Milestone Grading Option

[awhicks]

We (at some point) would like to implement milestone grading as an option within Web-CAT, in that it does not need to impact grading (or it could if we set policies) but likely only needs to show as a visual indicator on the results page for the students to know if they have a submission that meets the requirements. I believe execute.pl should have access to the raw data we use to calculate milestones (mutation coverage, style points, and date/time) and a new feedback section could show students their progress on each of the three metrics, and some thing like a check mark if they are all met. I believe we could add a new option in config.plist to take a file that defines the milestones and parses them into values that execute.pl can check and evaluate progress on, but there could be a better mechanism I don't know about.

[s-edwards]

Yeah, this is a good idea. We should talk about it to make sure we get the design requirements correct. I'm doing something similar in 1114 this semester, with a "starting early" deadline 1 week before the due date (projects every 2 weeks, so this means moving up to a total of 2 deadlines for each project, so there is now a deadline every week). It's the simplest possible model of 1 milestone plus final deadline, no more no less. But figuring out exactly what the feedback should look like isn't so easy, especially if there might be different feedback/constraints prior to a milestone vs. after it, or if there are only some checks that should be included instead of all checks, or if the reference tests used differ by milestone, etc. It is also important to be clear about how the total score is broken down, but that gets even more complicated if the acceptance criteria differ by milestone. So let's design it first.