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 Session Assistant and sometimes also the Session Lead. 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.

You can read more about how the process looks both from a trainee and mentor perspective in the HYF Assignment Template readme.

Communication with HYF and the Session Lead

It's important that you communicate with your Session Lead, team and the HYF staff. That could be if you get busy or something comes up that impedes your volunteering capacity. While it's important that you can commit to your volunteering tasks, we also know that life can get in the way sometimes. In that case, it's really important that you communicate with us then we can find another volunteer to help out in your absence.

Giving feedback

All the feedback should be communicated through GitHub to give trainees a realistic experience. If you're new to GitHub or need a refresher on reviewing a PR, check out the Commenting on a pull request guide (GitHub).

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 volunteer team and manage your time as needed.

Sharing general feedback

It is really helpful for the Session Lead to get an overview of how the team is doing with the assignment on a whole. So if you notice things that the team is collectively getting wrong, patterns of mistakes, or important details that trainees seem to misunderstand - then make an overview of those challenges and share them with the Session Lead so they can be addressed in the next session.

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

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 🤓