The grades in CS4110 will be given based on the delivered work. What did you try and accomplish, rather than how you wrote it down. In other words, if you write a terrible report, but you did the work, you can still get a good grade. If however you do not put in sufficient effort, but write an amazing report, chances are that you will fail the course.
We therefore use the following scheme:
- Ability
- Independence
- Results
50% of the final grade is thus fully determined by your effort, ability, and unserstanding of the tools and their possibilities.
- Easy to understand explanation of complex techniques
- Detailed presentation of results
- Justified conclusions
Only 30% is determined by how you write down your findings, the summary written in the first weeks is included in this.
- Capture content in slides
- How to do science in reversing and testing
- Answering/asking questions
The remaining 20% is determined by your understanding of the literature and how well you can communicate this to your fellow students.
In short, the presentations and summaries in the first weeks are important, but together only determine 30% of the final grade. The lab in the last part of the course is the main component, with 50% being determined by what you do, and 20% by how you write it down.
Our motivation for such a grading scheme is that we value your ability to work with the testing and reversing tools in order to obtain valuable insights more than your ability to write good reports, which is already graded in many other courses.