Assignments Overview
Canvas is the source of truth for this term’s assignments. This page may already show changes Canvas does not have yet.
This page holds the rules every assignment shares: how each term’s grade is built, how to submit, how rubrics score your work, late work, AI use, and TA check-ins. An assignment’s own page says what is due, when, and how it is scored, and notes any exception to these rules.
Grade Architecture
Section titled “Grade Architecture”Each term’s grade is four equal components of 25. Every number below is a percent of that term’s grade, and a dot means the assignment does not run that term. Each name links to the page that says what is due, when, and how it is scored; the Schedule lays the due weeks out in time.
| Component | Fall | Winter | Spring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project Partner Interactions Partner Rated by your project partner, or by your mentor where your team has no partner; reviewed by the instructors | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Midterm Pulse | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| End-of-Term Survey | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| Peer Evaluation Individual Rated by your teammates, for you alone; reviewed by the instructors | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Midterm Survey | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| End-of-Term Survey | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| Individual Evidence Individual Your own work, scored by the instruction team | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Bidding Survey | 1 | none | none |
| Resume and Intent | 2 | none | none |
| RFC | 14 | 15 | none |
| Defense | 8 | 10 | 10 |
| Career and Individual Retrospective | none | none | 15 |
| Team Deliverables Team Your team’s work, scored by the instruction team; half of each sprint note is your individual contribution | 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Term Startup | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Team Charter | 3 | none | none |
| Workshop Activities | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Sprint Notes | 8 | 10 | 6 |
| Repo Checkpoints | 8 | 8 | none |
| Term Retrospective | 3 | none | none |
| Definition of Shipped | none | 3 | none |
| Incident Postmortem | none | 2 | none |
| Landing Page | none | none | 3 |
| Release and Metrics | none | none | 7 |
| Project Handoff | none | none | 4 |
| Project Retrospective | none | none | 3 |
| Total | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Presenting at Demo Day, which your team does once during the year, earns 1% extra credit in the term you present, on top of the 100. The Engineering Expo in spring week 10 carries no points.
Submitting Your Work
Section titled “Submitting Your Work”Every document you submit is one PDF. Its first lines give the document title, your project ID and name, and each author’s name and email: every team member on team work, only you on individual work. Type them at the top of your Markdown before you convert it, for example:
# Team Charter
Project 42: Beaver Habitat Tracker
Alex Ulbrich <ulbrical@oregonstate.edu>, Jane Doe <doej@oregonstate.edu>When one submission combines several files, such as the three of the Team Charter, the cover lines appear once, at the top of the first. The PDF shows the rendered document, not raw Markdown: organized under real headings, with real tables, diagrams as images rather than their source, and alt text on every image.
A repository link does not replace the PDF, even when the document also lives in your repository, because the PDF is the version graded and kept. Two submissions are exceptions and say so on their pages: the Landing Page is a URL and a screenshot, and the Release and Metrics trailer is a video beside its PDF report.
If your project is under an NDA, IP, NDA, and Licensing has the one rule for what an NDA team submits, and each affected page adds a short note.
Rubric Conventions
Section titled “Rubric Conventions”Most rubrics use three bands per criterion:
| Band | Points | The work |
|---|---|---|
| Exceeds | Full | Does what the criterion asks, verifiably, and shows judgment beyond the mechanical minimum. |
| Meets | Partial | Substantially does what the criterion asks, with gaps that do not undermine it. |
| Does Not Meet | Low | Attempts the criterion but falls short in ways that matter. |
Work that is not submitted, is off-topic, or cannot be opened by a grader (broken links, private documents, videos that do not play) scores zero on the affected criteria. “Does Not Meet” is only for work you submitted that falls short. The Defense is the one rubric that carries an explicit Missing rating at zero, for an unexcused no-show. Check every link from a logged-out browser before you submit.
Criteria are written to be verifiable: commit hashes, CI runs, URLs, PR IDs, measured numbers. Describing the evidence does not substitute for linking it.
The rubrics that use other bands:
- Each sprint note item is present and real (Pass, full points) or it is not (Fail, zero).
- Workshop Activities, Term Startup, and the Bidding Survey are Complete or Incomplete.
- Each sprint’s individual contribution is Full, Partial, or Zero.
- The peer and partner surveys score on the scales their rubrics give.
Repo Checkpoint 1 uses the three bands, but four of its six criteria carry zero points in every band.
Rubric criteria also carry learning outcome tags, SO1 through SO6 and L07 through L10. They record where each outcome is evidenced and change nothing about how you complete the work; grading and the outcome mapping explain them. How points become a letter grade is on the same grading page.
Late Work, Absence, and Makeup
Section titled “Late Work, Absence, and Makeup”Submissions are due at the posted time. A submission due in a given week is due by Sunday of that week, unless its page names another day; the peer and partner evaluation surveys close on the date their invitation states. Planned conflicts (interviews, travel) need at least 48 hours’ notice.
| Work | If it's late or missed |
|---|---|
| Most submissions | Up to 48 hours late loses one rubric band on each criterion. After that it scores zero, unless you contacted the instructors before the deadline with a documented reason. |
| Sprint notes | Not accepted late; a missed note scores zero. One missed note per term with a documented reason is excused on request. |
| Workshops | Full credit in class or by Sunday of the week the class met; no late window after that. |
| Defense | Tell your TA before the session and you're rescheduled that term, with no penalty. An unexcused no-show scores Missing. |
| Demos | Send your TA a video of your segment within 48 hours, recorded as the demo cadence describes; it costs you nothing. Every check-in carries its own demo, so there is no spare slot to reschedule into. |
| Surveys | No late window: the survey can't be submitted after it closes. |
For illness and emergencies, contact the instructors as soon as you reasonably can. The instructors will always find a path for a documented emergency; the one case they cannot recover is one they were never told about.
AI Policy (applies to every assignment)
Section titled “AI Policy (applies to every assignment)”Generative AI tools may be used on any assignment unless a page says otherwise. Three standing rules:
- You own the result. Correctness, security, licensing, and professionalism of anything you submit are your responsibility, whatever produced it. choosealicense.com summarizes what the common licenses permit and require, which is where to start when a dependency carries one you don’t recognize.
- Delegate deliberately, and build the checks that make it reasonable. Major deliverables ask what you handed to AI tools, what checks made that reasonable (tests, CI, review gates, staging, a rollback path), and where you stopped to validate the result yourself. Validate carefully where a decision is hard to reverse: architecture, database schema, authentication, deployment, data migrations, licensing. Delegate freely where your checks catch mistakes cheaply. What is graded is the fit between how far you delegated and how strong your checks are, never how sophisticated your tooling is, so a weaker model or a tighter budget is not a disadvantage: it simply means tighter gates and more validation of your own.
- Respect the confidentiality boundary. What may be pasted into which tools is defined in your Team Charter’s AI and confidentiality section, following what your partner has stated about confidentiality. See the Generative AI guide.
The Generative AI guide explains how to tell a hard-to-reverse decision from an easy-to-reverse one and how to build checks you can actually trust, and lists the activities that practice both.
TA Check-ins
Section titled “TA Check-ins”Every team has a Teaching Assistant (TA), with a standing 25-to-30-minute check-in in each week the Schedule marks. The fall week 2 check-in goes through your Term Startup list while it is still in progress. Check announcements in week 1 for your TA; your team and your TA agree the check-in time. The check-in is where your sprint demo happens, live, with every student showing a piece of their own work from the sprint. The Defense, once per term, is a separate session in week 7 or 9; check announcements for the schedule. Between check-ins, your TA is reachable async.