Grading Policies
If you have any questions or concerns, please ask in lecture, during office hours, or on Piazza.
Graded work
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All homework and exams will be graded by Jeff and Chandra, directly within Gradescope. To keep grading consistent, each numbered problem is graded entirely by one person.
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Under normal circumstances, homework should be graded within one week of submission, and exampls should be graded within two weeks.
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Under normal circumstances, homework solutions are posted within 48 hours of the corresponding submission deadline, and exam solutions are posted within 24 hours of each exam. All homework and exam solutions include preiminary grading rubrics; graders may radjust or refine these rubrics on Gradescope during the grading process.
Regrade requests
If you believe that your score for any homework or exam problem is inconsistent with the published grading rubric, or that you were graded more harshly than other students for similar work, you can request a regrade.
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Submit regrade requests for homework and exams on Gradescope. If you have questions or concerns about any grade, we strongly encourage you talk with the course staff before submitting a regrade request. However, no grades will be changed in any student's presence; you must submit an official request through Gradescope.
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Regrade requests can be submitted up to two weeks after the graded work is released on Gradescope. Regrade requests for the final exam can be submitted up to three weeks after graded exams are released. However, final-exam regrade requests (and any other requests still outstanding after the final exam) will only be considered if a successful regrade would change the student's course grade.
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All regrade requests must include a brief written justification for the request. (Fill in the appropriate textbox on Gradescope.) Good justifications include the following:
- My answer agrees with the posted solution, but I still lost points.
- I lost 4 points for an incorrect time analysis, but the rubric says that's only worth 2 points.
- You took off points for missing the base case, but it's right here.
- My answer is correct, even though it does not match the posted solution.
- There is no explanation for my grade.
- The grading for this problem is bonkers; please regrade it from scratch.
Regrade requests with poor or missing justifications will be denied.
- We can only grade what you actually submitted. You cannot get a higher grade by explaining what you meant, either in person or in writing; your original submission must stand on its own.
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Most grading mistakes should be corrected after the first regrade request. We reserve the right to treat subsequent regrade requests for the same problem as requests to grade the problem again. To handle those requests, we will unmark all rubric items and delete all markup in Gradescope, and then give the problem to a different grader to grade from scratch. Your new grade could be higher or lower than your old grade.
Overall course grades
We will determine final course grades as follows. (What do you expect from an algorithms course?)
- Compute total scores from guided problem sets, homeworks, and exams.
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30% Homework:
Each submitted homework problem is worth 1.25% of your course grade.
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We expect to assign and grade about 30 homework problems during the semester.
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We will count a maximum of 24 homework problems, dropping the lowest scores if you submit more than 24.
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70% Exams:
There will be two midterm exams, each worth 20%, and a cumulative final exam worth 30%. We expect each midterm to have four problems and the final exam to have six, so each exam problem will be worth 5% of your course grade.
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Extra credit:
We may offer a small amount of extra credit for activites that support computer-science education research. Extra credit will depend only on participation, not performance, and does not require consent to use the results of your particiation for research purposes. All extra-credit opporuntities will be offered to the entire class (including students in Chicago), never to individual students.
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Exceptions:
- Forgiven homework will be treated as if it did not exist; submitted homeworks will have more weight in the overall grade computation. In exceptional cases, we may compute course grades based entirely on exams.
- Forgiven midterms will be treated as if they did not exist; their other exams will have more weight in the overall grade computation.
- We will not drop zero grades that result from cheating offenses.
- Exceptional cases.
- We reserve the right to give an F to any student with an overall exam average below 25%, OR submits less than half of the assigned homework problems, OR otherwise does not appear to making a good-faith effort. Historically, this rule applies to less than 1% of students.
- Anyone who misses both the regular final exam and the conflict final exam will be given an Incomplete and an opportunity to take a makeup exam early next semester. All Incompletes automatically convert to Fs on Reading Day in the Spring.
- Determine letter grades, according to the following fixed cutoffs. Each possible letter grade (except D+ and D–) covers a range of 6%. We reserve the right to lower these cutoffs. A+s will be awarded only under extraordinary circumstances.
- 82% ≤ A– < 88% ≤ A
- 64% ≤ B– < 70% ≤ B < 76% ≤ B+ < 82%
- 46% ≤ C– < 52% ≤ C < 58% ≤ C+ < 64%
- 40% ≤ D < 46%
- 0% ≤ F < 40%
- Adjust grades upwards at the instructor's whim. A+ grades will