How homeworks are graded

Grading of the homework is performed as follows.

For each student, we have two pieces of information:

• Reviewer quality rq. This is a measure of how much work you did reviewing, and how precise you were in your ranking. This can be negative (is negative, indeed) if you rank homework submissions at random.
• Homework quality hq, and uncertainty hu. These measure the quality of the homework, and how much uncertainty there is about it. For each homework, the quality is determined via hq = f(i), where i is the rank of your homework, and f() is a monotonically decreasing function that we choose for each homework after manually inspecting several submissions. The function f is used so that if everyone does the homework well, even people low in the ranking get good quality.

Your grade is a mix of these two. Basically:

• If there is a lot of uncertainty about your homework quality, or hu is high, then your score depends mostly on rq.
• If hu is low, then the score depends 1/3 on rq and 2/3 on hq.

What this means to you:

• If your classmates do not do you the courtesy of properly reviewing your homework, or skip their review assignments, then you will be fine if you do your reviews properly. So, do your reviews properly!
• If your classmates do a decent job at reviewing (as you will, given the above point), your score will depend 2/3 on your homework and 1/3 on your reviewing.