How you're graded
Three kinds of grade, measuring three different things. If you're ever unsure why a score is what it is, this page should answer it.
1 · Weekly standards — 40%
These are the habits of working in a shop, watched every day and entered weekly. They ask one question: are you working like an engineer? Safe, documented, organized, iterating, present.
Four of the six apply in all three courses. Two do not, and they are marked.
Shop Safety
Working in a way that keeps you and the people near you intact.
Eye protection on before you start, not after you're reminded. You follow the procedure for the machine you're on. You notice unsafe situations around you and say something.
Generally safe, but needs occasional reminders — protection put on late, a step skipped, standing in the wrong place.
Repeated reminders needed, or a procedure ignored. Any deliberate unsafe act lands here regardless of the rest of the day.
Documentation
Recording what you did while you're doing it, in your notebook.
Notebook is current, dated, and specific enough that someone else could pick up your work. Sketches labeled, measurements written down, decisions recorded with reasons.
Notebook is kept but thin — entries are vague, undated, or written after the fact from memory.
Little or nothing recorded, or entries that don't reflect what actually happened.
Iterative Prototyping
Building, testing, and changing on purpose rather than by feel.
You test early, change one thing at a time, and can say why you changed it. A failed attempt gets examined instead of thrown out.
You iterate, but changes are made by feel, or several at once, so you can't tell what worked.
Build once, hope it works. Problems get restarted from scratch rather than diagnosed.
Cleanup and Procedures
Leaving the room usable for the next period.
You start cleanup without being told. Tools go back where they belong, your bench is clear, scrap is sorted, and you help with shared space rather than only your own.
You clean up when told, and only your own area.
Leaves the bench or a machine for someone else to deal with.
Practice and Application
Using what we covered in class on the thing in front of you.
You apply the concept from the lesson to your own project without being prompted, and can explain the connection.
You can do the practice work, but don't carry it over to your project until pointed there.
Practice work incomplete, or no connection made between the lesson and the build.
Architectural Code
Working with an architect's habits, not just finishing the assignment.
Leader lines and symbols used correctly, title blocks accurate and complete, and design principles from class actually applied — stud spacing, solar orientation on a site plan, and the rest.
Drawings are readable but conventions are inconsistent, or principles from class are missing from the work.
Conventions ignored, title blocks incomplete, or the drawing doesn't communicate the design to a reader.
Lateness is tracked separately and never affects these scores.
2 · Projects — 40%
Where the weekly standards ask whether you're working like an engineer, the project grade asks a different question: is the work good?
Every project is scored on its own rubric, and that rubric lives with the project — look for How It's Scored in the row of tabs at the top of any project page. What gets judged varies with what you're building, so read it at the start rather than the night before it's due.
The score is given during your project presentation. Most of it is a team score covering shared work: your research, your drawings, your data, your iteration log. The last part is individual — each of you answers a question about the project on your own, so two people on the same team can come away with different numbers. That is the design, not a mistake.
There is no hidden effort grade in here. Effort shows up in the weekly standards above.
3 · Quizzes — 20%
The smallest slice, and the one with the fewest surprises in it.
Every quiz is announced ahead of time. You will know what it covers, and you will have class time to prepare. There are no pop quizzes in this room — the point is to find out whether the ideas stuck, not to catch you out on a bad morning.
Quizzes cover what we've worked through in class: the formulas, the vocabulary, the procedures, and the reasoning behind them. If you can explain why you made a design decision on your current project, you're most of the way to ready.