Grading
Your grade in this class will consist of:
- Your grade for the design challenges
- Your grade for the online discussions
- Your grade for participation
Canvas will not show your final grade. It will not even estimate it.
We will consider all aspects of your work in determining your final grade.
Note there are two aspects to “grading”: assessment (so we can give you a grade in the class), and feedback on your work. We will try to do both.
Grading for each of the pieces is described in Parts of Class.
Each part of the grade is considered without considering when things were turned in. Penalties are applied to the final grade. We may reduce your grade by up to a half letter grade (e.g., from an A to an AB) if your timeliness was a problem (e.g., you were consistently late). Generally, being late hurts you in borderline cases.
The design challenges will be given letter grades, and weighted by the length of the challenge. This is because the class schedule isn’t set exactly yet. Last year, there were three 4 week challenges, so they would have been weighted equally. We may grade separate components of the challenges (and weight them by their durations).
You will be given a letter grade for the online discussions and seek and finds. Your letter grade will reflect quantitative aspects and qualitative. Quantitative aspects are “did you do it” (acceptable/unacceptable/not turned in), and the qualitative aspects is how we reward excellence, such as very insightful postings or providing extensive feedback to your classmates. We will provide quantitative scores for each assignment, but will give qualitative grades based on groups assignments (we’ll assess it over the course of a few weeks, we expect everyone to have their ups and downs). Roughtly, you can get an AB for being consistently “acceptable” but to get an A you need to excel at least occasionally.
Participation lumps together “everything else”. This includes attendance, participating in discussions beyond initial posts (Piazza and posts beyond the minimum in the structured discussions), in-class exercises, doing the quizzes and surveys, … We will have quantitative measures (e.g., counting how often you show up or how many surveys you complete) and qualitative measures (e.g., do we perceive you as contributing to synchronous dialog or did you really make a good effort on an in-class design).
We will treat participation as a modifier for the final letter grade (like lateness). We may deduct up to a full letter grade (this is an extreme case - for example, if you never show up for class) for problematic participation. We may reward you with up to a half letter grade for notably exceptional participation. In both directions, consistency is key: you won’t be penalized for missing 1-2 classes or a few surveys (drop 2 applies, but we will be more lenient than that).
Your final grade will be the average of the letter grade components (design challenges and structured discussions weighted equally), modified by your participation and lateness penalty/rewards.
Regrades
If you believe there was an error in grading, send a private message to course staff via Piazza. Please tag it with “regrade”, and be clear if you are looking for an explanation or are just looking to recover points.
There undoubtedly errors in grading, and students only point out the ones likely to be in there favor. Statistically, it is implausible that all of the grading errors are against the students. It is unlikely that we made exactly one error. Therefore, if you point out a grading error, we may look at the entire assignment to make sure there aren’t other grading errors, in fact we might need to look at other assignments to check for errors as well.
Note that regrade requests may take time and might not be processed until the end of the semester.