Reply To: Growing Dissatisfaction with CGCookie

[Markus Berg]

@williamatics Unfortunately I agree with you. And that’s also why, except for the animation exercises, I have completely stopped sending in my own exercise submissions. I still do the the exercises, I just don’t send them in. The reason I still try to submit the animation exercises (when my busy schedule permits me) is because of @waylow ‘s comments and suggestions. To me personally, that’s worth more than the entire monthly subscription fee alone. It’s a great boost to my confidence. I also like to read his comments to other people’s submissions, as I have learned a ton from those alone.

When I first joined CGC in December last year, I felt quite nervous the first time I submitted an exercise. It was the first time I had ever let anyone have a close inspection of something I had made. Every few hours I would check if my submission had been graded yet, worrying that maybe I had forgotten something, that perhaps it would fail. And there were a lot more submissions back then that didn’t pass. Seems like the last submission that failed was early June this year. And before that, nothing has failed since middle of February!?

I guess some people feel a bit uncomfortable giving a fail to a submission, especially when the submission kind of passed. And perhaps they also want to give more encouragement by letting submissions pass. I can totally understand that. But sometimes failing a submission (with the comment as to why, and some words on how they can improve and pass next time) does a lot more to help someone improve their skills. Also, by letting certain submissions pass, that clearly didn’t meet all the requirements, you are sending the message that it doesn’t really matter if you do all the required steps, that those steps are more like suggestions and guidelines, and that you don’t really need to put any real effort into passing an exercise.

https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/15425  Here is a submission to the Modeling with Primitives exercise. Only two of the required 3 primitives were present. This one got a Fail, with 2 of the 3 exercise requirements filled!

https://cgcookie.com/exercise_submissions/19518 This one on the other hand, (from a few months ago, I guess!?), only submitted 1 out of 3 primitives, and also just 2 out of 3 requirements filled,  but it passed the exercise!

I’m not saying that the grading should necessarily be super strict, but at least it needs to be more consistent. Otherwise it’s not really fair, and I think does more harm than good in the long run. We are here to learn from our mistakes, to practice what we have learned in a course, and to fill in the gaps when we lacked something.

@theluthier maybe some grading guidelines should be added, for people to follow when they help grade submissions. What should be expected of a grader, how strict (or not strict) we should be and so on. Perhaps that would make the grading more fair and consistent and could improve the quality of doing an exercise in the first place. Submitting an exercise is kind of like a mini version of an art critique, so I think more effort should be spent to make the best of it.

These are just my opinions. I love this community. Even though I haven’t been very active the last few months, because of my increasingly busy schedule, I still try to log on every day, checking out the forum and grade exercise submissions, and I have no intention of leaving in the near future. Joining CGC has done a lot to help me getting more confident and actually start modeling things.