Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Aaron Safer-Rosenthal 20068164
Tamir Arnesty 20063753
Max Eisen 20072080

Addressed to: Associate Dean of Studies

Written on behalf of my group, with our names and student numbers listed above.

I am requesting a review of my instructor, Carolyn Lamb's, decision on grading of the final project in the course CISC 226: Game Design. Specifically, her decision to take off three marks for the execution portion of the rubric. She gave us an adequate mark, points, on that section. The rubric describes this as the game may have bugs, but these do not significantly impede its play. At least two minutes of gameplay have been provided. She goes on to explain these bugs in separate comments: I encountered a bug where the game would not always recognize that I had pressed the spacebar, especially from certain platforms and especially while using the movement controls at the same time. This made gameplay significantly more frustrating than it needed to be. I believe that this is an unfair deduction of marks, as the bug she describes is quite literally impossible to occur.

While writing the code for our game, we were sure to make the scripts (individual sequence of instructions) for movement controls and our spacebar control independent of each other. Due to this, the bug she described, would not be able to occur. Since the movement and spacebar scripts are independent of each other, being on certain platforms or using the movement controls, would have no effect on whether the game would recognize that the spacebar is pressed. As well, we have run extensive testing on multiple computers to try and encounter this bug. We were unable to find any evidence of it, and for this reason, decided that to request an informal review of the bug from Prof. Lamb.

We reached out to Prof. Lamb for a informal review of this bug she encountered, along with proof (the game's code) to show its impossibility. However, she declined to review and just restated that she had removed the marks based on her experience with the game. We obviously felt that this was unfair, and this led us to the decision to submit an academic appeal. Furthermore, section 1.1.2 of the academic appeal regulations state that The decision maker must provide reasons for the decision based on evidence and the decision must be consistent with the Academic Regulations. I do not believe it would be possible to provide evidence of this bug and for that reason, I feel that we deserve to have our mark reviewed and adjusted.
Ultimately we feel that we deserve the full 8 marks in the execution category of the rubric, as the game has no other bugs and it clearly satisfies the 2 minutes of compelling gameplay component. However, even if, for an unknown reason (such as an issue with her own computer or keyboard) Prof. Lamb experienced a bug while playing the game, I believe that this should be considered at most a minor bug. Therefore, as per the rubric, a maximum of 1.5 marks should have been originally deducted.

I have attached the scripts for the movement and spacebar controls (As .docx files. They should be in '.cs' format, however this form does not allow me to attach '.cs' files.) as evidence that this bug does not exist. Also attached is a screenshot which highlights a part of the Glitch (spacebar) script, and a screenshot of the rubric. I was not able to attach the game itself, (it exceeds the 10mb supporting document size limit) but we submitted both Mac and Windows version of it in the original final project submission.