marks from the above falls below 5.

[For lecture participation] Participated in lecture activities (e.g., in lecture polls/quizzes) in at least 10 lectures: 1 mark
[For perfect peer ratings] Received good ratings for all 10 peer evaluations criteria: 1 mark
[For helping classmates] Was very helpful to classmates e.g., multiple helpful posts in forum: 1 mark

Examples:

Alicia earned 1/2, 3/5, 2/5, 5/5, 5/5, 5/5, 5/5, 5/5, 5/5, 5/5, 4/5, 5/5 in the first 12 weeks. As she received at least half of the points in 11 of the weeks, she gets 5 participation marks. Bonus marks are not applicable as she has full marks already.
Benjamin managed to get at least half of the participation points in 9 weeks only, which gives him 5-1 = 4 participation marks. But he participated in 10 lectures, and hence get a bonus mark to make it 5/5.
Chun Ming met the participation points bar in 8 weeks only, giving him 5-2 = 3 marks. He lost 2 more marks because he received multiple negative ratings for two criteria, giving him 1/5 participation marks.

Your participation progress can be tracked in this page from week 3 onward.

Total: 20 marks

Implementation [10 marks]: Requirements to get full marks:

Achieve more than 90% of all deliverables by the end.
- Requirements marked as optional or if-applicable are not counted when calculating the percentage of deliverables.
- When a requirement specifies a minimal version of it, simply reaching that minimal version of the requirement is enough for it to be counted for grading -- however, we recommend you to go beyond the minimal; the farther you go, the more practice you will get.
The code quality meets the following conditions:
- Reasonable use of OOP e.g., at least some use of inheritance, code divided into classes in a sensible way
- No blatant violations of the coding standard (both Java and Git conventions)
- At least some errors are handled using exceptions
- At least half of public methods/classes have javadoc comments
- The code is neat e.g., no chunks of commented out code
- Reasonable use of SLAP e.g., no very-long methods or deeply nested code

Project Management [5 marks]: To get full marks, you should achieve,

Submit some deliverables in at least 4 out of the 6 iP weeks (i.e., week 2 - week 7)
Follow other requirements specified (e.g., how to use Git/Github for each increment, do peer reviews) in at least 4 weeks

Documentation [5 marks]: To get full marks, you should achieve,

The product web site and the user guide is reasonable (i.e., functional, not hard to read, covers all features, no major formatting errors in the published view).

You can monitor your iP progress (as detected by our scripts) in the iP Progress Dashboard page.

Note that project grading is not competitive (not bell curved). CS2113T projects will be assessed separately from CS2113 projects. Given below is the marking scheme.

Total: 45 marks ( 40 individual marks + 5 team marks)

See the sections below for details of how we assess each aspect.

1. Project Grading: Product Design [ 5 marks]

Evaluates:

how well your features fit together to form a cohesive product
(not how many features or how big/novel/interesting/difficult the features are)
how well it matches the target user

Evaluated by:

the teaching team (based on product demo and user guide)
peers from other teams (based on peer testing and user guide)

Q Quality of the product design,
Evaluate based on the User Guide and the actual product behavior.

Criterion	Unable to judge	Low	Medium	High
`target user`	Not specified			Clearly specified and narrowed down appropriately
`value proposition`	Not specified	The value to target user is low. App is not worth using	Some small group of target users might find the app worth using	Most of the target users are likely to find the app worth using
`optimized for target user`		Not enough focus for CLI users	Mostly CLI-based, but cumbersome to use most of the time	Feels like a fast typist can be more productive with the app, compared to an equivalent GUI app without a CLI
`feature-fit`		Many of the features don't fit with others	Most features fit together but a few may be possible misfits	All features fit together to for a cohesive whole

In addition, feature flaws reported in the PE will be considered when grading this aspect.

Note that 'product design' or 'functionality' are not critical learning outcomes of the tP. Therefore, the bar you need to reach to get full marks will be quite low. For example, the Medium level in the rubric given in the panel above should be enough to achieve full marks. Similarly, only cases of excessive 'feature flaw' bugs will affect the score.

These are considered feature flaws:
The feature does not solve the stated problem of the intended user i.e., the feature is 'incomplete'
Hard-to-test features
Features that don't fit well with the product
Features that are not optimized enough for fast-typists or target users

2. Project Grading: Implementation [ 10 marks]

2A. Code quality

Evaluates: the quality of the parts of the code you claim as written by you

Evaluation method: manual inspection by tutors + automated-analysis by a script

Criteria:

At least some evidence of these (see here for more info)
- logging
- exceptions
- assertions
No coding standard violations e.g. all boolean variables/methods sounds like booleans. Checkstyle can prevent only some coding standard violations; others need to be checked manually.
SLAP is applied at a reasonable level. Long methods or deeply-nested code are symptoms of low-SLAP.
No noticeable code duplications i.e. if there multiple blocks of code that vary only in minor ways, try to extract out similarities into one place, especially in test code.
Evidence of applying code quality guidelines covered in the module.

2B. Effort

Evaluates: how much value you contributed to the product

Method:

This is evaluated by peers who tested your product, and tutors.

Q [For each member] The functional code contributed by the person is,
Consider implementation work only (i.e., exclude testing, documentation, project management etc.)
The typical iP refers to an iP where all the requirements are met at the minimal expectations given.
Use the person's PPP and RepoSense page to evaluate the effort.

Unable to judge
Significantly less than a typical iP
Slightly less than a typical iP
At least as much as a typical iP

The score could be further moderated by this question answered by team members.

Q The team members' contribution to the product implementation (excluding UG, DG, and team-based tasks) is,

Equal share i.e., if the team has 4 members, this person did 1/4 of the work
Equal share + 10% i.e., this person did about 10% more than an equal share (equal share x 1.10)
Equal share + 20% i.e., this person did about 20% more than an equal share (equal share x 1.20)
...
Equal share - 10% i.e., this person did about 10% less than an equal share (equal share x 0.90)
Equal share - 20% i.e., this person did about 20% less than an equal share (equal share x 0.80)

Note: Effort put into non-user-visible implementation work (e.g., major refactorings) can also be counted for this component of grading, but it is upto you to describe that work in your PPP so that evaluators can factor those in.

3. Project Grading: QA [ 10 marks]

3A. Developer Testing:

Evaluates: How well you tested your own feature

Based on:

functionality bugs in your work found by others during the Practical Exam (PE)
your test code (note our expectations for automated testing)

These are considered functionality bugs:
Behavior differs from the User Guide
A legitimate user behavior is not handled e.g. incorrect commands, extra parameters
Behavior is not specified and differs from normal expectations e.g. error message does not match the error

3B. System/Acceptance Testing:

Evaluates: How well you can system-test/acceptance-test a product

Based on: bugs you found in the PE. In addition to functionality bugs, you get credit for reporting documentation bugs and feature flaws.

Grading bugs found in the PE

Of Developer Testing component, based on the bugs found in your code3A and System/Acceptance Testing component, based on the bugs found in others' code3B above, the one you do better will be given a 70% weight and the other a 30% weight so that your total score is driven by your strengths rather than weaknesses.
Bugs rejected by the dev team, if the rejection is approved by the teaching team, will not affect marks of the tester or the developer.
The penalty/credit for a bug varies based on the severity of the bug: severity.High > severity.Medium > severity.Low > severity.VeryLow
The three types (i.e., type.FunctionalityBug, type.DocumentationBug, type.FeatureFlaw) are counted for three different grade components. The penalty/credit can vary based on the bug type. Given that you are not told which type has a bigger impact on the grade, always choose the most suitable type for a bug rather than try to choose a type that benefits your grade.
The penalty for a bug is divided equally among assignees.
Developers are not penalized for duplicate bug reports they received but the testers earn credit for duplicate bug reports they submitted as long as the duplicates are not submitted by the same tester.
i.e., the same bug reported by many testersObvious bugs earn less credit for the tester and slightly higher penalty for the developer.
If the team you tested has a low bug count i.e., total bugs found by all testers is low, we will fall back on other means (e.g., performance in PE dry run) to calculate your marks for system/acceptance testing.
Your marks for developer testing depends on the bug density rather than total bug count. Here's an example:
- n bugs found in your feature; it is a big feature consisting of lot of code → 4/5 marks
- n bugs found in your feature; it is a small feature with a small amount of code → 1/5 marks
You don't need to find all bugs in the product to get full marks. For example, finding half of the bugs of that product or 4 bugs, whichever the lower, could earn you full marks.
Excessive incorrect downgrading/rejecting/marking as duplicatesduplicate-flagging, if deemed an attempt to game the system, will be penalized.

5. Project Grading: Project Management [ 5 + 5 = 10 marks]

5A. Process:

Evaluates: How well you did in project management related aspects of the project, as an individual and as a team

Based on: tutor/bot observations of project milestones and GitHub data

Grading criteria:

Project done iteratively and incrementally (opposite: doing most of the work in one big burst)
Milestones reached on time (i.e., the midnight before of the tutorial) (to get a good grade for this aspect, achieve at least 75% of the recommended milestone progress).
Good use of GitHub milestones mechanism.
Good use of GitHub releases mechanism.
Good version control, based on the repo.
Reasonable attempt to use the forking workflow at least for the early part of the project.
Good task definition, assignment and tracking, based on the issue tracker.
Good use of buffers (opposite: everything at the last minute).

5B. Team-tasks:

Evaluates: How much you contributed to team-tasks

Here is a non-exhaustive list of team-tasks:

Setting up the GitHub team org/repo
Necessary general code enhancements
Setting up tools e.g., GitHub, Gradle
Maintaining the issue tracker
Release management
Updating user/developer docs that are not specific to a feature e.g. documenting the target user profile
Incorporating more useful tools/libraries/frameworks into the product or the project workflow (e.g. automate more aspects of the project workflow using a GitHub plugin)

Based on: peer evaluations, tutor observations

Grading criteria: Do these to earn full marks.

Do close to an equal share of the team tasks (you can earn bonus marks by doing more than an equal share).
Merge code in at least four of weeks 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

There is no midterm exam. Information about the final exam is given below.

The final exam will be as per the normal exam schedule, and will count for 30% of the final grade.
We will use Examplify for the final exam this time.

Exam structure

The exam duration is 90 minutes.

The final exam has two types of questions:

MCQ questions - includes True/False like concept questions and some multiple choice/response questions
Short-answer questions

All questions will be displayed at once as Examplify doesn't allow creating sections
Based on the question you are answering, you need to manage your time appropriately
Weightage of the questions will be displayed to help you with time management

Exam briefing, mock exam, practice exam paper

There will be an exam briefing in the penultimate lecture that covers Examplify usage.
You will be given a practice exam paper (smaller than the full paper) to help you practice timing. That practice paper will be released at least one week before the exam.

Grade Breakdown