Assignment Reviewer

TL;DR: Reviewing trainees' pull requests on GitHub

All our trainees hand in assignments every week by using pull requests on GitHub. In order for the trainees to improve as much as possible we aim to review every pull request thoroughly. This review process imitates the real world and can really help the trainees to improve their skills significantly. 🤓

Responsibility

As an Assignment Reviewer it is your responsibility to review the trainees' pull requests. It is also your responsibility that all the assignment submissions get reviewed by someone! It is not you that has to do all the reviewing, but you have the responsibility to make sure all submitted assignments get a review. Normally the Assignment Reviewer(s) get help from the Teacher Assistant and sometimes also the Main Teacher. If you need additional hands - some of our alumni can help out too.

How trainees hand in assignments

The trainees receive assignments every Sunday and hand them in using pull requests during the week. The process goes like this:

1. The trainees create a pull request (PR) on their hyf-assignments repo

2. The PR now needs to be reviewed by a mentor. We always aim to get this done within 7 days of submission

3. When the review has been received the trainees need to make changes based on the feedback

4. When changes have been made they can merge their PR and they are now fully done with their assignment

There is a video here that explains and shows how it works. There is an extra step which is that the trainees also need to review another team members assignment (peer feedback).

Communication with HYF or Lead Teacher

It's quite important that you communicate with your teacher team and the staff. That could be if you get busy or something comes up that impedes your volunteering capacity. If you communicate with us then we can find another helper or get the other teachers to help out :) Everyone gets busy sometimes, but it's really important that all trainees can get feedback in good time.

Giving feedback

Give the review on the PR. You can see how to give feedback on a PR using Github here.

Here is an example of some review given by mentor RassiBassi (Rasmus)

Try to keep the review at maximum 3 points the trainees can work on. There is no need to overdo it! Remember that you are responsible for up to 16 assignments this week. Therefore try and coordinate with your teacher-team and manage your available time with the assignments.

Giving an overview of general misconceptions

It can be super helpful for the Lead Teacher to get an overview of how the team is doing with the assignment. So if you notice things that the is collectively getting wrong - then make an overview of those misconceptions so they can be addressed in the next session.

Here is an example of a Assignment Reviewer's overview of the :

After following assignment for Javascript 1 - Week 2 here are some notes:

• Many trainees have a problem with understanding return at functions.

• The most difficult question for them was the fourth student manager

• Some trainees copied the other trainees' assignment.

• Many trainees don't know that they can use <= and >= is available when they compare at if condition.

• There is still a problem with understanding the goal of functions. What is the function, why do we use it, and when?

• When I told trainees at the feedback that they can give the parameter at the function a default value at:

  function getFullname(firstname, surname, useFormalName = false) {

  I noticed confusion and difficulty understanding this.

• Using a lot of redundant console.log even if not mentioned in the question to log something. Also, I've seen at many assignment that the return it like

  return console.log(..)

• Using unclear or non-expressive names for the variables like x, a and I have told them that it is preferable to use clear, meaningful names for variables and functions.

• At question 4 to check if the trainee exists or not. Very few were thinking of using includes of indexOf at the array. Many used complex loops to implement it.

  -There was no clear understanding of how to use codepen to test the code. (edited)

Anything else?

If we left any questions unanswered - reach out to one of our staff on Slack 🤓