• Correctness: To receive a good score for correctness, you must implement all of the required features of the project as stated in the project description. Your program must also run without error on all inputs —, including inputs that were not provided in the project description and inputs that you did not try. Your program must not leak memory.
• Design: A good score on design depends on how well you have chosen several aspects of your program, including (but not limited to): object-oriented design and top-down design. For example, for a project where you define the classes, you will be graded on your choice of member functions and data members.
• Efficiency: your implementation of the project must have running times that conform to the project specifications. A slow function that produces the specified output is not a good implementation and will receive a poor score. We will run your project with large data sets. An efficient implementation runs in a matter of milliseconds.
• Conformity: (such a nasty word!) your code must follow the class coding standards in spirit. These coding standards have been rewritten to focus on intent rather than rigid guidelines. You must have adequate documentation. If you turn in ugly, unreadable code, there will be deductions.

The following presents a general project rubric. It shows how a submitted project might lose points.

• Conforming to coding standards make about 10% of the grade.
• Your test program is worth 50%. If you submit the sample driver program as your test program or no test program is submitted there will be 50% deduction.
• Correctness and completeness of your test cases (mytest.cpp) make about 15% of the grade.
• We have written test cases to test your submission without knowing anything about your code. Therefore, it is extremely important that your submission conforms to the specified requirements. Passing tests make about 30% of the grade.
• There is a 5% deduction for every modification that we need to perform to compile and run your work. For example, if we need to rename your file from myTest.cpp to mytest.cpp the deduction will be applied. One can find a non-exhaustive list of problems that cause deductions at the submission page.

• Addition error in the computation of your score.
• The grade sheet says a file was not submitted, but it actually was.
• The grader forgot to run a test case and deducted points.

• You think 10 points is too much to take off for a particular mistake. (The answer will be: “We took off 10 points from every student who made this mistake. It will be unfair to change your score.”)
• Your program runs on your own PC/Mac, you think something is wrong with g++ on GL. (You have to test your program with g++ on GL.)
• Your program works when you run it on your own test cases, but not on the test cases used for grading. (Thorough testing is the programmer's responsibility. You should have found those bugs yourself with robust test cases.)