Grading Policies

Our goal in assigning a final grade for 6.200 is to balance learning opportunities with the need for assessment. Our strategy is to use the quizzes and final exam as our primary assessment tools, while every other aspect of the class is intended primarily as a learning tool.

This page describes some of the details of how your grade in 6.200 will be determined.

Table of Contents

1) Policy on "Curving" Grades

We strive to assign grades according to MIT's definitions of what the various letter grades mean. Note that all of these definitions, and hence all of our grading policies, are based on your performance in the subject, not on how you compare against your classmates. We do not curve grades for any class component, nor for overall grades, based on aggregate statistics, and we do not have any limits on the number of students who can receive each letter grade; if we believe that everyone in the class has demonstrated an "A" level of understanding, then everyone in the class will receive an A!

2) Overall Grade and Grade Components

Your final grade in 6.200 will be computed as a weighted average of the several components:

• Grade Breakdown:
  • Problem Sets: 10%
  • Labs: 15%
  • Nanoquizzes: 5%
  • Quiz 1: 17%
  • Quiz 2: 17%
  • Final Exam: 36%

where each component grade is expressed on a 100-point scale (as described above). The weighted average (a number between 0 and 100), is used as a guideline when assessing final grades according to MIT's definitions of the letter grades. This will be followed by considerable discussion among the entire teaching staff to factor in your performance in labs and participation in class. This discussion can affect your letter grade, particularly if your initial grade is on a letter-grade boundary.

Additionally, in order to earn a passing grade for 6.200, you must earn a passing grade (60% or higher) in each of the following grade components individually, regardless of your scores in the other components:

• problem sets,
• labs, and
• exams (weighted average of quizzes and final).

3) Lateness

We believe that it is important to work through the exercises even after the deadline, and so for many of the kinds of assignments in 6.200, work can be submitted after the nominal deadline for some amount of partial credit (though for some kind of assignments this is not logistically feasible). This section describes the lateness policies for the various kinds of work in 6.200.

• For automatically-graded problem set exercises, any portion submitted on time will receive full credit, and any portion submitted late but within one week of the nominal deadline will receive 75% credit. Submissions later than one week will result in a score of zero.

• For labs (including auto-graded questions and checkoffs), any portion submitted on time will receive full credit, and any portion submitted late but before the start of the next week's lab section will receive 90% credit. Submissions later than one week will result in a score of zero.

• For free-response work, we are unfortunately unable to accept late work except for extenuating circumstances with support from a Dean in S³. In those situations, please reach out to 6.200-personal@mit.edu with your S³ Dean CC'ed.

If you are experiencing serious personal or medical difficulties that prevent you from completing the work in 6.200 on time, please reach out to us, and also please talk with a Dean at Student Support Services; with their support, we can consider additional extensions or alternative arrangements. Without written support from Student Support Services, we cannot consider any exceptions to the rules outlined on this page.

4) Collaboration Policies

We encourage you to discuss concepts and approaches with other students and with the teaching staff to better understand the course materials. However, it is important that these conversation be held at a high level, and work that you submit under your name must be your own (this includes derivations, programs, plots, and explanations). When you submit an assignment under your name, you are certifying that the details are entirely your own work and that you played at least a substantial role in the conception stage.

You must not take credit for work done by other students. You must not use solutions of other students (from this semester or from previous semesters) in preparing your solutions, and you must not share your work with other students, including through public repositories such as GitHub.

Copying work in contravention of this policy (or knowingly making work available for copying) may incur reduced grades, failing the course, and/or other disciplinary action. Copying work will also likely lead to decreased understanding and, thus, worse performance on later materials (including exams).

Weekly homework assignments provide an opportunity to develop intuition for new concepts by actively applying the new concepts to solve problems and answer questions. The process of actively struggling with the use of new ideas until you understand them is an effective and rewarding form of education. Reading someone's solution to a problem is not educationally equivalent to generating your own solution. If you skip the process of personally struggling with new concepts by getting the answers from someone else, you will have lost an important learning opportunity.

Good problems are a valuable resource. Don't squander them.

These policies are in place with the primary goal of helping you learn more effectively. If you have any questions about why the policies are structured as they are, or if a certain type of collaboration is allowed, just ask! You can do so by sending e-mail to the instructors (6.200-instructors@mit.edu).

For more information, see the academic integrity handbook.