[Unified-mailman] Fwd: submitting computer files

[Carl C Dietrich]

Dear Students,

To increase the happiness/life-expectancy of your graders (which is always a
good thing for
everyone), please take note of the requests below.  The requests are not
unreasonable,
and they may help you easily catch unintended errors in your submitted code.

-Carl


----- Forwarded message from JoHanna Przybylowski <johannap at MIT.EDU> -----
    Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 05:32:09 -0400
    From: JoHanna Przybylowski <johannap at MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: JoHanna Przybylowski <johannap at MIT.EDU>
 Subject: submitting computer files
      To: unified-gta at mit.edu

Ack. Sorry for the multiple emails.

I almost forgot, Carl had asked me to put in writing what I was explaining 
about submission of computer problems.

Basically, I'd like students to test run the files after zipping them, just 
before submission; it would save the graders a great deal of time. And at 
least, as was the case on this last pset reduce the debugging graders had 
to do. For example, it took me about 30min to figure out that the reason 
the output to file in the palindrome program wasn't working was because the 
student assumed that the output file already existed.

Also, I think sometimes students might be accidently submitting the wrong 
version of their code. The most obvious example is submitting code listings 
rather than code. Having them check by running the code would let them 
catch the error.

And it would be nice if students who don't have the full program working 
(i.e. they only were able to implement part of it) state what works and 
what doesn't work. They should also leave the code in a form that can be 
compiled and tested, even if it doesn't fully answer the problem.  That 
would save grading time tremendously and eliminate situations where I spend 
a chunk of time trying to debug why JK's original code doesn't work for 
something it wasn't written for; yes, someone simply turned in an 
unmodified version of JK's code.

An example for this upcoming pset, I told someone today at office hours was 
that if they didn't have time make the code to insert a node in the middle 
of a doubly linked list run correctly, but had insert_head and insert_tail 
working, they could submit a code that runs and demonstrates that 
insert_head and insert_tail run and mention that insert_middle was not 
working. I also suggested simply commenting out the part that doesn't run 
correctly rather than deleting it.

If you guys could send out my comments in a more coherent email, I think we 
can make grading computer programming problems run much smoother.

Thanks
-johannap


----- End forwarded message -----