[NSWI004] Regarding Project Activity Points

[Ondřej Roztočil]

Hi,

the mailing list seems to be quiet lately. I would like to use this opportunity to post some questions and unsolicited critical thoughts about the concept of 'Project Activity Points' (see 00-common.md in grading repo) which is going to be relevant for students soon. I understand that the teachers have thought about this more than I have, so they probably had their reasons for setting the rules like this. However, I expect more students to have similar doubts and it might be useful to have some discussion to dispel these doubts.

I will try to be brief:

1) Using number of days on which students make a commit as a metric for points seems rather unfriendly towards their schedules. If a student communicates and plans with their team well, I don't see why they should be penalized for only having time to work on the assignments once a week, rather than twice a week, for example. This can of course be "gamed", but that seems silly and promotes bad Git practices.

2) Number of submitted lines of code is also a questionable metric. Generally, the shorter the code is (while retaining readability, etc.) the better. Or do you expect that everyone will need to write 2000+ LOCs anyway? Further, how does it work with Git history and what code is actually taken into question? Should teammates refrain from refactoring each other's code or they risk taking away their points?

3) Finally, more theoretical point. Maybe I am missing why there are teams for this course in the first place, but it seems to me that these 'Activity' rules teach the wrong lesson about team development: that writing code is the only valuable thing a person can do. Research, design, all sorts of communication - to give few examples relevant even for our limited project - are just as important as coding. Has a system without artificial metrics, where it is solely up to the teams to make sure everyone does a fair share of work, been tried in the past and it proved too problematic?

Sorry for not structuring this better and sorry to my teammates if I tanked our chances for passing the course.

Best regards

Ondřej
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