[NSWI004] Regarding Project Activity Points

[Tomáš Kubíček]

I have similar doubts about this system and would appreciate discussion
about this topic.

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 22:26, Ondřej Roztočil <roztocil at outlook.com> wrote:

> 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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