TLDR: In a course where students are required to do exercises, a programming project and write a report in small groups, the lecturer announced that grading will be based on 'creativity' and how funny or interesting he thinks the results are. How can I cope with this as a student?
I am taking a mandatory course where a programming project and exercises are carried out in small groups of students. Over the last years, the projects were relatively similar from what I've heard, and the course is known for a comparatively large workload with no deadline or fixed extent.
An anecdotal example told by the lecturer is that someone wrote a 170 page report and implemented his own wireless transfer protocol (which is only partly related to the course contents). Students from the last semesters took up to around a year in total to finish their projects.
This is my final semester where I take courses (hopefully), and the only semester I am able to take this course specifically. After that, there will be my masters thesis.
In the introduction to the course, the lecturer has mentioned that he does not want to keep the old format of long reports about the basics, but rather wants students to write 'creative' blog posts in addition to a report to be turned in. In particular, he is looking for us to write about things he likes or perceives as funny (but is still related to the topic, which according to him has a lot of potential for this).
In addition to the report and programming exercises, he lecturer wants students to write creative written blog posts about topics closely related to the exercises. These posts are supposed to contain funny and interesting information, as in "we accidentally made a mistake but the outcome looks/sounds funny" or "during the exercises we found out/made an assumption and verified it by xyz".
I want to mention that this is the same lecturer who fell asleep during two of my talks he had to grade, and I was previously dissatisfied with his grading on one of these. Now I have a new task where the desired outcome is unclear, and the task description is very subjective. During the introduction, I have explicitly asked for fixed deadlines and a statement about the extent of the project and report (as in, how many pages and such). He replied that he would 'probably' write down a few sentences about the task soon.
My worry is that there will be a lot of work for me, since i would like to get a very good grade. In addition, I fear that my work won't result in what the lecturer wants, and I am worried that I might get a worse grade than desired due to 'creative' grading.
My questions are:
- Should I communicate this to the lecturer?
- If yes, how?
- How can I effectively deal with this unclear task in a way that will not leave me frustrated and overworked?
I understand that me being unsatisfied with a grade is not so much a problem and rather common in students, but my main concern is that I don't want to do unproportional amounts of work and then be given an average or worse grade.