Requirements

Summary of grading criteria:

• 5% - Online quizzes
• 45% - Homework assignments
• 5% - Discussion participation
• 20% - Midterm
• 25% - Final

Final letter grades will be based on the relative distribution of total scores and not on any preset numerical grade.

Quizzes

About ten quizzes will be given on RamCT throughout the semester. Six of them will be before the midterm exam, and four thereafter.

Assignments

Assignments will be of two types. Each assignment needs to be turned in electronically by 11:59 pm on the due date.

There will be a couple of programming assignments that involve writing code to implement requirements and use design patterns, and also writing code to implement test cases.

There will be a long project with several deliverables including requirements, use cases, domain models, design models, program code, and test code. This will be done as an iterative project with code due several times during the semester.

Ideally, this project should be done as a team of two. However, since we know it is difficult for distance learning students to work in a team, they will do this project individually. Students still have the option of working on a team project, but our expectations with respect to the application's features will be higher.

Discussions

Abour ten discussion assignments will be given; six of these will be before the midterm exam, and four thereafter. Students must actively participate in the discussion forums on RamCT. Each discussion group will have about 4-5 members, and may contain both on-campus and distance students.

While specific instructions will be given for each discussion assignment, in general, we expect each student to make an initial posting for each assignment, followed by responses to other students' postings. Merely having one sentence that says, for example, "I agree with everyone", is not enough to get a grade.

Exams

There are two "take-home" exams (midterm and final). Students can expect to have about 6 days to write their answers.