Grading Issue | course-v1:MITx+6.431x+3T2020

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Here’s a deep-link to the specified section: https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+6.431x+3T2020/courseware/Unit_10_Markov_chains/Problem_Set_10/.

Hitting the submission history, most of the problems in this section were attempted on the last day of the course run, but still technically before the 23:59UTC cutoff time.

Short answer: Not a bug. Problem Set 10 is not graded, and so it does not count towards the learner’s course grade.

Long answer: This “bug” and this course is truly a perfect example of why our Subsection “labeling” system is, ahem, bad.

Basically, what we do (on the course progress graph and in Gradebook) is that we take all of the graded subsections of a certain assignment type, and we just enumerate them with the assignment type’s label, starting from 1.

Let’s say we have three homeworks:

• Let’s Do Our First Homework!

• More Fractions!

• Division is Fun!

On gradebook and on the progress graph, we will see them as:

• Homework 1

• Homework 2

• Homework 3

Makes sense, but what if we were to have a course with the following naming structure for homeworks?

• Homework 1

• Homework 1b

• Homework 2

• Homework 3

Then we have the labels

• Homework 1

• Homework 2 (actually Homework 1b)

• Homework 3 (actually Homework 2)

• Homework 4 (actually Homework 3)

Confusing!!!! That’s what happened here. This course had Problem Sets 1 - 6, 7a, 7b, 8 - 10. The labels are thrown off after 7a. The bar that is labeled Problem Set 10 on the graph is actually the subsection named Problem Set 9. It’s dropped because the learner didn’t attempt it, and has a zero, which was then dropped. The reason there isn’t a bar for a Problem Set 11 (Problem Set 10) is because Problem Set 10 (the actual Problem Set 10) is not configured to be a graded subsection.

There is a ticket to add assignment names to Gradebook

and I think we should definitely consider also adding it here.

This seems like it might be a misconfiguration on the part of the course team. The entire “Unit 10” is ungraded, but still has due dates?

From the “Grading Policy” section of the course: The lowest 1 score among the 10 problem sets will be dropped, so only 9 out of 10 problem sets will count.
That sounds like they intend the Problem Set to be graded. They also have it configured that there are 2 dropped Problem Set grades, not one.

Should we mention this to someone? Is that appropriate / something we do?