Midterm grading progress

I've made a first pass through all the midterms now, and assigned tentative scores ... but I want to make a second pass through to make sure your scores don't depend too much on how warm my coffee was or what time of day it was when I read yours. I will probably need to "bin" them (group into rough equivalence classes given the same score) to avoid too much random variation in scores.

Generally I'm pretty pleased. Most of the midterms did draw from both papers, and thoughtfully applied them to the specific project descriptions. A few of the midterms were particularly creative or insightful. Some were a bit generic, describing only general goals ("encourage open communication") rather than concrete plans for meeting those goals. Many, I thought, underestimated the difficulty of precisely defining interfaces and reaching a common understanding of what Jackson calls "ground terms". That's understandable, and I think it's hard to grasp how slippery terms and interface definitions can be until you've had some (possibly unpleasant) experience working with others across organizational boundaries.