1.2. 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 Contributing to the course 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