Re: Marking of assignment 2

Ed Casas (edc@ece.ubc.ca) Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:30:51 -0800 

Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:30:51 -0800
From: Ed Casas <edc@ece.ubc.ca>
Subject: Re: Marking of assignment 2



On Wed, Feb 23, 2000 at 06:48:13PM -0800, Jonathan Lashin wrote:

> I realize that commenting your code is very important,
> but isn't it going a little overboard when the
> comments alone are worth 52% of the assignment, while
> the correct operation is worth only 17%?
> 
> Perhaps the title of the assignment was too
> misleading, and should have been called "Commenting in
> Assembly" instead of "8086 Programming".
>
> The reason I am upset about this is because I spent
> the whole day programming and testing to get the
> program to work properly, but I also commented every
> single line of code, which only took a few minutes.
> 
> Can we be informed of the marking scheme ahead of
> time, so that we don't invest huge amounts of time,
> only to lose a lot of marks on something that could
> have very easily be done in a few seconds, had we
> known exactly what we you were looking for?

There are a number of considerations involved in the selection of
the marking scheme.  Some are practical limitations, some have a
pedagogical basis and some are based on what I believe are the
important or difficult parts of a particular assignment.

First, the marking criteria have to be objective and easy for the
TA to evaluate.  The TA only has a few minutes to spend on each
paper, has limited knowledge of what's gone on in class and is
not a subject expert.

In this particular case I thought the best way for the TA to
judge the quality of the work was by looking at the comments.
The output of this program is so easy to forge that I didn't
think it reasonable to assign it a very high weight.

Second, I don't think it's a good idea to give out the marking
scheme ahead of time because I suspect it would bias your
efforts.  However, you can probably get a rough idea of how
future assignments, midterms and finals will be marked by looking
at previous years' marking schemes (available on the web).

Finally, the readability of a program is extremely important and
documenting it well requires a great deal of effort (hopefully
more than a ``few minutes'').  I think you'd find that the
quality of the comments is well correlated with the quality of
the code.

I hope that clarifies things.

-- 
Ed Casas   edc@ece.ubc.ca   http://casas.ece.ubc.ca   +1 604 822-2592