Background
Many assignments in this course will use a computer automarker to generate the initial assessment. This automated process provides fast and very thorough testing of the code and also provides a great deal of individual feedback to each student so that they can determine if the assessment is reasonable. This thorough and precise machine testing is what is done in industry to find bugs and to test that code meets specifications exactly. It would be quite simply impossible to provide such levels of testing and feedback with a human tutor.
To spread the workload, the next level of quality checking is performed by each individual student when they examine the automarker output in great detail for "fairness." Note that students have much more incentive to check their marks than the tutors and they only have one assignment to look over instead of hundreds.
This is very much like the open source development model as described in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
Given a bit of encouragement, your users will diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly than you could unaided.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
The power of this effect is easy to underestimate. In fact, pretty well all of us in the open-source world drastically underestimated how well it would scale up with number of users and against system complexity, until Linus Torvalds showed us differently.
If, after checking the automarker results, you are confident that the automarker has made a mistake, let the tutors know via the comp2304@itee.uq.edu.au alias, and they will endevaour to correct the issue.
Unfortunately, small mistakes in your code (for example, forgetting a semicolon) may mean that you get a low grade for the assignment. While the course staff appreciate that you may have put a lot of effort in to the solution, in the real world of computer programming, precision and accuracy are extremely important. In these circumstances, the tutors will not be able to adjust your grade (regardless of how small the mistake is) but you will be eligable for resubmission (see below).
In the unlikely event that an error is found that affects all students, the marks of all students may need to be adjusted - which may lead to a decrease in marks for some. For this reason, all results should be considered as draft results until announced as finalized.
Optional: Resubmission Process
All students will also be able to adjust their code based on the automarker feedback and test cases and then resubmit the debugged code. The resubmission results will have a 25% penalty applied to them in order to reward students that correctly submitted the assignment during the original submission process. Note that resubmissions will be disregarded if the code is clearly plagiarised or if no original submission was received, or if the code is substantially different from the original submission.