Max=332; min=57; avg=223; std=54.
above 300 points corresponds to an A;
Some students have asked to receive more
information on their grades for their Final Projects.
Since we cannot give detailed explanations
to all 70 teams, here are some explanations
that might explain why your assessment may
differ from the final number of points received.
First, a hard, rigid point scale simply
does not work all that well, when people do such diverse things
as we have seen in this class. The point scale
that we provided, was meant to give you ideas
of what technical problems you should attack
and what we considered their relative difficulties.
One common misconception that we found, when
we looked at your self-assessment scores,
was that many students thought that they could
simply add all their entries in a single category.
For instance in the group about "locomotion"
we might find a suggested score like:
Sliding + Flying + Rolling + Walking = 60;
and this would be maxed out at 40.
However, our assessment might look at it more
in this way:
Highest achievement = Walking, but not bug-free
=> 25 points.
Also, the same basic technical achievement
cannot be counted more than once in different categories.
Also, other important criteria are: how well-integrated
your project is, how smoothly it was running,
how well the various effects could be demonstrated,
and how well the UI controls were working.
For stellar performance in any of these areas,
you were given more credit,
but for deficiencies in this respect, credit
was also taken off.
Finally there were some more subjective judgements
concerning:
aesthetics and overall cohesiveness and choreography.
As a sanity check, and to avoid that the point
scheme would lead to any unreasonable scores,
we "bin-sorted" all projects into equivalence
classes of what we felt were projects
that seemed to be of the indistinguishable
quality and levels of achievement.
Then, considering all of the above criteria,
we assigned grades to all these equivalence classes,
-- and, equivalently, "score points" from
the scale on the project score sheet.
This was done on an absolute scale of what
we consider to be:
for instance, "A-quality," or
"the boundary between B and C," etc.
There were a couple of projects that were
off-scale at the top end;
but they simply got an A+ without affecting
the rest of the grades.
Overall this was a good class, and the project scores reflect this !
If you still have questions about your project,
you may contact the TA's
after we are done grading the Final Exam (probably
some time late Wednesday).