Late Work Policy for Capstone Deliverables

Overview:

Missing an important deadline with a client is a serious matter, and will quickly lead to an erosion of confidence in your team. Learning to accurately plan the team's and your own personal effort to meet deadlines is an incredibly important skill in professional software engineering. It is also a difficult skill to learn. The very best approach, of course, is to realize that you are not particularly good at estimating effort for a team yet, and therefore plan accordingly: leave plenty of breathing room in front of deadlines, so that you are fine even if things take a little longer than hoped for.

Even the best intentions go awry once in awhile, however, so allowance is made for late assignment partial credit at the discretion of the Mentor(s) and/or Instructor(s). To reflect the importance of timliness in real professional practice, and to be fair to other teams, the penalties do add up fairly quickly as time ticks past the deadline. This should be very strong incentive to plan ahead and get things in on time!

Note that your team mentor is the ultimate arbitrer of deadlines for your team, meaning that your mentor may choose to extend a deadline for your team for a specific reason related to the specific project. For instance, perhaps a client did not get the team feedback on the latest draft of a document in a timely manner, or some other factor related to the specific project and/or out of the team's control. Thus, this Late Policy is best seen as the "default" policy, and will be ]used by all team mentors "all other things being equal".

The following table summarizes the late work penalty policy for the Capstone program. As noted in the syllabus, it applies to team deliverables only; no late work is generally accepted for individual deliverables.

Scoring late work:

The way it works is as you'd expect: the late assignment is graded normally, according to established grading criteria, and scored accordingly. The above-listed penalty percentage is then subtracted from this score.

Again, this whole process is designed only as a life-ring to use only as a last ditch effort to save a time-planning disaster. It's much better to just get your work well in advance of the due date!