

Udacity Unfair Grading - k2pts
http://www.udacity-forums.com/cs373/questions/9076/hw1-4-localization-program-graded-unfairly

======
k2pts
Suzam Pal: "How does it really matter if the course is non-profit or not? Why
should that stop us from calling a mistake as a mistake, a bug as a bug, an
ugly solution as an ugly solution? I've participated in a few small and
medium-sized open source projects where we give away the product of our hard
work for free, and users benefit from it without paying anything. If there is
a bug in my work, or if a user suffers due to my work, I take responsibility
for it and I fix it. If a student submitted an answer without violating
Udacity's specifications, and it was graded incorrectly, then it is clearly
either a bug or a mistake in the specification, and in a free society, people
have the right to complain about it."

------
gee_totes
For someone who doesn't know anything about Udacity, what's going on here?

~~~
droithomme
A student didn't follow directions and is unhappy at being penalized. Doesn't
belong on HN at all, it's an issue between student and udacity.

~~~
k2pts
AndyAtUdacity:

We have seen a lot of questions about homework 1.4. While we don't have time
to check everyone's code, it seems like the majority of problems fall into one
of a few cases.

1\. Students deleted or modified the code above the comment section. This
section was necessary for grading purposes. Admittedly this is not the most
robust system and we will try our best to make future homework more clear
about what you can modify.

2\. Students redefined the show() function. While this wasn't explicitly
forbidden, this had the same affect on the grading as modifying the show
command. The reason you couldn't do this is because we actually redefine the
show command in our grading script. This was an effort to prevent us from
grading you wrong if your solution included print statements for debugging.

3\. Students did not make their solution general enough. These solutions
tended to only work for a world of 20 cells. We tested with a variety of
worlds, so such a solution would not have been marked as correct.

We apologize for the confusion and the effect this had on some of your grades
for the first hw. I hope everyone still enjoyed the homework, we put a lot of
work into making it and we are as disappointed as you when it doesn't turn out
perfectly.

Please mark this solution as correct so other students can see the "official"
answer. Thanks!

\---

k_l_s:

I guess I'm not sure what to make of this answer. While I understand that you
have what seems to be thousands of users and so individual attention would be
inplausible, you are presenting a rating system through which you are
communicating to folks (admittedly, I am one of them) that their material
mastery is poor when it likely is not. It would seem to me that the solution
is to fix the grading system or to do away with grades, if it is
technologically infeasible to correctly evaluate an individual's mastery of
the material. Simply explaining that the grading technology is lacking but
leaving the grades in place is demotivating and, quite honestly, perplexing.
We students don't know the full implication of these grades, but almost
certainly they will remain in your database and might even have significance,
in the future, that would make some of us regret simply ignoring them. I
presume that I am not the only one who would like to see the system work.

\---

~~~
th0ma5
My experience with the AI class was weird in the sense that the profs would
say things like "I don't blame you if you got this one wrong" but then score
the answer wrong.

This gets to a greater question (which they also addressed) is that a deeper
more involved question makes you think more, and hence they felt that people
who got things wrong perhaps did more work and challenged themselves more,
which as a whole a good thing, and I'd agree.

Some things just don't lend well to being binary right or wrong. In the ML
class however, their code was a little more modular, and they had a lot more
clear warnings about what you could and couldn't touch, and then the grading
system was interactive and you could repeat your tests (and they did like what
was described here and tried for more general problem spaces to see if your
answer was written generally as well)...

So this is tough! The cynic in me says that this can make one go down the
rabbit whole that "the man" is trying to indoctrinate you into an arbitrary
system of their own choosing that isn't necessarily empirically correct, but
then I remember my intro to Philosophy where they state that you really have
to frame the debate or else all bets are off, and you just can't get any work
done in chaos in like that.

