Revised Assignments and Grading

Component	Original Weight	Revised Weight	Changes in Structure
Exercises	60%	80%	Fewer exercises and most will be computational.
Technical Memo	10%	0%	Will not be given.
Individual Project	30%	20%	Will be reconfigured as described below.

The new version of the project is to build a well-documented public GitHub repository that could be cloned by someone else and used to carry out an analysis of your design. The repository should contain at least the following components:

• A Markdown README.md file that explains the analysis in the repository;
• A set of Python scripts that carry out the analysis;
• A Markdown file called results.md that discusses the key results of the analysis.

The README.md file (or additional Markdown or PDF files) should provide enough information that someone else could understand the purpose of the analysis and reproduce it from the underlying raw data. In particular, as a whole the documentation should: (1)  concisely explain the purpose of the analysis; (2) include instructions on how to obtain the original input data, such as where it can be downloaded or it should provide a script to download the data via an API; (3) explain what each script does and the order in which they should be run; and (4) explain any additional files provided in the repository.

The project will be graded on three criteria. Two are similar to those used for the exercises: correctness and clarity. Does it run without error and produce correct results? Is the code clear and the overall project well-documented? The third criterion can best be called technical merit. That's a catch-all term for whether the project does something particularly useful, challenging, interesting, or novel. Its purpose is probably clear: it's to encourage people to stretch themselves by ensuring that a challenging project can still receive a good grade even if it isn't as polished as it could be.

The project will be due by 11:59 pm ET on Friday, April 24th.

As I mentioned in class, we'll have a virtual poster session during the last class on Monday, April 27th. Please send me the URL and a short abstract describing it (say a sentence or two) and I'll post both on the web for use during the poster session.