Tuesday, October 27, 2009 2:49 AM,

A student writes:



	 Hello Dr. Patt,
	 
	 Do you give partial credit when grading programs? Or is it either 100 
	 or 0?I was just thinking about mine and realized I made a small mistake...
	 
	 I wanted to see if it would benefit me more to keep it as is or 
	 turning in a perfect one for an 80...
	 
	 <<name withheld to protect the student preoccupied with grades>>



I do understand the preoccupation, and I know I am kidding myself when I tell 
you that the few points you worry about will do far less to improve your grade 
than if the time were used to really understand the material.

So, with an old man's look of resignation, I simply sigh and answer the 
question.

It is generally not 0 or 100.  I guess you must have gotten 0 or 100 on the 
first program or you would have known that.  Plenty of grades in between, 
although it is true they tend to cluster closer to 0 and 100 than far away 
from those two grades.

We test the program on a large number of inputs, and assign points for each 
test you get right, 0 if you get it wrong.  We choose each input so that the 
set of inputs are testing different things, so it is likely a bug may not show 
up with one input, but show up with another.  Then we look at the program as a 
whole to see if we can identify a reason for the good or bad number of points.
So, many students will score less than 100 and more than 0.

Sometimes a small bug has disastrous results, so you will end up with zero as 
your grade because you did some bobo thing.  If that happens, you need to show 
the program to the TA - not a "fixed" program, but the EXACT program you 
submitted.  If he agrees that it should not have resulted in such a low grade, 
he will bring it to my attention and we will grade the program again.

NOTE: This does not mean you are allowed to fix the bugs in the program you 
submitted.  You had that opportunity for program 1 only.  But if you believe 
your grade was too harsh as a result of a small error, you should bring it to 
the attention of one of the TAs, and it will get back to me for reassessment.

OK?

Good luck with the rest of the course.  
Yale Patt