Grading Policies

Table of contents

Grade Allocation

Your final grade will be calculated according to the following breakdown:

Letter grades will be determined at the end of the semester. Boundary assignments are done heuristically—there are no grade quotas or targets, and there is no centering of the grade distribution at a particular boundary (i.e., we do not “curve” the class).

In our final grading meeting, we will consider each student individually and judge your performance across the entire class. As a result, we are better able to take into account, and make adjustments for, a single bad grade in an otherwise consistent record.

Lateness and Extensions

Every student has 7 slack days that you can use, no questions asked, for additional flexibility during periods of heavy workload, minor illness, absences from campus (e.g., interviews, conference trips, sports meets, etc.), special occasions (e.g., religious holidays, family events, etc.), or unexpected problems. These slack days may be used in accordance with the following requirements:

  1. Slack days may only be used for individual assignments (i.e., A1–4). They cannot be used on the final team project, nor on design reviews or peer critiques.

  2. You may use at most 3 slack days for any given deadline.

  3. Slack days apply in 24-hour chunks. You cannot chop a slack day up into slack hours or minutes.

  4. You must request slack days before an assignment is due. Use this form to request slack days. A copy of your request will be emailed to you, and you will be responsible for tracking how many slack days you have left.

Late submissions not covered by a slack day will incur a penalty of 10% of the total available grade for each day of lateness. Note: while we will endeavor to return graded work to you as soon as possible, if you use slack days, this will likely delay receiving feedback on your work.

Additional Support

In the event you experience an emergency or illness that cannot be accommodated via slack days, we will of course work with you on an appropriate extension. However, to support your request, we ask that you get in contact with the following on-campus offices, and include written support from them (including an explicit description of how many days extension they believe you should be granted) as part of your request to us.

Undergraduate Students: Student Support Services (S3). If you are dealing with a personal or medical issue that is impacting your ability to attend class, complete work, or take an exam, you should contact a dean in Student Support Services (S3). S3 is here to help you. The deans will verify your situation, provide you with support, and help you work with your professor or instructor to determine next steps. In most circumstances, you will not be excused from coursework without verification from a dean. Please visit the S3 website for contact information and more ways that they can provide support.

Graduate Students: GradSupport. As a graduate student, a variety of issues may impact your academic career including faculty/student relationships, funding, and interpersonal concerns. In the Office of Graduate Education (OGE), GradSupport provides consultation, coaching, and advocacy to graduate students on matters related to academic and life challenges. If you are dealing with an issue that is impacting your ability to attend class, complete work, or take an exam, you may contact GradSupport by email at gradsupport@mit.edu or via phone at (617) 253-4860.

Life at MIT is intense, fast-paced, and exciting. But it can also be exhausting, and almost all students have times when they feel demoralized or frustrated. Campus can seem like a lonely place even when you’re surrounded by others. The staff of this class is deeply committed to making your experience this semester valuable and, hopefully, joyful as well.

Collaboration and Reuse

Good design is all about collaboration—getting inspiration from other ideas, remixing them into your own, getting and making critiques of design. So, we encourage it in within certain limits.

Individual assignments. The first four assignments are solo assignments, and should be completed without collaboration. You are welcome to talk with other students as part of high-level discussions, but each of you should complete the specific analysis, design, and implementation pieces of an assignment by yourself.

Programming labs. The programming labs are, similarly, designed as solo problem sets to make sure that you learn the requisite skills to productively contribute to the final team project. As a result, while we are happy for you to discuss approaches with one another, and look to online resources such as StackOverflow for debugging help, your code and write-up must be your own (this helps to ensure you really understand the material yourself!).

Team Project. All members of the team must work together on all parts of the project (i.e., data analysis, design, implementation), and each of you is expected to contribute a roughly equal share to these components. Except in unusual circumstances, all members of the team will receive the same grade for completed work.

Unless otherwise stated in an assignment, you are free to use any third-party code, whether as libraries or code fragments, and to adopt any idea you find online or in a book as long as it is publicly available and appropriately cited (see the section on code in the MIT Handbook on Academic Integrity for details). Please include these citations directly on your visualization(s) as well as part of any required writeups.

Academic Integrity

In this course, we will hold you to the high standard of academic integrity expected of all students at the Institute. We do this for two reasons. First, it is essential to the learning process that you are the one doing the work. We have structured the assignments in this course to enable you to gain a mastery of the course material. Failing to do the work yourself will result in a lesser understanding of the content, and therefore a less meaningful education for you. Second, it is important that there be a level playing field for all students in this course and at the Institute so that the rigor and integrity of the Institute’s educational program are maintained.

Violating the Academic Integrity policy in any way (e.g., plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, cheating, etc.) will result in official Institute sanction. Possible sanctions include receiving a failing grade on the assignment or exam, being assigned a failing grade in the course, having a formal notation of disciplinary action placed on your MIT record, suspension from the Institute, and expulsion from the Institute for very serious cases.

Please review MIT’s Academic Integrity policy and related resources (e.g., working under pressure; how to paraphrase, summarize, and quote; etc.) and contact me if you have any questions about appropriate citation methods, the degree of collaboration that is permitted, or anything else related to the Academic Integrity of this course.