Discussion Feedback and Grading

in Posts

For online discussions and seek and finds, we are giving you two different evaluations. One is the per-assignment “quantitative” evaluation - this is posted for each assignment, and is on a 1-5 scale. The other is the more “qualitative” feedback, where we look at your work over the course of a few weeks and give you a grade.

This posting explains these two, so you can interpret the scores you are getting.

Roughly, we expect the “online discussion grading” to be:

  • Convert the (drop 2 average) of seek and find and online discussion to a letter grade. (5/5=AB, 4/5=B, 3/5=BC)
  • Add a factor from the qualitative grade (+/- one step). Since qualitative grades are on a 4 point scale, it is roughly (4/4 = +1/2 step, 2/4=no addition, 0/4=-1/2 step)
  • We haven’t decided how we will factor in participation

I say roughly, because low qualitative scores might already be reflected in the quantitative scores.It’s not an automatic process.

Your participation also counts towards your participation grade.

We know that when we post these as Canvas comments, the formatting is removed, and they are hard to read. We are trying to find a workaround.

Quantitative Score

The quantitative feedback is based solely on your initial posts. It is scored on a 1-5 score per assignment, and drop 2 grading applies.

Note: the idea is that 5/5 means things are “at least good” - to get an A, you also need to do well in qualitative grading.

The rubrics are posted with each assignment’s grade, but they might be difficult to read as Canvas Comments:

Online Discussion 5 pts (1 point per item)

  • Something turned in
  • Two independent posts (we can relax this for weeks 1 and 2)
  • Good response to prompt 1
  • Good response to prompt 2
  • Responses show evidence of attention to reading.
  • [no points - but note for next grading phase] notable answer

Seek and Find 5 pts (1 point per item)

  • something turned in
  • post has image (be relaxed on first few)
  • post has proper citation (be relaxed in general, but especially on first ones)
  • image fits requirement
  • response answers prompt

Qualitative Score

We will manually give you a qualitative grade based on our impression of your online activity. We will post these in a special Canvas Assignment that covers a group of weeks. (for example Weeks 1-5 Online Participation). There will be a comment for the statistics, and a comment for the grade.

Note: we did not look at the statistical measurements (other than the counts) in determining the grades. Post-hoc, the statistics seems very correlated. So you might check the Qualitative Participation Grading (and Quantifying it) page about statistics to interpret what you’ve done.

We are splitting this into two parts, both scored on a 0-4 scale:

Initial postings

  • 0 = the quantitative score overstates the student’s performance
  • 1 = posts are below expectation, but not totally a disaster
  • 2 = the (close to) 5/5 “good” rating is right (student doesn’t really get above being consistently good = roughly an AB for a grad class)
  • 3 = consistently better than good
  • 4 = consistently a lot better than good

Reply postings

  • 0 = unacceptable - not really contributing to conversations
  • 1 = poor - some contrubution, but not significant
  • 2 = occassionally a good contributor (or often an acceptable contributor)
  • 4 = often (consistently) a good contributor

When we give you the scores, these are the two “overall” numbers. There are some other numbers that we used to come up with the overall score.

  • QuantEx - quantity of initial posts exceeding minimums
  • Best - quality of best posts
  • QuantRep - quantity of replies (subjectively, since we only count “real” replies)
  • Adds - do the postings add to the dialog?