Grading, Lateness, and Extensions

1) Overall Grade

Our goal for 6.s090 is to provide a learning opportunity, primarily through the homework exercises.

Your grade will be based on three separate pieces:

• Completion of Drills
• Completion of Practice Exercises
• Performance on Written Exercises

Your score for a particular unit is the weighted average of your scores on the exercises. The drills are worth 20% of the week's grade, the practice exercises 60%, and the written homeworks 20%. We expect most students to be near 100% completion of the exercises. You can use the grades page to track your progress.

Your final score will be an average of your grade for each unit (with the last unit being worth double).

Your final score will be mapped to a letter grade based on the scale described in MIT's definitions of letter grades. A rough estimate of how we expect this mapping to look is as follows:

• A: \gt 90\%
• B: \gt 80\%
• C: \gt 70\%
• D: \gt 60\%
• F: \lt 60\%

This course is pass/fail. In order to pass, you must both achieve at least a C average across all the units and demonstrate effort towards completing each unit (meaning earning at least 50% of credit each week).

If you have any questions about your performance in the class, please email us at lgo-python-staff@mit.edu.

2) Lateness

Our policies around lateness are designed to balance several goals, including encouraging healthy life choices (for example, sleeping at reasonable times without worrying about losing points), providing flexibility for when things get busy or unexpected events occur, and providing a regular structure to help you keep up with the class and avoid falling behind.

To this end, weekly exercises can be submitted late for partial credit within a limited window. Your score is based on your most recent submission as of the "cutoff" time (normally 11:59pm the Sunday night following the week's Friday deadline). Portions of the assignment that were complete before the regular deadline will receive full credit; and additional portions of the assignments that are complete in your most recent submission as of the cutoff time will receive 70% credit. Submissions made after cutoff time will not receive credit.

If you have any questions about this policy or its impact on your grade, let us know at lgo-python-staff@mit.edu.

3) Extensions

Friday due dates were chosen for several reasons including: trying to maintain a consistent workload schedule to help with time management and content retention (regular practice is key!), giving you enough time after the tutorial to do the assignments, considering when your other work is due, encouraging you to seek help at office hours if needed, and avoiding encouraging work on the weekends if possible.

All that being said, the instructors are aware that the summer term is very busy and we would much rather give you an extension than have you pull an all-nighter working on an assignment for this course. Our interest is in helping you learn (and making sure you don’t fall behind), not in contributing to burnout and exhaustion.

Acceptable reasons for requesting an extension may include: sickness, personal emergencies, an off-week, time mismanagement. To request an extension, please email lgo-python-staff@mit.edu with a vague explanation (no need to share personal details unless you want to) and a reasonable timeline of when you expect to finish the assignment (preferably this would be before the next tutorial so that the written assignment feedback can be released in a timely manner) and we will consider your request.

We are confident that students generally know their limits, can manage their time well, and can get their work done on time. We offer extensions because unexpected events are a part of life and we trust that you would only ask if there was a sincere need.