CS 1401 Assignment #4

Due Date: correspondingly, Monday, February 20, 2006, or Tuesday, February 21, 2006, before the beginning of your lab section.

Goals: to learn to design objects and value-returning methods.

Points: This assignment is worth a total of 20 points. No late assignments will be accepted, but credit will be given for partially completed assignments turned in on time.

Assignment: In this assignment, we will deal with the same competition assignment as in Assignment 3, with the following difference:

• in Assignment 3, we asked you to design one application; the emphasis was on making things work;
• in this assignment, instead of placing everything into a single method main, we ask you to make your code more in line with the object-oriented paradigm; the emphasis now is on designing objects and methods.

Reminder: To encourage the departments to work better, the university is thinking of organizing a competition between different departments, so that students from a winning department will get a special celebration party.

There are many possible criteria for selecting a winning department: the number of students n, their average GPA g, the percentage h of students who are members of honor societies, the percentage a of students who are active in professional organizations (like ACM), and the number p of research publications co-authored by senior and graduate students, etc. To select a winning department, we combine these criteria, with certain weights, into a single rating

To help the university, we must design a template that would compute such a rating for different departments.

Desired structure: define three classes:

• class Student whose objects are students;
• class Department whose objects are departments, and
• an application class.

Class Student should contain:

• a field for the student's name,
• a field for the department's name,
• a constructor method for defining a new student object based on two strings containing, correspondingly, the student's name and the department's name;
• a method getName that returns the student's name;
• a method setName that changes the student's name;
• a method getDept that returns the department's name;
• a method setDept that changes the department's name.

Class Design should contain:

• a field for the department's name;
• a field for the number of students n in the department;
• a field for the average GPA g;
• a field for the number H of students who are members of honor societies;
• a field for the number A of students who are active in professional organizations;
• a field for the number p of research publications co-authored by students;
• a constructor method for defining a new department object based on the required information;
• get and set methods which return and change the value of each field;
• a method percentHonor that returns the percentage of students who are members of honor societies;
• a method percentAtive that returns the percentage of students who are active in professional organizations;
• a method ranking that returns the department's ranking.

The application class should do the following:

• ask the user (the student who types in this information) for the following information:
  • his or her name;
  • the name of the student's department;
  • the number of students n in this department;
  • the average GPA g of students in the department;
  • the number H of students who are members of honor societies;
  • the number A of students who are active in professional organizations (like ACM); and
  • the number p of research publications co-authored by students.
• based on the answers, construct the corresponding objects of type Student and of type Department;
• use the methods defined for such objects to print a report that displays:
  • the name of the department;
  • the name of the reporting person;
  • the number of students in the department;
  • the average GPA of students in this department;
  • the number and percentage of students who are members of honor societies;
  • the number and percentage of students who are active in professional organizations;
  • the number of research publications co-authored by students; and
  • the resulting rating of the department.

Homework part. On a separate sheet of paper, please do Exercise 9 (p. 145), and Ex. 5 Ex. 3 (p. 147). Explain your answers. Return the sheet with your answers to your TA by, correspondingly, Monday February 20 or Thursday February 21 before the beginning of your lab session.