Weekly releases should be mandatory for GSoC participants. I worked on Boost.Visualization during GSoC 2007, and they helped me accomplish most of my stated goals. Each week, I sent a list of promises to my Mentor, and worked like crazy to get them all finished and checked in by Sunday. He sent me nudges when I slipped a day, and I kept to the schedule I set out at the beginning of the summer. By releasing code each week, I noticed some of the bad decisions I made, and made two major reorganizations by the end of the summer. The end result was still poorly factored, but without weekly tasks it would have been poorly factored and incomplete!
Were you generating full releases each weak? I can certainly see how that policy can be used to measure progress. That's actually a good idea since it forces the student to think about end product as much as the code.
Please consider exceptions to this rule :).
There always are :) Andrew Sutton andrew.n.sutton@gmail.com