End of Week Surveys

Each week there will be a Canvas “graded survey” that prompts you with questions about the week’s material.

As a graded survey, Canvas will give you full credit for completing the survey - without regard to the quality of your answers. We may check your answers to make sure you made a legitimate attempt (and will take away credit if you did not).

The graded surveys are designed to give you a chance to reflect on the material of the week, and to demonstrate that you understand key things. It is less of a test (to assess how well students learned), and more of a check to see how things are going.

We may reward particularly insightful or thorough answers (see Grading). But, we do not expect to read all of the answers, and of the ones we read, we may not reward all of them.

The questions are designed to help you think about the topic and self-assess how well you understand it. The Educational Science literature suggests that taking a little time to reflect on what you learned over the course of the week can be really valuable. We started doing these surveys in recent years(both in CS765 but also CS559), and found that they were a really useful for us (course staff) to stay more connected to the students, but also help the students internalize the material. Yes, we actually got positive feedback that students liked being forced to take the time to reflect on what they learned during the week.