.What are they?
- The Progress Reports are personalized, customized, weekly-ish emails that provide current updates on your progress in the course, including overdue assignments, upcoming due dates, current attendance record, and - when needed - extra encouragement to catch up (heh) as well as congratulations for moving forward. I used to call them "Weekly Updates", but they may occur more or less often. They are distinct from the PDF "Gradebook" (formerly called "Grading Reports").
- Why do they include?
- I keep track of every aspect of every grade in one ginormous database, tailored to the particular class, semester, and student roster. It includes as many as eight cells of calculations just for one assignment for one student. The database has 14 spreadsheets and over a million cells of information. It's that complex because I try to be fair, consistent, and objective, which results in a variety of procedures, adjustments, and tracking features.
The Progress Reports distill that information into a narrative form, of about nine paragraphs long, with details about your progress - as well as mine. - Why do the exist?
- You (students) want to know how you're doing - whether to adjust your sense of comfort with the material (am I as on top of this as I feel? or, am I really this confused? and, am i the only one confused? i seem to have missed a lot of points, but gee look - so did many other people!) or because you're concerned about your grade at the end of the term (either at the level of worry that you'll pass, over concern that your GPA will drop below a threshold for financial aid or employment, or because you want to preserve a pristine record.)
- I provide feedback about my evaluation of your work and progress in as many ways as possible. These emails are an attempt to make the feedback more summative and narrative than these other methods I employ:
- Daily quizzes allow you to see, question by questions, whether you're fully tuned in or not quite getting everything.
- Lab assignments allow you to work with others to assess differences in your understandings and identify areas of confusion.
- Returned lab and homework submissions provide more or less feedback - at least about what you got wrong and, to one degree or another, reminders of key points or concepts about which you may be confused.
- The online grading report provides an almost blistering array of data about everyone's progress, presented by codenames which you select (if you like, and if you consent to your scores being listed online in that fashoin - which is the only reason to send me a codename). There is pretty much nothing I could tell you about your grade that isn't there; in fact, if you have any questions, I'll have to look at the spreadsheet it was printed from in order to answer you. So, be specific in your questions: Exactly what on the report should I examine?
- When will they start?
- They'll start by the third week, and I'll say more about them during the 4th or 5th lecture. By that time, there are enough data points to answer the inevitable "how am I doing?" questions you'll have. ;-)
- What if it's wrong?
- Email me, ASAP! One of the main purposes of those emails is to keep you informed about what I have on record for your grades, so that you have plenty of opportunities to alert me throughout the term to any errors, and so that there are no surprises for either of us at the end of the term. It allows you constant opportunity to identify deficiencies and errors, and eliminates doubt at the semester's end about what you record is and should be. Not many faculty will acknowledge that errors happen in the recording of grades, and I don't know of any who put their entire gradebook online - but I do both.
- Don't delay! Some errors, I can't fix weeks or months later. For example, if your clicker battery isn't working, and your quiz answers aren't shown as recording on the grading report, tell as soon as the report includes data for other students on that quiz. I can be nice/lenient about technology problems - but not if you compound those by not letting me know immediately. I cannot give you credit for multiple missed quizzes that you didnt realize weren't recorded, so don't wait until you find out that there are a few weeks of missing data in your record!