[buo]

Absolutely. In my experience teaching in college, this is the correct approach.

A very useful thing to have, both for teachers and students, is a "rubric": a succinct description of how the work will be evaluated, and the importance (weight) of each feature.

[castillar76]

Yes! And then the rubric should actually define the pieces of the assignment you care about them getting right. I have this debate a lot when we’re designing assignments for an intro to Python class (which, sadly, we have to do very regularly because of sites like Chegg…). Figure out what it is you want the student to get out of the assignment (e.g., manipulating dictionaries or sorting values) and evaluate their results based on whether they did that thing. If they did the thing but missed some nitinoid details they don’t get a perfect grade, but they should get a solid, passing grade for it.