Submission Zip doesn't always contain the *best* submissions of a student

[jasenmh]

If a student submits an assignment that get 90/100, and then submits one that gets 0/100, the most recent submission is bundled in the ZIP file. It would be more convenient to have the best evaluated submission included so that by-hand grading can see it.

Thanks.

[pconrad]

I'm not sure I agree. My sense is that the student should take responsibility for making sure that their last solution is the "best" solution. If their code regresses, they have the opportunity to "choose" to submit again---and send a version that gets a better score.

Of course, my scenario here is a bit unrealistic in that it is based on an assumption that they get "get back" to their "previous version" that worked. That may not always be the case.

I wonder whether they have access to download their own previous submissions? That would give students in early courses (8,16,24) the opportunity to use submit.cs as a kind of "really simple" de-facto version control system. Basically, each submit becomes a "commit".

By the time they get to 32 or 56 they should be sophisticated enough to be able to use something like "git" for themselves---or at the very least, make occasional snapshot "copies" of their own code.

[bboe]

I can see the point of having both options, download most recent, and download highest scoring as different instructors will take different approaches and the point is to provide convenience to those grading the assignments.

@pconrad at the moment, I don't believe the students have the ability to download the complete package for an assignment, but that could be enabled. They can, however, download the individual files. Please file a separate issue if you'd like that.

[jasenmh]

I see your point, and I sort of expected it to work like that (your last submission is the one that's graded) since it's the way we handle turnin submissions. The inconsistent part, then, might be the Scores CSV button which gives each student the best score achieved. Maybe a better solution would be a choice of whether that button gives you a CSV with the best scores or the last scores.

[dmfranklin]

The reason the best score shows is that one philosophy of the system is to allow students to keep working on their projects after the deadline in order to better understand the concepts rather than just get a score. So, a student might have a certain "best" score before the deadline but still want to improve his/her score during a late window. We don't want to make this harder by making them guess whether the new effort will improve or hurt his/her score.

Likewise, if the student wants to work on some aspect of it after the deadline / late window, and the graders haven't gone through and graded it, we don't want that to take away from their score.

So this was the philosophy. From this philosophy, it makes sense for the "best" one to also be included in the zip file.

We also debated the importance of having students deliberately turn in the latest one, or teach them to back up their work and resubmit their best one if they want that one to count. It's really all a set of tradeoffs. There's no one perfect answer.

I think it's cleaner to take the latest submission, but students were very angry when they would have a later submission have a lower score than the earlier, and we wouldn't take the earlier one. It was too much to expect graders to look down the list of scores and find the highest one. So Bryce implemented this "best" score feature to both save time and allow that highest score to count.

I'm okay with either choice. We just need to make it very clear to students what we're doing.

Diana

On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 10:09 AM, Jasen Hall notifications@github.com wrote:

I see your point, and I sort of expected it to work like that (your last submission is the one that's graded) since it's the way we handle turnin submissions. The inconsistent part, then, might be the Scores CSV button which gives each student the best score achieved. Maybe a better solution would be a choice of whether that button gives you a CSV with the best scores or the last scores.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/ucsb-cs-education/submit_issues/issues/9#issuecomment-65276020 .

Diana Franklin LSOE* Department of Computer Science University of California, Santa Barbara

*LSOE is a little-known position in UC that is a tenure-equivalent rank analogous to associate professor

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[pconrad]

I can go either way. I was not aware that the CSV file chose the "best" score.

The important thing is that the zip file needs to contain the same version that is being used for grading. If that's the "best" one, that that's the one that needs to be in the zip file.

[jasenmh]

That'd be my +1.