My primary concern in evaluating a student's work in this course is that the process be fair and open, that it be directly related to what the course is actually about, and that it not poison the learning process by focussing everybody's attention on marks. I believe people learn better when their attention is on the subject, on learning, and on teaching what they've learned to others, rather than on demonstrating to an authority what they're learning. Members of the class should be able to feel confident that they will get a mark that makes sense to them, that they won't be surprised at the end of the course, and they should be able to forget their anxiety about marks and get on with the work of learning.
One way in which I try to achieve this is simply by making the consistency and depth of each student's engagement in the course the central factor in determining her mark. One reason for this is that the course is founded on the assumption that to be involved actively in such a process is the best way to learn. If someone's genuinely, consistently and actively involved, and still doesn't learn, I think that may well be a problem with the course design, rather than with the student. But I should caution you: I take seriously the STU calendar's definition of an A -- and, even more, what I look for most to justify a mark in that range is initiative: you don't get an A by doing what you're told. You get it by being engaged, starting things, taking initiative, demonstrating curiosity and involvement, and reporting on what you learned through being engaged and going beyond the merely required.
Yes, you're probably asking, but really, how do I get a mark in this class?
First of all, let me be reassuring. If you're used to getting a particular mark -- if you usually get Bs, for instance, or even As -- you can be confident that if you work consistently and responsibly in this course you'll get at least the mark you'd usually get. You won't, of course, if you don't put in the time and effort and thought -- but if you do, my experience with courses organized this way is that you have nothing to worry about. Let me explain how this works. It's not complicated, but it's very different from most schemes for determining marks, so it can seem confusing at first.
An individual's mark in this course is determined by two factors: (1) time and effort; and (2) how much of your own learning you can explain and demonstrate and convey to others. How are these measured, and how do they fit together to produce a mark?
Quantitative factors (time and effort)
First, there's simply time and work put in. As I said earlier, I expect this class will normally take up about eight hours every week. I try to estimate the various assignments and tasks so that they can be done in that amount of time, and if people report that they're actually requiring longer I'll change things. But basically the way I can know if you're putting in the time beyond simple attendance (since -- like other professionals -- you don't have a time clock to punch or a desk to be at) is whether you produce the necessary work: electronic mail, reports on your reading, postings to discussions, engagement in organizing and presenting reports, finding and presenting texts, etc. I keep pretty thorough records of how much work people produce, and I use these records to generate, mathematically, a minimum mark somewhere from C- up to a B. If someone does every single thing that it's possible to do her mark cannot fall below B. Not many people ever do that much work, of course, but almost everyone in a class does enough work to guarantee a mark of C or higher. It's important to be clear, though, that having done something in this course means having it done it when it matters: deadlines are determined by the process. If you produce a report too late for it to be used, there's no point in producing it, because it won't be any use (and, to reiterate, tasks are not done for me; they're done to contribute to a process of learning). There's a more thorough explanation of this policy on my Web site, here.
This minimum mark is calculated mathematically, and adjusted to make sure that anyone who's worked consistently (usually it's in the range of about three-quarters of the tasks I count, and almost everybody does that) gets a minimum of at least a C-. This, then, constitutes a floor or minimum grade. The information it's calculated on will be public -- I keep an updated Web page with quantitative records available so that (among other things) you can see how you're doing (and correct any errors).
But how do you get a mark higher than that minimum? The first thing to remember here is that this is in large measure a course in learning things yourself so that you can help others learn them. I believe the best way to learn is to teach. The second thing is that it's a course in learning how to be aware of what you're learning, of knowing when you've become able to do or understand something you couldn't do or understand before.
But of course this raises a couple of problems: how is it possible for me to know whether you're becoming a better monitor of your own learning? How would I know whether you helped other people learn? In general, it happens because you think and write about the process, and that thinking and writing is used to generate a second mark, which may well be higher than that minimum mark (and thus will replace it). Here's how this works.
As the course gets underway we begin a process whereby one of your tasks every week is to add to an accumulating reflective journal (sometimes called a learning log) on your own learning. You'll get suggestions from me about how to write this sort of document, posing some particular questions -- about different kinds of learning, and, equally important, about the processes -- about what you learned, how you learned things, who else in the class produced work that was important to your learning, and how it was important.
You'll write this document and save it on the Web. (There will be detailed instructions for how to set your learning journal up.) As you do the first one or two, I'll be reading them and responding with suggestions about ways to do this better or more effectively, and I'll suggest now -- and frequently later -- that people read each others' (the Web pages will be public) but, except for that, you'll be on your own in writing them. Twice during the course (at midterm time, and at the end), I'll ask you to spend some time considering them and write a synthesis of your journal, focusing on the most important things you've learned.
I'll read this and make my own judgment about how convincing and concrete your descriptions of your own learning are, and determine a mark according to my estimate of the amount and quality of learning demonstrated. Finally, I'll also watch for how many times, and how substantially, each person in the class is mentioned by others as having contributed to their own learning. Often others in the class notice things I have no way to be aware of. I'll make the same judgment about concreteness and convincingness, and raise the mark if it seems warranted. This will make up another minimum mark, a qualitatively based one. You will receive whichever of the two marks is higher. One does not influence the other.
Two things about this process need to be very clear. One is that the minimum marks that are generated by simple participation in the work of the course can't be lowered; the other is that my judgment about the quality of people's work and learning plays a very limited, but very specific, role in this process. Most of the mark is generated by factors outside my judgment, but there are a couple of places where my judgment is crucial. First, below the B guaranteed by doing everything I have records of, I decide how much work is necessary to generate a given minimum mark (not on an individual basis, but for the class as a whole). Second, there's no way for me to evaluate the convincingness and concreteness of your learning log except subjectively: I simply make a judgment. I'm guided by the statements in the STU calendar about what constitutes work of varying qualities, and I explain in as much detail as I can what considerations play a role in my judgment.
What will this require from you? Once a week you'll need to spend some time -- a half hour or so, usually -- writing a journal entry identifying and explaining the most important learning you've experienced in the preceding week, and the people from whom you learned it, and how.
By their nature, it's true of these learning reflections (like other assignments in this course) that there's no way to do them later. So one of the things you'll need to do is budget the time to do this every week. I think you'll find it more than simply a task to get done: in my experience, this kind of journal is the best possible way to make you feel more confident about your own learning -- and, in fact, to reinforce and solidify it.
I expect (or at least hope) that all this will make you able to forget about "grade anxiety" and get on with the course. One of the worst things about courses where you are often working with other people, or where you're expected to do the actual learning on your own, is the poisonous effect of not knowing "how you're doing," and your suspicion that other people are "getting by" with little work and you're not getting credit for all your own effort and ability (if you've worked in groups in a conventional class, where the group was marked as a whole, you've probably felt this). In this case, though, you'll have a clear idea what your minimum mark is, and you'll also have a much clearer idea than in most classes of how much you're learning .
It's probably clear by this point that sheer persistence counts for a lot in this course: if you simply work regularly and consistently at it, you can't do badly. On the other hand, it's important to be very clear about this: the course structure simply doesn't allow for some strategies which work quite well for many other courses. It won't do to take it easy through the middle of the term and then work really hard in the last few weeks. Work intended to inform others and help them with the next step in their learning can't be "made up later" -- it's like coming to a party the next day.
Once you're substantially behind in this course, in general it's extremely difficult or impossible to catch up. If your usual pattern is to catch up at the end, you'll have to change it; if you don't think you can change it, you should seriously consider taking another course. Further, to reiterate what I said above, if you're looking for a mark above the quantitative minimum, it won't do merely to do what you're told: you'll need to take initiative, to formulate questions and strategies -- in general, to be an active, curious learner.