Student Grades: Factoring In Optional Supplementary Work R. J. vkodl
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, MA 02747 S u ~ ~ ovou s e feel that the students in vour wurse would be& frlm some supplemental activ;ties and that the bcnefit would be there whether the students worked alone or whether they worked in concert. You would like to make the supplemental activities (homework exercises, challenging problems that you hesitate to include on exams for fear of "blowing the class away," topical papers, etc.) optional, but would like to have them enter into the students' grades for the course. To encourage student participation in optional supplemental activities, you would like those optional activities to have a "grade-boosting" effect, but without compromisingyour evaluation of student performance on examinations. One way of accomplishing the above goals is as follows. Let a student accumulate exampoints, E, on examinations, and let the maximum possible such accumulation of exam points be Em. Let the student accumulate supplemental points, S, on graded optional supplemental activities, and let the maximum possible accumulation of supplemental points be S,. The student's percentage score for the course is then computed as follows: exam points r supplemental poi%% Grade(%, = 100 x ---- - - -max. exam points supplemental points 7
Note that supplemental points have a grade-boosting effect relative to exam performance (EIE,,); you can there-
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fore grade supplemental activities as rigorously as you like since even a single supplemental point has grade-boosting effect. For purposes of illustration, let S, iE- = 0.25. First, consider the case where perfohance on supplemental work parallels performance on examinations, that is, SIS,, = EIE,,. It follows then that Grade
62.1
78.9
95.8
Next, wnsider the case where performance on supplemental work is essentially the same for all participating students (they work in study groups, say, and share results). Say that the common performance level is such that S/S, = 0.75. It follows then that
Grade 60.4 78.9 96.0 Note that whereas there are grade-boostingbenefita for all students who Darticiuatein the outional su~ulementaladivities, regardle& of wdere they st&d on t h e ~ i ~ , ,scale, those benefits are more pronounced at the lower endofthe scale. By settingS,,iE,at alevel that you are comfortablewith, you can in good wnscience assign optional supplemental work and can honestly tell the students that if they participate in the optional work they d lget better grades.
