Grading

Exams

Exams are graded collectively by the CS111 instructors. Many questions require us to use judgement, and we do our best to be both consistent and fair. If you think we made a mistake grading your exam, please come talk to us. Do not write on the exam at all if you will seek a regrade. We will consider the regrade and return the exam to you as soon as possible.

You should not communicate with any other person about the contents of any CS111 exam before or after taking it except CS111 instructors. Any violation of this policy will be brought before the Honor Code Council.

There will be two kinds of exams in this course, which are detailed in the following three sections.

In-Class Midterm Exam

There will be one in-class midterm exam during lab (see the Schedule for the exam date).

This is a pencil-and-paper exam; you are not allowed to use any computers or other electronic devices (including smartphones!).

This is an open-notes exam: you may bring with you any of your own notes, as well as hardcopies of any course materials from the semester. However, your time to consult notes during the exam will be limited, so we encourage you to make a one- or two-page summary of key notes you may want to consult as part of studying for the exam.

Final Exam

There will be a 2.5-hour self-scheduled final exam that you can take in any one of the slots during the final exam period.

This is a pencil-and-paper exam; you are not allowed to use any computers or other electronic devices (including smartphones!).

This is an open-notes exam: you may bring with you any of your own notes, as well as hardcopies of any course materials from the semester. However, your time to consult notes during the exam will be limited, so we encourage you to make a one- or two-page summary of key notes you may want to consult as part of studying for the exam.

Grading

Your course grade will be based on a weighted average of the following components:

At the end of the semester, we will compute a weighted average for each student and assign letter grades.

In general, the mapping from numerical score to letter grades looks like this:

Depending on the overall performance of the class, we may adjust this mapping.

The above information is intended to tell you how we grade. It is not intended to instill in you a preoccupation with point accumulation. We encourage you to treat points in this class as you would Monopoly money. If you focus on learning the material, the grade will normally take care of itself.

Note: for the problem set portion of your score, we will average the scores you got on each individual task, so a problem set with only 1 task on it is worth only 1/3 as much as a problem set with 3 tasks, and in general, it doesn't make sense to talk about an average score for a problem set.