Using Marmoset to submit assignments

Basic Logistics

1. Go to https://marmoset.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/ and log in using your WatIAM info. This should be the same as the info you use to log in to Quest.
2. Click the "as" button under "Authenticate". You should only have one choice here.
3. Click "CS145 (Fall 2023):".
4. You should now be able to see the assignments that have been set up on Marmoset for CS 145. You can submit your assignment files to Marmoset via the "web submission" page for each assignment question.

Submitting Assignments

If only one file is required for an assignment question, you can submit only that file. If multiple files are required for an assignment question, you must zip all of the required files and submit the zip file. Make sure that all of the required files with a required name are named correctly; otherwise, you will receive "did not compile" as the test result.

Tests on Marmoset

There are two types of tests that we will use on Marmoset in CS 145: public tests and release tests.

Public tests are designed to test whether your program works in the most basic sense possible. They are simple tests that test for trivial cases.

Release tests are designed to test whether your program is correct. You can expect these tests to test all the dark corners and special cases that can potentially break your code.

After Submitting a Program

When you make a submission to an assignment question on Marmoset, your submission will be automatically tested on a CSCF server. After a while (a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on server load and program and test complexity), the tests should finish and a result will be available.

Interpreting Test Results

If your submitted program does not compile or run successfully on its own, your submission will receive a result of "did not compile" and the detailed test results will contain something similar to the error message you get if you ran your program yourself. In this case, your submission will not be tested with any of the tests.

If your submitted program runs successfully on its own, it will be tested with all of the tests (including release tests).

If it fails any public test, the detailed test results will display an error message for that public test. Your submission will still be tested with any of the release tests. However, you will not have the option to see any information for the release tests.

If it passes all of the public tests, you will have the option to see information for the release tests. If you do so, you will use up one of your "release tokens" for that question. For every assignment question, you will be initially given 3 release tokens. Each release token will regenerate 12 hours after its use.

It is not necessary to use release tokens or view the results of your submission to receive credit. However, you are encouraged to start your work early to have more chances to see the results of the release tests, and potentially catch any mistakes. If the deadline will expire before your token regenerates, you can still submit, though you will not be able to tell how your submission did on the tests.

Marmoset automatically tests each submission with all of the release tests, in some order specified by the course staff. If your submission fails a release test and you use a token to see the results, you will only see that test and one more test in the detailed test results. If your submission passes all the release tests, you will not see any release tests in the detailed test results, but you will be credited with full marks for that question.

If you fail a release test, you will get a very small amount of information about what went wrong. You will not be given details of the test case that you failed. Do not attempt to guess what that test case might be; do not ask about it on the forum, and do not speculate about test cases on the forum. The correct action when failing a release test is to re-examine your own test suite and redesign it to find the error in your code or your assumptions.

You can continue to submit and see the result of release tests after the deadline has passed, though post-deadline submissions mostly do not affect marks (note the Assignment Grading section below). It is a good idea to finish questions on which you ran out of time, to make sure that you have done all the learning.

Common Marmoset Test Messages

Here are the possible results of requesting a release test:

"Success: test X passed", where X is the name of the test. You can pat yourself on the back for this one.

"Error: wrong output for test X". This means that some function you were required to write did not produce the value we expected, or (later in the course) that some part of your program did not produce the output that we expected.

"Error: program ran out of resources while running test X". This means that your program took too much time or too much memory during the test. The "short result" reported should be ignored in the case of a timeout, because we use our own timeout mechanism, not Marmoset's.

"Error: program encountered error while running test X". This means that your program halted with an error during the test.

"Error: program ran out of time while initializing". This happens if your program takes too much time when it is evaluated by Marmoset, before any of our tests are run.

"Error: program ran out of memory while initializing" (same as above, but with memory).

"Error: program failed to initialize". This happens if you use the wrong language level, if you have non-text elements in your program (such as values snipped out of the Interactions window and pasted into the Definitions window), or if you are doing something that is not permitted, such as file I/O.

Assignment Grading

There is no penalty for multiple submissions. Your best submission counts. The only thing stopping you from spamming Marmoset with many submissions is your own conscience, so do not do it. Please remember that the server is a shared resource; out of courtesy to your fellow students, do not do anything that overloads it, especially close to deadlines.