Grading and Rules

The course is graded by means of a practical assignment and a multiple-choice exam.

Assignment

The purpose of the assignment is to test the students' understanding of the theoretic, algorithmic, and implementation details of several data visualization and data representation algorithms.

The assignment, described in detail here, can be executed in groups of 1 or 2 students. A group receives a single grade. However, note that the amount of presented detail (when solving the assignment) for a group of two students is supposed to be about double than the amount of detail presented by a student who works alone. Group forming is up to you (if you encounter difficulties, please contact the lecturer).

During the assignment you will complete several consecutive steps. The way of working for all steps is outlined below:

• Steps: Within each step, you will have to implement one or more visualization algorithms. Note that, within each step, you have several sub-steps with sub-questions to cover.
• Order: The order in which you complete the steps is up to you. However, it is strongly recommended you complete the steps in the presented order, as this is the logical (and increasing difficulty) order. Later steps rely upon functionality provided by earlier steps. Also, note that weekly feedback will be given only on the step(s) pertaining to that week.
• Results: The results of all steps, put together, will form your final assignment, which you have to hand in for a grade.
• Progress: Each week, there is a lab session during which you have to show your current progress to the student assistant(s). In the lab, you have access to computers on which you can develop and demonstrate your software. With this occasion, your progress will be evaluated. In the same time, the assistant(s) will address any questions or difficulties you have with the current step.
• Feedback: Feedback is provided during the lab sessions, which are mandatory to attend.
• Deliverables: At the end of the course, you should hand in
  • a written report describing your completion of every step with a detailed description of the functionality you added, design decisions you took, and snapshots illustrating all these.
  • the software you created during your assignment. This is to be delivered both as ready-to-run, self-contained, executable which can be tried out immediately and has a user interface or command-line interface containing all the functionality required by all the steps; and as source code with detailed build instructions.

Both the report and the software must be delivered on a physical medium (CD/DVD), not electronic (email). Both are to be delivered to one of the student assistants.

Exam

Apart from the practical assignment, the course is graded by a multiple-choice exam. The exam verifies the theoretical knowledge on data visualization acquired during the course. The exam consists of around 50 multiple-choice questions. The exam is open-book (you can bring in the course's book with you). However, no other written notes can be brought along.

For practicing for the exam and getting a better feeling of its set-up, a set of sample exam questions is available here. The questions have the same structure and difficulty as the real ones which will be used during the exam. Answers are provided for the sample questions, so that one can understand the working and reasoning process to be used during the real exam.

Grading

The final grade is given by max(written exam, (practical assignment + written exam)/2)). This formula has two purposes: First, it allows students with a less strong programming background to successfully take part in the lecture. Secondly, it ensures that all students work on the practical assignment to build up concrete, practical, scientific visualization skills, besides the theoretical ones. To pass the course, you have however to have passing grades for both the practical assignment and the written exam.