Continous Assessment
First and foremost, a very warm welcome to my research group!
Your FYP/URECA is a 10-month long endeavour starting from [June - March] [December - October] with an expected work load of 10 hours per week. I plan to meet up with you once a week to check on your progress.
One of the goals of the FYP/URECA is to ensure that you produce consistent work output in every of the 10 month, just as you are expected to when you go to work after graduation. Thus, you will be graded for every month starting from June/December using a simple binary system (pass/fail).
You earn a pass for every month that
- You produce satisfactory progress or
- in lieu of satisfactory progress, you attend ALL regular planned meetings for the month, i.e., weekly and I am convinced that you have made a good faith effort/attempt to tackle the problem (limited by your I.Q.)
You shall fail that month if:
- You have not made satisfactory progress and you miss more than 2 planned meetings per month for whatever reasons, MCs, family problems, emotional issues, work, IA/IO, etc.
- You meet me every week for the month without showing any satisfactory progress
- You ask me to debug your source code (in which case, why don't I just do your FYP/URECA for you and get the full credit?)
If you pass all 10 months, that means the maximum score for your FYP/URECA is 10x10 = 100%. If you only passed 5 of the 10 months, your maximum attainable FYP/URECA grade is 50%.
The same grading scheme will apply during examination month, holidays, vacations, acts of gods, disaster, etc., meaning that realistically, you will have a 80% maximum attainable grade, which corresponds to an A grade.
Thus, every month of your progress counts. This ensures that if there is a prolonged period of absence/inactivity/stagnation on your part, you are guaranteed to fail your FYP/URECA.
For example, if you fail 5 out of the 10 months, and work extremely hard on the remaining 5 months, you will at most earn a passing grade of C, in the best scenario. The method for computing this final score is a simple hard threshold:
if score > max_score then score = max_score
