Reply To: Growing Dissatisfaction with CGCookie

[Jake Korosi]

A little late to this thread I suppose, but I did want to add my thoughts on the topic of exercises.

Firstly, when it comes to feedback.  I confess that most of the time I’ve graded, I haven’t left feedback; usually when I do it’s to express when I’ve found a submission to be strikingly well-done; but I suppose that’s of limited use really.  Mostly the problem that I need to overcome is that I’m self-conscious about critiquing peers’ submissions when I’ve very much a student myself.  I suppose you could say I’m afraid of giving advice that comes off as presumptuous.  It would be incredibly awkward to tell somebody they need to clean up the smoothness of a curved surface on their model, however objectively true that is, when I know that in a week I could be making a model that has the same faults and wind up being given the exact same advice by someone else.  I suppose you could call it a minor variation of Impostor Syndrome.

Secondly – some of those exercises it’s -incredibly- difficult to give advice for.  Let’s use an example that’s already been used to make another point – the Three Objects exercise.  As has been pointed out, from a pass/fail perspective this exercise is a no-brainer to *grade* – there are three instructions; if you have followed all three, you pass that exercise and it’s really that simple.  But therein lies the problem – okay, so if somebody fails that exercise because they only made two objects, or did not use Sketchfab, or whatever, your feedback can simply explain that.  But what feedback do you possibly give to an exercise that passes, beyond “good job”?  You have to edit three objects.  It doesn’t say how extensively.  It doesn’t say they have to be smooth-shaded.  It doesn’t say they have to be very elaborate nor very simple.  Anything you can tell a passing submitter for that exercise beyond simple support and a Welcome to CGC (it’s probably their very first exercise after all) would be entirely superfluous really.   And for that matter, if the exercise has failed – only one person needs to explain that there should be three objects and the submitter only made two.  Once the first grader points that out, what is left for the remainder of graders to add?  Just keep repeating over and over again that they needed to make three objects?  That’s not particularly helpful.

Thirdly – I can’t overstate how much I LOVE Wayne’s personally reviewing every exercise.  It’s really awesome!  It would be great if other instructors could do that sometimes, although I completely understand why they cannot.  But there’s also a rub…I know that when Wayne pointed out a mistake in my bouncing-ball exercise for example, my next few steps were pretty clear – take down submission, fix mistake, resubmit.   And I don’t think I’m far off in thinking that most animation students will do that.   So there’s the thing – if I come along and click on an animation exercise that’s awaiting grading and I see Wayne has already left his own professional-grade and typically quite substantial feedback in it…what on Earth of value do I have to add to that?  “Uhhh….good job?”  In the case where he’s found a mistake I don’t even grade those exercises quite frankly, because I anticipate the submitter will soon be deleting the exercise and resubmitting a corrected version.  Note; this is NOT a suggestion that Wayne needs to do anything different whatsoever!  But his participation in those exercises changes the calculus a bit, and that’s something that needs to be considered especially when we’re discussing things like minimum-required commenting for grading submissions.