CS 4455
Video Game Design and Programming
Grading
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Grading

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Overview
Your final grade is made up of two major components, homework assignments, and a project. The weighting of these components is described below.
      Students are expected to do their own work at all times and to follow the university's codes of academic conduct and honor code. Cases of suspected collaboration or cheating will be immediately forwarded to the Dean of Student Affairs, and will be pursued to resolution. This is an unpleasant process for all involved, so please do not put yourself in this situation.
      Grading is determined by a term-long accumulation of points, weighed in percentage as stated for each component as summarized below. Determinations of the individual category breakdowns will be determined by looking for gaps or clumps in the final averages.

 

Homework Assignments
The regular homework assignments will be substantive and you will have about a week to do them. I anticipate giving around three of these. These regular homeworks will be worth 8% of your grade. Individual values will be determined later.

Project
One term-long game design project will be given in this course. The project will be broken down into five parts, each around five weeks in duration. Each of the substantive assignments is worth between 13% and 16% of your final grade. The project will have you develop a game. The assignments will have you specify a game, design it, build it, and evaluate it. The material which you turn in should be presented professionally, and should stress grammatical correctness and clarity. It will be submitted via on paper, with supplementary material via the Web. You will be judged on your originality, innovativeness, quality of writing, and correctness. Each assignment will be graded on a scale of 0 to 10. Further details will accompany each assignment.

Final Exam
The final exam will cover the lecture materials and the readings in the Course Pack. I expect you to have a basic grasp of these materials and of all parts of your project. You should be familiar with what went on in each aspect of your project.

Experiment Participation
My research group is doing user interface evaluation experiments this fall, and we need participants. We will "pay" each student who participates as a subject in our experiments 2 percentage points on the term's mark. Credit for participation in an experiment can only be applied to one class. 

Summary
Below is presented the weight of the different course components toward your final grade.

Component    Weight
Experiment Participation   2%
HWs   8%
Project part 1 - Game Proposal + Design Sketch   13%
Project part 2 - Design Specification + Interim Report   13%
Project part 3 - Minimum Target Progress Report   16%
Project part 4 - Alpha Release   16%
Project part 5 - Playtesting and Final Paper 14%
Final Exam 20%