Grader guide

Grader guide#

While the grader is the intended audience here, others are welcome to read it.

General info#

  • Responsibilities section of the job post

  • Schedule

  • In grading/Discussions:

    • We want to try giving students just enough hints to figure it out without giving them the answer.

    • Don’t spend a ton of time trying to figure out something that you don’t understand; feel free to escalate to the instructor.

  • For students seeking one-on-one help, direct them to office hours.

    • If someone asks to meet with you specifically, you’re welcome to do so, but not required.

  • Notifications:

  • Log hours for any time you put in related to this class, including any learning you’re needing to do yourself to answer questions.

  • Keep an eye out for students who I should encourage to apply as a grader next term. Things to look for:

    • Being consistently helpful in the Discussions

    • Clean, well-documented solutions for the homeworks

    • Asking good questions

Weekly cadence#

Weeks end the day of class, the next one starts the day after. “Weeks” is therefore referring to the class-to-class cycle. These “weeks” may be longer than seven days if there’s no lecture due to a holiday.

Between-class participation tracking#

Helper notebook.

  • There are five weeks of participation tracked, from Lecture 0 through Lecture 5.

  • We can be fairly forgiving/generous with what counts as completion.

  • Every student should have each week marked one way or the other.

  • The instructor will mark participation for students that came to office hours.

  • Each week is represented as a gradebook item.

    • Every cell for previous weeks should be filled in.

    • Mark each student that participated as P (present).

    • Mark those who didn’t as A (absent).

Discussions#

  • Help page

  • We are trying to strike a balance between students getting accurate answers quickly and encouraging students to help one another to cement their learning.

  • Ensure Discussion questions have answers within the specified timeline.

    • Wait 24 hours to respond to questions that could be answered by another student, giving them a chance to do so.

      • Make sure homework questions have an answer within 48 hours, since they are time-sensitive.

      • Within 24 hours of when homework is due, answer questions as soon as possible to get students unstuck.

  • Please give corrections/clarifications on student answers where necessary.

  • If posts have the wrong Category, are a Question when they should be a Post or vice versa, please fix.

  • Mark correct answers as Accepted, if they aren’t already.

Check-in meeting#

  • How’s the workload?

  • Anything you need clarification on?

  • Any Discussions the instructor should jump in on?

  • What came up in Discussions/assignments (common problems, etc.) that might be useful to cover in class?

  • Are all cells in the gradebook filled in (through last week)?

Assignments#

It’s recommended that you create a GMail filter for something like from:google.com subject:"shared with you" ("colab notebooks" OR homework) to Skip Inbox so that you aren’t notified every time a student shares a notebook with you.

Checks#

The following should be true for each Assignment:

  • [ ] The description is a link to the assignment page on this site

  • [ ] Points

    • [ ] 100 points per Assignment, except for Homework 3 and the Final Project Proposal which are 50 each

    • [ ] Percentage of the overall grade matches the breakdown in the syllabus

  • [ ] Allow late submissions

  • [ ] Dates match the schedule:

    • [ ] Release Date is the start of the course

    • [ ] Due Date

      • Use the start of the second section, if applicable.

    • [ ] Late Due Date

      • Ditto.

  • [ ] Enable manual grading

  • [ ] Submission Methods Enabled: Upload only

  • [ ] It’s officially “linked” from Brightspace

  • [ ] It shows up in the Brightspace Gradebook properly

Grading#

Official docs

  • If points are deducted, explicitly state what the deductions are for.

  • If you’re having trouble accessing the notebook in Google Colab, make sure the URL doesn’t include an authuser parameter.

  • Scoring and regrade rules

  • You are checking student submissions against the solutions. That said, student code/output doesn’t need to look exactly like what’s in the solution, as long as they’re doing what’s asked for in each Step. When grading, points should only be deducted based on these criteria. Please leave comments for:

    • Point deductions, explaining what it’s being deducted for

    • Feedback like “this could be done better/differently,” even if there isn’t a corresponding point deduction

  • How to give extensions

    • Grant any request for 1-2 days made before the deadline; escalate others to the instructor.

    • Set the Late Due Date to the original late submission deadline or the new due date, whichever is later.

  • Solutions folder will be shared with you from Google Drive

    • The students don’t need to match the provided solution exactly, as long as they do what the question is asking.

  • Plotly doesn’t render in Gradescope. You’ll need to download the student notebook and view in Colab or another tool.

  • Per Gradescope support, “Unfortunately, there isn’t a way right now to assign “0” scores to all students without submissions on Gradescope. For now, the workaround would be to upload a blank/fake submission for each of the students who didn’t submit anything for the assignment on Gradescope and grade those submissions with a 0 score for all questions, so that the students have a 0 on Gradescope.” This is done through Manage Submissions. Feature request.

  • Note that you need to both Post Grades and Publish Grades.

  • Grader will manually apply late penalty

Plagiarism#

See the class policies for more details for what constitues plagiarism vs. fair use.

It isn’t your responsibility to look for potential instances of cheating/plagiarism. That said, if you have suspicions of those occuring, you must report them to the instructor. Things you might notice:

  • Use of a package we haven’t covered in class

  • Using a technique we didn’t cover in class

  • Multiple student submisions:

    • Being identical

    • Solving a problem in the same unusual way

Final Project#

Proposals#

  • Students are encouraged to submit before the deadline to get feedback sooner.

    • Please provide feedback on the proposals within four days of submission so that students can get started.

  • If the proposal shows effort and follows the format, full credit should be given.

  • Things to look for (don’t spend too long on these):

    • Will their dataset answer their question?

    • Do they have a question that is objectively answerable?

    • Will it be the right level of challenge for the duration of the project and their skills, not too much, not too little?

  • You will often need to provide feedback along the lines of:

    Your question is good, but you’ll probably be able to answer it in relatively few lines of code. Think about what your follow-up question(s) will be.

  • Constructive feedback can be given as a reply in Ed (where other students can see). If the proposal is bad, send an email.

    • In other words, avoid embarrassing anyone.

  • To indicate to a student that their proposal is good to go, mark the reply as Resolved.

Grading#

The Final Projects themselves are peer graded. We’re using Peerceptiv to facilitate the peer grading. Once the peer review deadline passes:

  1. Open each submission.

  2. For similarity scores over 20%, look at the report.

    • Matches in data output can be ignored.

    • If it seems like there may be instances of plagiarism or you’re not sure, let the instructor know.

  3. Calculate the median of the scores from the peers, using that as the final grade.

  4. In the Gradebook, give points to the reviewer under the Final Project Peer Review.

Scoring details.