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."
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!
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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.
I've used it continually since 2001, and I'm still using it now. The downside is that most companies have forked the OpenACS code internally (including universities using dotLRN) --- that code never made it to the outside world. If you needed an extension, it has always been the case that you had to write it yourself. Developers are indeed an often scarce good but that has worked well for those of us that are still around.