Grading the 2016 AMOS Projects
The AMOS Project is a course that teaches agile methods. As such, the learning goals center on acquiring the capabilities to perform an agile methods process well. How well are students able to perform a Scrum process? Work with the appropriate tooling? The resulting product and artifact quality is secondary to the process capabilities to be acquired (but a natural expression of those capabilities).
Grading students has several components. The main components are (a) active participation in class where we teach and discuss the practices of agile methods and (b) the weekly project work that students perform. The percentages to which they constitute the final grade vary by student role, i.e. it is 20% / 80% for product owners and 10% / 90% for software developers, commensurate with the time invested in each component.
Class participation is graded using a [0|1|2|3] scale, where 0 means the student didn’t show up, 1 means the student was silent in class, 2 means the student actively participated, and 3 means that the student said something I considered noteworthy.
Weekly project work is graded using a check list of capabilities to be acquired. This checklist contains teamwork and individual work components. The check list can be found here: https://goo.gl/cIBDr7. The scale [y/n] checks whether the capability was demonstrated correctly or not. The scale [0..10] grades on a scale of 0..10 how well the capability was demonstrated.
All scales are explained in more detail in this blog post: https://wp.me/PDU66-2cl.
A minimum participation rate of 50% is required to pass the course. Both class participation and project work are graded every week, so that at the end of the project, for every student we have a comprehensive picture. The grade follows mathematically from the many data points, but we reserve to adjust the grade by using additional factors like overall effort, product quality, and helpfulness to other students.
All grading information can be found in the first slide deck of any of our courses.