Dear Michelle, I believe even more strongly than I did before that you did the right thing in the case of this student. I was using your case as a springboard to the issue of grading reliability in general. Sincerely, Stuart ___________________________________________________________________ Stuart J. McKelvie, Ph.D., Phone: (819)822-9600, Extension 2402 Department of Psychology, Fax: (819)822-9660 Bishop's University, 2600 College Street, Sherbrooke (Lennoxville), Québec J1M 0C8, Canada. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bishop's University Psychology Department Web Page: http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy ___________________________________________________________
________________________________ From: Michelle Everson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 5/8/2007 7:08 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Re: Devil's Advocate: RE: The things students will say... Stuart, I appreciate the points you brought up here, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that I think I do a perfect job of grading. The course I am teaching (if I didn't mention it earlier) is an introductory statistics course, and we do offer partial credit a lot, especially on homework assignments. This is why the student ended up with this particular percentage. What bothered me most about this student e-mail is that it comes at the very end of the semester, and rather than ask me to look at a SPECIFIC assignment, this student seems to think I can easily go back through all assignments (and there are many in this course!). After every assignment I grade for students, I encourage students to come to me and share any questions or concerns they have with me. This student never did that. Plus, there were some opportunities where he could have earned extra credit that he passed up, and there were certain assignments that he just did not do at all. So, I felt his grade was justified. Incidently, I do usually round up if students are very close to the next highest grade. Had this student had a grade slightly higher than 89%, I would have likely given him the A-. I actually heard back from this student after I wrote to him this morning with an explanation of why I would not change his grade. His response was "Oh, I understand. I just thought it was worth a shot." So, I guess getting a B+ is not so devistating to him after all. Michelle Everson Department of Educational Psychology University of Minnesota --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english <http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0<=english>
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