There will be a few parts to grading your projects Your projects will be graded running them on a number of test files for which I have already created correct(we hope) output. Your output will have all punctuation, blank lines, and non-newline whitespace stripped before diffing similarly cleaned files.
Some of your data structures may be included with the TAs own testing code to test their efficiency and correctness.
Some text output cannot always be graded by simply diffing because there is no guarantee that we will have the same output. In these cases your project's output will be pre-processed. In the case of the B+ tree, for instance, this program will verify that each node has the correct number of keys, that they are correctly ordered, and that all the correct data is at the leaves(and any other rules I may have left out).
Thanks to the miracle of automation you should expect your projects to be run on very very large inputs.
Typically each test file will be worth 10 points, and you will be eligible for either 10 or 0 points depending on whether you pass for fail that test. There is no partial credit for an individual test. I may give points projects that fail a test because of 'small' errors after initial grading at my own discretion. The tests will try to test mutually exclusive components of your projects independently. However, if you don't have a dictionary which at least correctly stores all points so that some 'get lost', you may still end up failing other tests since they all require a working dictionary.