[NSWI004] Quizzes and notes on semester conclusion

[Petr Tuma]

Hello,

the quizzes for the coming week are in the repo, as always. More importantly, we have some information about the semester conclusion - please read on, your explicit response (in the quiz file) is also needed.

1. Vacation period. There is official Christmas vacation from December 23 to January 3, inclusive. For the purpose of this course, the vacation period does not count towards deadlines - that is, if you submit assignment 05 on December 21, it counts as on time, December 22 is one day delay, January 4 is two days delay. AOE timezone, naturally.

At the same time, please expect possibly slower response to your mails throughout the vacation period, and expect that the grading of assignment 05 may be delayed until after the vacation period.

2. Quiz points. We plan to have three more graded quizzes (including the one posted now), for a total of 13 quizzes and a maximum of 65 points (100%). A minimum of 50% (33 points) is needed to pass, if you end up just below this threshold, we will check if your other results are good enough to warrant softening the threshold, this decision will be strictly individual.

3. Assignment points. We plan to have one more assignment, for a total of 6 assignments and 60 points. A minimum of 50% (30 points) is needed to pass, most teams have actually already passed this threshold.

3. Grading. As soon as you have enough points for a particular grade, you can get that grade. You do not have to complete the last quizzes or the last assignments. The grade computation is based on the average of your point percentages. If you have K% knowledge points (65 = 100%), I% implementation points (60 = 100%) and A% activity points (20 = 100%), we will compute (K+I+A)/3 and if that is at least 50%, you have enough points for "good" (3), at least 70% for "very good" (2) and at least 85% for "excellent" (1).

Based on our records, most of you already have enough points for some grade. From the feedback we receive, it looks quite likely that most of you, if not all, will stop at assignment 05, and some of you perhaps even at assignment 04. We think finishing assignment 05 is still quite useful from the learning perspective and would encourage you to do so. Finishing assignment 06, on the other hand, may not involve so much new stuff (our experience suggests the closing assignment is the most difficult one to debug simply because your kernel is already large at that point and interactions become complex). Also, we realize times are strange and you may want to have the exam period free for other classes (assignment 06 deadlines would stretch into the first week of the exam period).

What we need to know is who exactly, if anyone, will do assignment 06, so that we can prepare accordingly. We have included a question about this in `12-devices-before.md` (Q3), please fill it in when you answer the quiz.

4. Teams. If some members of your team decide they have enough points, but other members would prefer to continue, we will proceed based on how many members are left. If the team still has two members, we will expect it to finish as is (two members are still enough, the difference in manpower is partially compensaged by the reduction in coordination overhead anyway). If the team only has one member left, we will help you find another team where you can continue.

I'm sure I forgot something, so please ask away as needed :-)

Have a nice weekend, Petr

-- 
Petr Tuma
Distributed and Dependable Systems
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Charles University, Czech Republic
       http://d3s.mff.cuni.cz