19 October 2007

The following information is relevant for students that have not passed 
the course "Research Skills 1: Programming" by making the six weekly
assignments or for other students that wish to obtain a higher mark.

You will be offered two opportunities to improve your mark. The first is 
to hand in one or more of the optional assignments of the past six weeks. 
The deadline for this is ***TUESDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2007***. Note that you 
cannot hand in answers to exercises for which you have already submitted 
answers before. The points obtained this way, will be added to the results 
which you have already achieved.

   Example: in week 3, a student has obtained the mark 2.9 (=11 points; 
   0 points means no correct answers; 50 points means 5 correct 
   assignments). He makes an optional assignment for that week and obtains 
   a 9 for that. His point score increases to 11+9 = 20 points and his
   week score becomes 20/30*8 = 5.3. His mark for week 3 has increased
   from 2.9 to 5.3 and this means that his final mark for the course 
   will be increased by (5.3-2.9) / 6 = 0.4 points.

Note that the optional exercises of week 1 cannot be submitted since
the answers were discussed in class. 

If your course mark is 5.0, we advise you to hand in three optional 
exercises. If your mark is under 5.0 then hand in six or more exercises. 
In reponse to feedback received from you, we will add extra hints to the 
optional exercises.

If you fail to obtain a sufficient mark after this, you will have to make 
a big programming assignment in the second block. The deadline for the big 
assignment will be at the end of block 2 (January 2008).

If you have questions about upgrading your course grade, please send them 
to Erik by e-mail (erikt(at)science.uva.nl).