Assessment
==========

This course contains a wide variety of assessment activities, designed to
encourage *active learning* and emphasize practical skills development.

This is only a brief summary of the assessments. For full details, please refer
to the course outline on CourseLink.

* **Course Notes Development or In-class Debater** 10%

  - Each student should make individual contributions to these course notes
  - Since there are not enough spots for every student to be a primary note 
    taker, students will have the opportunity to be an **in-class debater** in
    lieu of primary note taker
  - See :ref:`contributing-to-notes` for more information.

* **Reflections and Participation in Debates** 10%

  - Between March 11 - April 1 each student will read *Situational Awareness*
    and contribute to a series of asynchronous and in-class discussion and
    debates
  - The in-class debates will be in the lecture periods on March 18, March 25
    and April 1

* **Video Presentation** 10%

  - Each student will research and prepare a 5 minute pre-recorded
    presentation on a prominent systems thinker of their choice
  - The presentations will be submitted through the CourseLink "Video
    Assignments" tool and made available to the instructor and all students for
    peer review

* **Homework** 15%

  - Homework assignments will closely follow the lectures. They will be submitted as `Jupyter`_ notebooks. They are due by
    CourseLink Dropbox according to the schedule on CourseLink
  - Homework will be auto-graded according to a terniary scheme:

    * High pass (more than average effort, essentially complete)
    * Pass (reasonable effort, may be missing some components)
    * Fail (less than average effort, mostly incomplete)

  - The three homework submissions with the lowest grade will be dropped. However,
    **homework assignments that are not submitted will not be dropped**

* **Lab Tests** 25%

  - There will be two lab tests, each worth 12.5%
  - The lab tests will be conducted in the lab periods on February 13 and March 20
  - The lab tests will cover the material from the homework assignments and the other labs
  - They will involve a short meeting with a member of the instructional team while working in a `Jupyter`_ notebook

* **Final Project** (Teams of 3-4 students) 30%

  - The project will focus on a case study of complex systems modelling
  - See `Downey (1st edition)`_ for some examples of student case studies

.. _Jupyter: https://jupyter.org
.. _Downey (1st edition): http://greenteapress.com/complexity/index.html