Timeline for A student in my course does well on exams, but doesn't do the homework: Go easy on them, or make them "pay the price?"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 28, 2015 at 7:16 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | We forget the KISS principle at our peril. link | |
| Nov 28, 2015 at 4:50 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @DanielR.Collins - "My tech sucks so bad I can't calculate a simple maximum" is a really poor excuse for not giving a student the credit that one would otherwise say they deserve. What limits the ability to select an "ideal" grade should be measuring how well a student has mastered the material (which is inherently tricky), not primary school mathematics. | |
| Nov 25, 2015 at 18:41 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Henery: Thanks for that. To be clear, it can't directly handle the conditional weighting, you'd need to make 3! = 6 separate columns for all the possible weightings and then take the maximum across them, correct? | |
| Nov 25, 2015 at 18:29 | comment | added | Henry | @DanielR.Collins: The documentation here library.blackboard.com/ref/36ba3329-e441-488a-93ce-7a55543cc999/… describes how to create a calculated column which is the maximum of several other columns. | |
| Nov 25, 2015 at 18:17 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Henry: To my knowledge that's not correct. If you could point to some documentation as to how Blackboard can handle conditional weighting as specified by Tom Au's post above, it would be appreciated. | |
| Nov 25, 2015 at 14:23 | comment | added | Henry | @DanielR.Collins Many course management systems do support such things (Blackboard and Canvas both do). | |
| Nov 25, 2015 at 7:56 | comment | added | Jessica B | @DanielR.Collins If my students want to know where they stand, I tell them to work it out. They know what they've got for all the marked work, so they are just as capable of doing the calculation as I am. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 23:55 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Jessica B: At our institution, "keeping students informed as to their progress" is a major component of our observations and evaluations, it's appreciated by students, and I think it's good practice. Using the classroom management software their current grades are always automatically updated and accessible 24/7. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 14:58 | comment | added | Tom Au | @DanielR.Collins: Basically, the professor wouldn't re-do the calculation unless a student asked him, after having presumably done it himself. But it was a safety net. (In my case, the grades were so obviously skewed (90% for the final, 85% for hourlies, 60% for homework) that he did it on his own. And gave me a B- instead of a C+. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 8:18 | comment | added | Jessica B | @DanielR.Collins No, it doesn't need doing each week. It needs doing once at the end of term. A student doesn't have a grade for a course until they have completed the course. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 5:28 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Dan Romik: Of course, that process would need to be repeated multiple times over the course of a semester to keep grades updated. In my case, it would have to be done at least once a week for each of 4 classes (instead of the management software just keeping it updated live automatically). | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 3:28 | comment | added | Dan Romik | @DanielR.Collins these software suites usually have a function enabling download/upload of grades. At my institution many instructors would download the raw grading data, process it in Excel to compute final scores, and upload the final grades into the system. Is it slightly more work? Maybe (actually sometimes the opposite, as grading software is a pain to use and setting up your own spreadsheet makes things more transparent and minimizes the chance of errors). Is it sufficiently hard and time-consuming for your "waste of time" argument to make sense? I don't think so. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 3:22 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @Dan Romik: In my experience, most instructors who do this kind of Rube Goldberg grading aren't doing it with technology. And the point stands that it's not automatible in most classroom management software. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 3:20 | comment | added | Dan Romik | @DanielR.Collins it is trivial to implement such a scheme in Excel or other spreadsheet. If you don't know how, ask for administrative support from your department and I'm sure they'll help you figure it out. Not saying you should use such a grading system, but the technical difficulty shouldn't be a factor in your decision. | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 3:12 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | The problem with this is that it's a whole lot of wasted time for the professor for so little benefit. It's generally not a calculation that you can automate in a classroom management package, for example. If I were advising the professor, I would definitely recommend putting that time into something more productive. (This is what I meant by "running different case what-ifs" in my answer.) | |
| Nov 24, 2015 at 1:31 | history | answered | Tom Au | CC BY-SA 3.0 |