Small, Yet Costly, Errors

In general, your project will either completely pass each test, or completely fail it. In particular, the following ``small'' mistakes have been known to fail projects completely in many tests:

• Forgetting to match each ``open'' XML tag (e.g. <tree>) with a ``close'' XML tag (eg. </tree>)
• Forgetting to include the / at the end of single tags (eg. <success />)
• Sloppy capitalization (eg. <Success/>)

• Misspellings (eg. <sucess/> or <comand name= ``creatCity''> ...).

On rare occasions, the tests may be extended to allow minor errors to pass, but only if we find that the cost of that error is significant and unfair. However, in the large, you'd do better to get this stuff right the first time, than expect partial credit.

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, and some `get lost', you may still end up failing other tests since they all require a working dictionary. This does not reflect double jeopardy on the part of the test data, since it is always possible to use some other structure (such as the Java TreeMap) for the data dictionary, and receive points for portions of the tests that merely reference the data in the dictionary. Do not hesitate to ask for suggestions as to how to work around missing project functionality.