Some days you go into class and give an excellent lecture and just feel like everything is working, like you got this teachin' thing figured out.And other days you look at your syllabus and realize you accidentally weighted the various grade-items such that a student can fail all three of the main assignments for the semester and still (barely) pass.
It's really hard to come up with a weighting system that covers all the priorities: encouraging them to prepare for/participate in class, privileging assignments that demonstrate mastery of course content/skills, rewarding active, on-time participation in group work (if applicable), etc., etc. Every time I make an adjustment to address a problem from the last semester, another one pops up (and of course c. 90% of students seem completely blind to the incentives I so carefully build into the grading system). My saving grace is that I teach mostly a required course in which students need to receive at least a C to graduate. They can earn C-s and Ds, but they'll have to repeat the class to get a diploma. That mostly eliminates the "still (barely) pass" problem.
ReplyDeletePlaying with the numbers associated with grades can sometimes help, too. There's a lot of room to play with between F=0 and F=55 (or so). Of course an assignment that never came in is a zero, but what about an assignment that is completely non-responsive to the prompt (quite likely because it was originally completed for another class/by another person)? I'd argue that that can be a zero, too (or, if you're using a rubric, that at least some parts of it can receive a zero, resulting in an F grade well below c. 55).
I'm curious about one aspect of your comment: how do the C-s and Ds count when your "success rate" for the course is computed? As "success" or "failure"? (They're not Fs, but still obligate a student to retake the course.) Assuming such rates play a role in the evaluation of your teaching, which may not be the case.
DeletePeter: I'm lucky. Nobody is tracking success/failure rates at my school, at lease not at the professor/course level, or at least not in a way that plays any role in the evaluation of my teaching (it's possible that if I flunked half a class, somebody might inquire into the circumstances; I think I've come close to 25-30%non-passing grades a few times, with the great majority of those being students who simply disappeared in the course of the semester). It may yet happen (raising graduation and related rates is definitely on the agenda), but I feel pretty confident that leaders in my department and program will push back against any initiative that assumes that professors are in a position to dramatically change those rates while maintaining standards. In writing classes, the failures are most often students who either don't write the papers at all, try to hand in irrelevant work recycled from another class, or plagiarize. Since we already break down the big projects into steps, and provide incentive to complete those steps through the grading breakdown (hence my semesterly dithering over the percentages), it's hard to see what more we could do to raise pass rates. Fortunately, we've got a bit of a reputation as a school that does writing instruction well, so we have that argument in reserve if anybody wants to do something that would lower standards.
DeleteHonestly, I worry more that the course that I teach might be cancelled or dramatically revised (=more students per section) because it's too expensive to teach (even whens staffed by relatively low-paid contingent faculty) than I do that I'll be pressured to raise passing rates.
Thanks. I'm in the bizarre situation of having to roughly match "success rates" (success defined as C or better) for every UG course I teach, when the recent record of success rates for each course is not known to the faculty. Also, students who disappear even before the first test (or drop without warning later, for personal reasons) count against me, regardless of their record in the course. If that doesn't happen, I'm given below "meets expectations" for teaching, independent of any documentation of student performance throughout the course I care to produce. I don't know if anyone else in the dept is treated this way, since there are no publicly known uniform evaluation criteria. The Dean and the Provost are aware of this, and don't care. So I can't help but wonder if this sort of harassment is unique in the country (for tenured faculty at an ostensibly "R1" land-grant.)
DeleteRemember the good ole days when you could just assign a midterm, final exam, and a term paper and weight them all the same?!?!?!?
ReplyDeleteThat was the basic weighting of nearly every single one of my courses as an undergrad. Some added an extra "participation" grade, and others added an extra paper due near midterm. But, in general, they were all weighted about the same, and every course was set up that way in terms of grading. Oh, and this was at a Community College and a SLAC!
I've forgotten to enter a final grade value (i.e. what the assignment is worth) and our LMS automatically counts that as SUPER EXTRA CREDIT. I just went to check midterm grades and realized everyone has between 400-600% in the class. SURPRISE! i
ReplyDeleteThe built-in assumptions in LMS gradebooks seem calculated to confuse students, and generate grade complaints. I'd much prefer they started with no assumptions about anything, and let us add our own.
DeleteYeah: I never had this problem when I calculated the grades myself. Granted, I had to do it 82 times before I felt confident that the grade was accurate, but at least I knew where things went wrong if they did.
DeleteWhen I was an undergraduate, some of the courses in my major had a policy whereby failing a major component of the course (research essay; final exam) could result in failing the course, even if the rest of your grades mathematically qualified you for a passing grade.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a pretty good system, but of course it's something you would have to have in your syllabus up front, and is also something that might not fly in these days of snowflake students and accommodating admins.
We have this in our freshman seminar entry-level course to our program: they have a common final exam that pretty much determines whether they move on to the next sequence. It makes for some odd discussions when someone is earning a B and gets an F on the final exam.
DeleteThere's a lot to be said for a common final exercise with common grading. Of course, it's also a time-consuming logistical nightmare, especially if you insist, as so many US institutions of higher ed do, on staffing a significant proportion of intro/core courses with adjuncts.
DeleteIt is all of the above: time consuming, a logistical nightmare, and we couldn't do it if we did staff adjuncts! I wouldn't do it if that were the case because that's just not fair.
DeleteRight now the only adjunct we have is a person who used to teach full time who (for personal reasons) gave up her full time position and asked to only teach one class per quarter. Finding adjuncts in this desert wasteland is tough (no one is driving in two hours away from any civilization to teach a class for $1,200.
Wylodmayer, you're much closer to math than you think. In my intro classes (Calculus, differential equations) I set the D/C boundary at 50%, the F/D boundary at 40%; otherwise the percentage of Fs would cost me my job, tenure or not. (Note: I don't "curve" grades). Also, of four semester grades (three midterms and homework ave) the lowest one can be dropped. And the final is worth 40% (so I can do whatever I want, after student evals are in).
ReplyDeleteAs a result, it is entirely possible for a student to get high 40s/low 50s in all four grades (and not do any homework) and still squeak by with a C- ("fair"). That's what it has come to. On the other hand, my As are sacred; you have to know what you're doing. Typically a few As, then a big gap, then many Cs (not all of them earned.)
(Detail included since I missed the chance to comment on the "how do you fight grade inflation" topic, and it fits here.)
I did that as well. If you got a 50 on each of the 3 exams, but got at least a C on the term paper, and attended class, you could pass.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you have management potential. Congrats :)
ReplyDelete