Measuring a student's impact by a project on the number of lines of code they committed can be very misleading.
Sure, in the extremes it will give sensible results (someone wrote only 3 lines, or wrote 90% of the code base).
But minor, questionably motivated refactorings can create huge commits, while someone may come up with some great design while walking around for hours and sketching on paper, which all ultimately boils down to a short function.
Dumb metrics like this cannot replace actually talking with the students, asking questions about their choices and alternatives, having them do presentations or lab notebooks/logbooks etc.
> Dumb metrics like this cannot replace actually talking with the students, asking questions about their choices and alternatives, having them do presentations or lab notebooks/logbooks etc.
As said in the parent:
>> Over-all it helped the prof grade faster, at least in the degenerate cases.
Sure, in the extremes it will give sensible results (someone wrote only 3 lines, or wrote 90% of the code base).
But minor, questionably motivated refactorings can create huge commits, while someone may come up with some great design while walking around for hours and sketching on paper, which all ultimately boils down to a short function.
Dumb metrics like this cannot replace actually talking with the students, asking questions about their choices and alternatives, having them do presentations or lab notebooks/logbooks etc.