Marking Scheme

The following general principles will apply:

• The report should be clear, concise, and "reasonably" professional. That is, there should not be too many errors of presentation (grammar, spelling, etc.). The style need not be too formal (e.g. you can use the first person - "I did this..", "I tried that..." etc.) if that is what suits you. However, you should not be too informal either (e.g. using slang terms etc.).

• The report should follow the general outline detailed in previous sections.

• Full marks will be awarded only where all the elements asked for in the instructions have been successfully completed, tested, and adequately described in the report.

• Marks will generally be deducted if a report is too long, and, in particular, if it repeats significant extracts from the on-line notes.

Where a session involves several distinct parts or exercises, the instructions will state how the total marks are allocated between these exercises. Within each such part or exercise, marks will be allocated as follows:

• Plan: 10%.

  In more detail: this will be awarded on a qualitative assessment of whether the plan is coherent, whether it is appropriate, whether it deals adequately with the exercise as stated etc. It will not depend on whether you actually succeeded in carrying out the plan!

• Development: 60%

  10% will be awarded for presenting code which is even approximately correct - correct in outline. A further 10% is awarded if the code is free of syntactical errors (i.e. compiles successfully) - or if the report gives a good explanation of what syntactical errors are still present, and what steps were taken in trying to solve them. A further 10% is awarded for program style - whether the code is sensibly indented, with good line breaks, sensible spacing, meaningful identifiers, and effective comments etc.

  10% will be awarded simply for specifying, in detail, suitable run time test cases: i.e. tests to be carried out, and the (correct) expected behaviour. 10% will be awarded for presenting actual execution time results for these cases - clearly stating, in each case, whether the test was passed. A further 10% will be awarded if the program passes all such test cases, or if the report gives a good explanation of what errors are still present, and what steps were taken in trying to correct them.

• Conclusion: 10%

  These marks will be awarded provided the conclusion is a clear, concise, and accurate summary of what was achieved and/or learned.

• Bonus: 20%

  The final 20% is reserved as a "bonus" to be awarded entirely at the discretion of the marker. These marks will be awarded for particular excellence of various sorts. For example, where the report is particularly well written and presented; where the testing has been particularly comprehensive; where the code is particularly elegant; or where the report demonstrates particularly good problem solving skills. This last is especially important: the point being that, even if you get mired down in difficulties, and make little progress on the assigned exercise, you might still qualify for some or all of this bonus if you can demonstrate that you adopted an effective, logical, structured and systematic approach to trying to sort out the difficulties.