Assessments

Your overall course grade is made up of the following:

  • Practice Exercises: 14%
  • Weekly Assignments: 36%
  • Midterm Project: 25%
  • Final Project: 25%

Practice Exercises

You will have series of practice exercises throughout the term to help you better understand web applications. You are strongly encouraged to complete the practice exercises and make the required submission on Gradescope. They will be graded based on completion, not correctness.

Why Practice?

Practice coding helps you become a great coder. These practice problems aren't graded, but that doesn't mean they aren't important.

You should aim to practice a lot, especially with unfamiliar concepts. Spread practice over multiple days to take advantage of the spacing effect, which helps you retain new knowledge.

More about practice

Practice helps you understand what you know, and what you don't know. It can be easy to trick yourself into thinking you understand something when you do not -- or that you don't understand when you do. Practicing by writing code or debugging code will help you find out what you really understand, and where you are still confused.

Practice helps build confidence in your coding. The more programs you write, and the more problems you solve, the more you learn that you are a capable coder and problem-solver.

Practice doesn't always feel good - sometimes you'll be stumped! But, practice shouldn't feel super frustrating either. If you find yourself getting angry at yourself or the code, it's a good time to take a break and ask for help.

On the flip side, if practice feels too easy, it means you aren't challenging yourself enough. If the practice problems early in the course are not challenging for you, you should seek additional challenges.

Assignments

Each week you will be given an assignment (or project), where you'll practice the concepts covered in the readings and lessons. The assignments let you practice with the topics you covered that week, explore applications and connections, and check your own understanding of the material.

Projects

You will have a midterm project and a final project in this course. Projects are larger in scale and will give you an opportunity to work with larger amounts of code to solve more complex problems. You will be given two weeks to complete each project. They represent a significant portion of your grade, and so it is important that you start these projects as early as possible.

Submission

All of your work must be submitted in Gradescope and Anchor.

For projects with a Github link, you should also push the latest version of your code to Github Classroom.

This video shows how to get assignment code onto your computer, and how to submit it to Github Classroom.

Submitting Assignments in Github, Gradescope, and Woolf

Late Policy

The assignments in the course build on each other. It is important to turn your work in on time, both for your own learning, and as a matter of professionalism.

If you know that you will not be able to submit an assignment on time, please contact the instructor to provide the reason and ask for an extension. Note that you need to notify the instructor before the assignment is due.

In general, the penalty for late submission of an assignment is 25% of the assignment grade.