Section Grading Specifications
This page describes the specifications that your submitted work must meet to receive credit and to receive Master or Proficient for the assignments for which that is a possibility. It is extremely important that you read this page carefully and reference it throughout the semester as you complete assignments to ensure you are doing what I expect of you.
Subsection General Expectations for All Work
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Your work is evaluated mainly on the quality of your reasoning and explanations, and only somewhat on the correctness of your answers. Whenever you submit work that has a “final answer” it must be accompanied by an explanation of how you got it and why you think it’s correct. Such explanations are generally a combination of English text and math. The English used must be clearly and simply stated. Grammatical correctness is less important, but excessive errors can make an explanation unclear. Mathematical work must be logically organized and legible. Unless the item says otherwise, a response given without explanation will not be considered correct or a good-faith effort at correctness.
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The target audience for your explanations is your classmates. Your explanation should allow a person who has the same level of training and background as you - but who has no familiarity with the problem you are solving - to follow your solution from beginning to end and agree with your answer, without having to do much or any extra work and without accepting anything on faith. If your explanation skips steps; or simply asserts that something is true rather than explains why; or uses language that is unclear or hard to follow; or is disorganized or illogical; or other such things, it will probably not meet the specifications.
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Solutions to problems should generally be free of any significant errors, and you should try to submit work that is totally free of these. The next section below goes into detail about what is considered an “significant error”. On the other hand, minor errors are typically ignored as long as there are not too many of them. The next section explains what a “minor error” is and gives examples.
Subsection Significant Errors and Minor Errors
The question that I am trying to answer when grading an assignment is:
Does the student’s work show clear and sufficient evidence that they have mastered the core concepts and processes for this assignment?
Solutions that provide this evidence are usually successful, even if they have small things that are still wrong. Solutions containing items that suggest this mastery is not yet present usually aren’t. This means that your goal in every assignment you submit for a grade is exactly to provide this clear and sufficient evidence that you have mastered the content, in the form of clear, correct, and complete solutions as described above.
This is not about “right answers” or “wrong answers”. Your answer could be wrong for reasons unrelated to the core ideas of the problem and your grasp of the core concepts still be evident. On the other hand, your solution could arrive at the right answer, but the work supporting that answer does not show evidence of mastery of the core concepts.
Errors come in four main flavors:
- Computation errors
- This is when you simply make a mistake in computing something; like multiplying \(1\times 2\) and getting \(3\text{.}\)
- Logical errors
- This is where you draw incorrect conclusions from data. For example, if you conclude that since \(xy=0\) both \(x=0\) and \(y=0\text{,}\) you have made a logical error. You should have only concluded that \(x=0\) or \(y=0\) - both need not be true.
- Factual errors
- This is where you misstate or misuse a definition, theorem, step of an algorithm, or parameter from a problem statement. For example, you might miscopy the problem statement and change a number or incorrectly remember an equation from a theorem or algorithm. Many errors in mathematics solutions are of this kind. Fortunately, these are easy to avoid by slowing down and double-checking your work.
- Semantic errors
- This is where you make a grammatically correct statement which nonetheless is devoid of meaning or content. For example, writing "The gradient of the domain is 4" has no meaning, because a domain is a set of inputs and does not have a gradient (and also a gradient is generally not a number). These are often hard to notice, because learning to make meaning in a new area is hard!
Errors (of these kinds or others) may be either significant or minor.
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A significant error is one pertaining directly to the core concepts of the problem/assignment it occurs on. It calls into question your understanding or mastery of those concepts.
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A minor error does not pertain directly to the core concepts of the problem/assignment it occurs on, and your understanding or mastery of those concepts is still evident despite the error.
Which of these levels a particular error falls into depends a lot on context and will be at my discretion to decide. Whenever you make errors of any level of seriousness we will point it out in the feedback you receive. Typically you will also have a chance to correct it (see the Reattempts section of the syllabus).
Subsection Specifications for Assignments
This section lays out the criteria that I will use to decide whether your work is “successful”, organized by assignment type.
Subsubsection Engagement Credit Items
These are graded based on completeness and effort only, with the full engagement credit amount awarded when the submission is a good-faith effort at a complete submissions and is submitted prior to the deadline and no credit awarded otherwise. This means:
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The item must be turned in prior to the deadline, not after
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Each part of the item must have some response, unless labeled “Optional”. You may not skip or omit parts of the item; and the item will not receive credit if parts are skipped or omitted, even if by accident, or if work on any one part is significantly incomplete.
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Each response must be an attempt to respond correctly to the prompt. For example, you may not submit "I don’t know" as a response to a short-answer or long-form text question. If you don’t know how to do a problem in this course, you are expected to ask for help, either from me, from our LA, or from a classmate.
These criteria do not apply to class attendance. You will earn 2 engagement credits for attending a class meeting other than an exam or exam reattempt session for at least 50 minutes.
Subsubsection Specifications for Exams
As listed in the Syllabus, the exams will consist of several parts. One part will consist of true/false, multiple choice, or fill-in/state definition/theorem type questions. The others will be groups of problems where you will select one problem in each group to work. (The group may have size one sometimes.)
Exams are graded holistically. So although we will give you feedback on the individual items on the exam, your earned grade is for the overall work on the exam.
- Master
- Approximately 9/10 of the true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in items are correctly answered. The work from the problem groups is done with no significant errors and no more than 3-5 minor errors overall.
- Proficient
- Approximately 7/10 of the true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in items are correctly answered. The work from the problem groups is done with at most one group having a significant error and no more than 3-5 minor errors overall.
- Beginner
- The criteria for Proficient is not met, or one or more problem groups has no significant attempt at a solution.
The individual parts of each exam will be marked Success/Retry on Gradescope to help you know which portions need to be reattempted later. But only the overall holistic mark contributes to your course grade.
Subsubsection Specifications for the Video Project
The video project’s requirements have three parts. First, there are required checkpoints that need to be met throughout the semester. Failing to meet these will result in a Beginner mark on the project.
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Feb. 12: Select Video Project Team
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Feb. 26: Submit Video Project Topic & Team Contract
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Mar. 19: Submit Video Project Report
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Apr. 28: Submit Video Project
Second, your submitted video project needs to meet the criteria outlined on the Video Project Information page. This page will detail how the content of your project will be evaluated to determine Master/Proficient marks for the team deliverable.
Finally, your team’s mark for the video is modified (up or down) based on team evaluations and the criteria that you each select for yourselves in your Team Contract to arrive at your final individual mark. More details will be available as we approach the Team Contract submission.
