Grading criteria for project documents:

• The main attributes I am looking for are details, consistency, and usefulness.
  • Details are critical in software engineering. The most serious catastrophes are often caused by poor attention to detail. More immediately, you are essentially defining your own assignment. If you do not spell out the details early, you will not know what you are supposed to do later. Alternatively, you and your teammates may end up with different ideas of what you are supposed to do, making integration of the project extremely difficult.
  • Inconsistency typically arises from poor attention to detail. You say one thing in one part of your document, but something different in another part of the document. Again, the impact is likely to occur later on and waste far more time than you would spend inspecting the document now.
  • Lack of detail and inconsistency typically make your documents useless for helping you get closer to a working product. You cannot make use of the earlier document because you never worked through the details. As a result, you waste lots of time later on essentially repeating earlier efforts. The course starts to feel more demanding than it should be.
• These items suggest that you would benefit from having someone read through the document for potential problems.
• I do *not* give extra credit for having a GUI (graphical user interface) in your project. It is quite possible to get full credit with a very plain interface.
• You are not being graded purely on effort. I have received documents that were relatively thin, but had everything in them. I have also received monstrous documents that obviously took a lot of time and effort, but which had serious flaws.

Things to consider if you want to put these documents in a portfolio:

• The appearance of the documents should be made more professional -- again, I do not give credit for having a clear plastic binder, but if you want this in your portfolio, having the work bound would be a good idea. Including some artwork on the cover can also make your work look more professional. However, you should do this with the understanding that it does not make what is inside any better.
• A GUI would make your project more presentable to prospective employers. Keep in mind that it is quite possible to create very bad GUI's.
• I do not personally like to grade your spelling or your grammar. While employers generally sympathize with the linguistic challenges of moving to a new country, there are always a few who are rather picky. More importantly, there's a decent chance you can impress someone if your English is better than they expect. You should consider your grammar and spelling to be part of your overall presentation.