Appeal Procedures

Check your Programming Assignment 2 grade on the ZINC Online Submission System. Your submission record will state all test case failures (if any).

While there are multiple grading records on ZINC, only the latest one will count as the score for your submission; you can ignore other previous records.

To make an appeal for your grades, please follow the below procedure. Appeals with incomplete information and/or not following the procedure will not be processed:

1. See the solution section of the PA2 webpage to run the test notebook and obtain grading details.
2. Follow the instructions of the given Colab Notebook to run the testing code on your PA2 code.
3. Create a PDF report for your appeal and submit it to the "PA2 Appeal" Canvas assignment.
   • State which test case(s) you wish to appeal. Clearly state your reasoning for why your code should have passed those test case(s).
   • You are encouraged to take screenshots of the testing code output. But please screenshot the full error details, or at least the full outputs of the test cases you are appealing.
   • You may propose changes to your PA2 code. Clearly state (via typing or screenshot) your code changes in your PDF report. Such changes are subject to a flat deduction to the overall after-appeal grade, proportional to the magnitude-of-change, with the TAs' decision being FINAL.
     • Special case: if appealing for the last test case (the model weights), one major issue is that some previous tasks are also wrong. For example, wrong augmented layers or main model, wrong configurations for compiling and training. If some of these tasks indeed fail in your code, wrong model weights are considered reasonable. Otherwise, please also attach the explanations of these tasks in your PDF report.
     • The grader fails to cover some reasonable cases, for which you can appeal and recover deducted points. For example, int vs float array datatype, directly `.add`ing layers from AugmentedLayer() instead of nest it inside a new Sequential, putting activations as dedicated layers instead of using activation= parameter, using CamelCase rather than snake_case for some shorthand strings. Note that it doesn't mean that any other case is also the grader's fault. For other cases not mentioned, TA will decide whether to give points or not.
     • For other special cases and grader logic errors, please also propose the codes to mitigate the problem or your reasons why it's the grader's fault.
     • For grader internal errors (when "Grader internal error" is raised or when the test case is ERROR instead of FAIL), please explain your codes in the related task function.
   • For logistical or ZINC error cases (e.g., submission with wrong filename, ZINC failed to run and reported error code, etc.), please provide a detailed description about the logistical error, your debugging process, and your proposed solution to fix the issue(s). Flat grade deduction may or may not be applied depending on the seriousness of the logistical error, with the TAs' decision being FINAL.
   • For late penalty appeals, you may request for TAs to grade an earlier submission on ZINC, which you have submittied before the deadline. You are also allowed to propose code changes to that specified earlier submission.
   • Merely copy-paste from the solution is an automatic appeal rejection.
4. TAs will run your specified ZINC submission code with your proposed changes (if any) on ZINC in order to verify your appeal report.
5. Appeal deadline is May 26 (Thu), 23:59 HKT. No late appeals will be processed.
   • TAs will process only your latest PDF report after this deadline. Please ensure that your PDF report contains all of the details that you wish to appeal.
6. Finalized scores will be uploaded to Canvas after all appeals and late penalties are processed.

Please keep in mind the below appeal policies:

• No partial credit for individual test cases.
• You won't be penalized for attempting an appeal. In the worst case, we will merely reject your proposed code change, and you will retain your original score.
• The strictness of the code change penalty policy is because the solution has already been released alongside the appeal procedures.
• You may email the TAs-in-charge or post on Piazza for enquiries regarding the appeal instructions and/or the testing code. However, TAs will NOT process your appeal (nor comment on appeal progress) via email nor Piazza.
• All PA2 scores after appeals are FINAL.