end of term
So today was the last day of classes for winter term. (Well, tomorrow actually, but my class is a Tuesday/Thursday class.) And suddenly a few students asked “How is the class participation grade computed?” It’s weird that they never think to ask this when it could still do any good for their behavior. It’s like suddenly, the last week, oh! my!
I said there were two components, and you had to do both to get credit for the grade: section attendance and participation, and regular weekly participation on the course email list. Both were carefully explained from the first week. Students doing poorly at either had a warning note written on their mid-term paper bringing the requirements to their attention. The professor has assigned 10% of the grade to participation, and agreed with me at the beginning of the term that it was fair to do it the way I wanted: if you want a C, you have to
both participate in half the section meetings,
and participate on the email for half the weeks. For an A, you have to do
both all the time. If you blow off
either then you don’t get credit for participation.
Two students asked how this would be computed early in the term, and I told them. Nobody else did. At every juncture, it was stressed that both participation in section and participation on the course email list were mandatory course requirements.
And now there is a number of students who write decent papers (A- or A quality work), good thinkers, clearly did all or most of the reading throughout term, regularly attended section, and mostly entirely blew off the email requirement. They think it’s totally unfair, suddenly. Meanwhile, there are other students, otherwise identical, who wrote very nice weekly things for the email list, prompted good discussion on it, had interesting things to say. There ain’t no way that I’m gonna budge on this. But geez, what do you think the words “mandatory requirement” mean?
I have the feeling that if they were told on the syllabus that they would outright fail the course if they didn’t do it, there would
still be a crowd who blew it off and got suddenly persnickety.
A while ago a professor in the department taught one of those big intro courses where he said that class attendance was mandatory, and announced from day one that if you missed so many classes, you would fail the course--or you could freely drop it--but you would not be permitted to get a grade. So the hatchet day came, letters went out to those students, and suddenly they showed up, complaining how unfair it was.