Student Responsibilities and Assessment Criteria#
Students will be responsible for and assessed according to the following criteria:
Participation: This will be an active, hands-on course in which we learn and develop new packages and methods during the semester. Student contributions to problem solving and to class discussions represent 5% of the final grade (200-300 level).
Quizzes: There will be a total of 7 short quizzes in the class. Each quiz will be limited to a few questions from the previous lecture. This will be 10% of the final grade (200-300 level).
Assignments: There will be a total of 9 assignments for 200-level students and 8 assignments for 300-level. Most assignments will have a GenAI Reflection section in which students should explain where/if they used GenAI, how they validated it, and when they rejected its outputs. This will be 35% (300-level) to 45% (200-level) of the final grade.
Final project: The final project will be undertaken in teams of up to 2 students, and will consist of two parts:
A project proposal, providing a summary of the proposed work, the datasets and methodology that will be used, the delineation of specific tasks undertaken by each team member, and then expected results. Each team needs to also present their proposal in the class. This component will account for 10% of the final grade (200-300 levels).
The final project repository and report. The repository will contain all the code and analytical steps used to perform the analysis (including documentation of the content and steps to reproduce the results), with the report submitted as a Jupyter notebook providing a summary of the project rationale, analyses undertaken, key results (illustrated with key figures, graphs, and tables), and discussion, including unexpected results, challenges encountered, and suggested improvements. This component will be worth 30% (200-level) to 40% (300-level) of the final grade.
Note: Projects should be solely implemented in Python. Projects can use Google Earth Engine Python Package, but they should not be solely implemented in Google Earth Engine.
Assignments and the final project will be assessed against four main metrics: Quality and Accuracy; Clarity; Documentation; and Reproducibility. Numerical grades will be converted to letter grades as follows:
A: 93-100; A-: 90-93
B+: 88-90; B: 83-88; B- 80-83
C+: 78-80; C: 73-78; C-: 70-73
D+: 68-70; D: 63-68; D-: 60-63
F: <60