Marks in this course worry people for one wrong reason: the belief that some people are “programmers” and the rest are here to watch. No such split exists. Reading code, writing code, and building something a person can use are learned skills, and you are marked on process, growth, and what your work does for somebody else — all of it inside your control.
Where the evidence comes from
pie title Where evidence comes from "The Community App" : 30 "The Toolbox" : 12 "The Data Digest" : 10 "The Helper Script" : 8 "Code Journal and reflection" : 15 "Quizzes and check-ins" : 15 "Daily practice and collaboration" : 10
The Community App is deliberately the largest single piece of the course. It runs across the last two units, it is built for a real person, and it is where everything else you have learned finally has to work at the same time. The three earlier tasks — The Helper Script, The Data Digest, and The Toolbox — are the rehearsals that make it possible.
Quizzes are short, frequent, low-stakes, and re-attemptable after new learning. They exist to find out what needs work, not to close the book on it.
Reflection is your Code Journal, where a broken build turns into evidence of learning — often the strongest evidence you have.
Daily practice is the small stuff done consistently: warm-up predictions committed to in ink, driving and navigating fairly in pairs, the question that unlocked a neighbour’s bug.
Small and used beats ambitious and broken
On every task, and most of all on the culminating project, a modest program that works and that somebody actually uses scores higher than a grand design that does not run. This is not a consolation prize for low ambition — judging scope accurately is one of the hardest skills in software, and Interviewing Your Client treats it as a professional skill because it is one.
Broken programs are never penalised as broken
Version one of everything crashes. The mark follows where your work ends up and how visibly you got there — your journal and your comments are how “visibly” happens.
Each task page lists its success criteria before you start, phrased as things an observer could see in your work. If a mark ever surprises you, ask: those criteria are the whole story, and Getting Help lists the ways to reach me.