Interpreting your DE6 Grade
You have gotten (or will get very soon) your grade for DE6. It will be in a separate Canvas column.
We graded it on an A-F scale. Your grade is given as the “GPA number” (4=A, 3.5=AB, 3=B, 0=F). We do this to make it easier for later averaging. And so that we can divide things a little more finely than the “whole half-grade steps.”
You can convert things to a letter grade by rounding (e.g., 3.7 rounds to 3.5, which is an AB). But you should also interpret it as “3.7 is an AB, but really close to the border”. Being close is significant because of how it might be combined with other assignments later, but also so you know with a little bit of fixing, it could have been an A.
The idea of fixing comes up because you will get the chance to fix things… (more on that in a moment).
Explanations for the grades are provided in the comments - in a form that requires some interpretation.
- Each student has 5 “rows” of data: a summary, and a row for each visualization.
- Each row can have a comment (as text)
- Each row has a bunch of codes - these are explained at DE5-6 Codes: Feedback.
- Each row got a score for some of the criteria (at DE11&DE12: 4 Questions, 5 Visualizations (Aspects of the Answers)): Question, Answer, Design, Details, Rationale. The numbers were not used consistently, and were applied sparsely. In most cases, they were not noted. If you got a number, we are just telling you the sign (negative means problem, positive means good).
- Missing captions and insufficient (or non-existant) titles were so common that we didn’t note them for everyone. You know if you don’t have a title.
Every visualization was thoroughly considered, but not everyone got extensive notes. We might have marked something as “IE” (inappropriate encoding - which is really bad), but not put the negative number for design. Or we might have just observed it and taken it into account when we made our overall assessment of the 4 visualizations as a group.
So, if you see “Design 2: IE,DD (+Question 2) (-Design 2)” this means visualization 2 got codes IE (inappropriate encoding) DD (data dump), and had a positive score for question (we felt it was asking a good question), but a negative score for its design (ineffective design - which is not surprising given the IE code).
I am aware that this is not great feedback: the goal was consistent assessment, not necessarily to provide actionable feedback.
In general, we graded the visualizations, and then checked that the rationales were OK. Rarely did we allow a good rationale to change our mind for a bad visualization. Your visualizations were meant to stand alone.
Re-grades: if we re-evaluate, we look at everything. It is unlikely that the mistakes you point out are the only ones we made. You might argue that what you did is OK, but if we give you points for that, we’ll probably notice a bunch of other things we didn’t consider as well. In many cases, we were lenient. We gave OK grades to assignments that were missing basic things like good titles and captions.
If you are unhappy with your grade, you will have an opportunity to make up for it…
The DE6 Do-Over Assignment
There will be another design exercise - details forthcoming - giving you the opportunity to “do the assignment over” - to fix your assignment based on what you’ve learned. We’ve seen a lot of examples in class, you’ve gotten critiques from your peers, you’ve gotten (limited) feedback from DE6 assessment, you’ve learned some useful theory (e.g., color), etc. You should be able to do better.
(some people made some great visualizations! but for most students there is some room to make use of what you’ve learned - if only “good captions and titles are important”).