Grading and Assessment

Consultative or Specifications Grading

As stated earlier, assignments and assigned materials as a graduate student are intended to further your intellectual development, which makes grading both a bit redundant and crude. We are all coming to the course from a variety of backgrounds and life experiences, and with a range of current ongoing commitments, so your intellectual trajectory will naturally look different from someone else’s in the course. Rather than paper over this fact we’ll be using a form of grading, called consultative or specifications grading.

In essence, it boils down to you examining the expectations for each grade in our guidelines, determining what you can achieve over the course of the semester, and then throughout the semester using a combination of assessments to decide whether you’ve achieved your goals or not.

All of this is adapted from my colleague Ryan Cordell, and I’ll be honest that I’m still working through how best to implement this form of grading, so if you have any concerns or questions please don’t hesitate to reach out. I will be sending you periodic surveys so that you can self-assess your weekly participation grade and also your work on your group project.

I’ll be posting more detailed descriptions after our first meeting so that I can tailor the expectations, but the goal here is to encourage you to both take ownership of your learning and also to ensure that you are being graded in a way that is flexible enough given the structure of this course.

Below are the grade contract breakdowns for the weekly participation grades. Grade Contract expectations for the semester-long project will be posted soon as well.

Weekly Seminar and Lab Workshop Participation Grade Contract

Component	Exceeds Expectations	Meets Expectations	Below Expectations
Attendance and participation in seminar	Attends all seminar meetings¹ and actively participates in discussions, drawing from assigned materials	Attends almost all seminar meetings and participates the majority of the time in discussions	Attends most of the seminar meetings and only occasionally participates in discussions
Assigned materials	Reads and engages with all assigned materials prior to seminar meeting (including both applied and contextual materials)	Reads and engages with majority of assigned materials prior to seminar (primarily contextual and sometimes applied materials)	Does not consistently read assigned materials and struggles to engage with them
Asynchronous participation in collective notes or Slack	Contributes weekly to collective notes and shares relevant materials on Slack channel consistently	Contributes majority of the semester to collectives notes and occasionally shares relevant materials on Slack	Contributes a few times to collective notes and rarely to Slack
Weekly Assignments	Completes any weekly assignment and comes prepared to sessions to discuss their work	Completes majority of weekly assignments and engages in some of the discussions	Struggles to complete weekly assignments and does not consistently participate in discussions

Grades based on contract:

A+: Achieves Exceeds Expectations consistently across all grade contract categories throughout the semester
A: Achieves Exceeds Expectations 80% on all grade categories throughout the semester and never Below Expectations
A-: Achieves Exceeds Expectations 70% on all grade categories and never Below Expectations throughout the semester
B+: Achieves Exceeds Expectations 50% on all grade categories and only Below Expectations less than 5% of the semester
B: Achieves Meets Expectations 70% on all grade categories and only Below Expectations less than 10% of the semester
B- or lower: Has Below Expectations more than 20% of the semester

Incomplete grades

An exceptional request for an incomplete grade is most often granted to students encountering a medical emergency or other extraordinary circumstances beyond their control. Students must request an incomplete grade from the instructor. The instructor and student will agree on a due date for completion of coursework. The student must submit an Incomplete Form signed by the student, the instructor, and the student’s academic advisor to the front office: https://uofi.app.box.com/v/ISIncompleteForm Please see the Student Code for full details: http://studentcode.illinois.edu/article3/part1/3-104/

Grading Scale

97-100 = A+
94-96 = A
90-93 = A-
87-89 = B+
83-86 = B
80-82 = B-
77-79 = C+
73-76 = C
70-72 = C-
67-69 = D+
63-66 = D
60-62 = D-
59 and below = F

Absences related to illness will not impact your attendance/participation grade, but you should contact the instructor to make up missed work. ↩