Grading Update

in Posts

We’re now far enough along in the semester that I can give some more specifics on how I intend to give grades in class. Nothing really changes from the original Grading (and late policy) - it’s just that we now have more details, and some experience where there was ambiguity.

Overall

The plan of having grading for “excellence” and checks for engagement still holds: excellence tells an initial grade and then, if engagement is a problem, we penalize you.

The inital “feedback note”

I am writing a note to everyone with a little feedback. This combines things from Alex (he wrote his own version of this) and me - without much attempt to put it together. There are three “pieces”:

  • Your midterm exam - you know this already
  • Your “engagement” - see below, but this is basically whether you have been “at least adequate” in your engagement since we have no way to truly measure/reward excellence.
  • Your Portfolio 1 grade - this is either A or not-yet-A (see below). If you got a “not-yet-A” we prefer you put your energy into the current parts of class - you can make up for doing poorly on past assignments by doing better (putting in more effort/creativity) on your future assignments.

Engagement

For the first part of class, there was no one for whom engagement was enough of a problem that we would deduct from your grade. Please keep up the good work!

We have not really been keeping score in Canvas too much - it’s not useful. Going forward, we’ll find some way to let you know if engagement is a problem.

We also have no way to reward excellence here - some people have been “very engaged” (asking questions, putting notable effort into workbooks, …) and others less so. We check that people are “at least adequate” in their engagement and expect that those of you who are really engaged are reaping other rewards (learning more, seeing benefits in portfolios, etc.).

Excellence: Portfolio and Exams

The original post only said there will be portfolios and exams. Now I can give the details:

  • There will be 4 portfolios. The “final project” will be treated as a portfolio.
  • There are (still) 2 exams that cover the material in the regular section and we grade these on the same scale as the regular section.

The general idea is to weight everything evenly: there are 5 graded things (the exams together count the same as a portfolio). However, we may fudge things based on circumstances.

For the exams, we will over-weight the exam that you do better on. So, if you mess up on one exam, we will count the other one a little more. (no exact formula, but something like 8% first, 8% second, 4% which ever is highest - or 12% higher of the two, 8% lower).

Portfolio Grades

We will grade portfolios as “A” and “not (yet) an A”.

This is inspired by some education science stuff… everyone should be able to get an A, it’s just that you didn’t have enough time to iterate and learn.

The problem isn’t the students, it’s time. Ideally, we could give you all the time you need. But, in practice, we have the finite amount of time of a semester class, and we want you to be exposed to all of the material. I don’t want you going back to fix old assignments because that takes time away from learning the other things we want you to learn.

As such, each portfolio is graded either “A” or “not-yet-A”. At the end of the semester we will figure out how to look at the not-yet-As to come up with a final grade (yes, you have to trust us). If your portfolios are consistently “not-yet-As” your final grade will be “not-yet-A”.

That’s not to say that all “not-yet-As” are created equal. An assignment that just misses the standard is different from one that fails to show excellence, or is missing key components.

My expectation (now that I know the class a bit…) is that most things will be As. And, for most people, most of the assignments will be As so we won’t spend too much effort quantifying how much an assignment misses an A.

This also explains the class’s late policy: turning in something late implies that, at the time the assignment was due, you didn’t think the assignment was an A (otherwise you would have turned it in). We have a policy like this for fairness reasons (all students have the same amount of time to complete the assignments) and practical reasons.

An important point: if you don’t think your assignment meets the standards for an A, then use the resources available to you to improve it! Our goal is that everyone succeeds!