Extra Credit
What is the role of extra credit? There are students in my class who were F's at the end of the semester. I offered an extra credit project. Those who did it were able to finish with a D in the class. But
a) I felt like I am giving them a cop-out from doing work during the rest of the semester, because by doing the extra credit assignment, they didn't have to make up half of the other assignments that they had missing.
b) Although my target audience with the extra credit were the D's and F's of the class, the majority of the A students completed it as well, causing a false inflation of the grades on that end.
c) The content and skills required for the extra credit is difficult to adjust. Since I'm targeting the lower-level students, it should be "fun", and a good chance to be creative (to provide differentiation by interest), as well as appropriately scaffolded. At the same time, it should still challenge students to learn content and apply skills.
The criteria for extra credit should be:
A) Not offered in a way that detracts from classwork completion
----- Differentiated and scaffolded
----- of low point values
----- Perhaps available only if you have x assignments missing?
B) Not artificially inflate grades, while still allowing students to earn points
C) A learning opportunity for all students who attempt it
The question then becomes, why have it as extra credit? Shouldn't I be able to differentiate within the classroom?
Labels: extra credit, grading
3 Comments:
I have a long response to this, but right now I have to go meet Alexis to go shopping at the Chinese market. Later?
At the end of my historical linguistics class, I had two missing homework assignments. Because I was lame. This would have put my grade in danger had the TA running the class not pulled me aside and said, "look. you're missing homework, and you probably don't have time to do the missing assignments and the final this week. So I'm going to give you a problem set that's harder than either of the homeworks, but won't take you as long as two separate assignments did, and these will replace the missing homeworks in your grade." And so I worked really hard on that problem set, and did a good job on both that and the final, and got a decent grade in the class after all. Maybe something like that is worth trying? An assignment that isn't just extra credit (which all the A students will do) but replaces missing or failing work, and is hard but perhaps less time-consuming. Of course, that's a ton of extra work for the already overworked teacher...
I had a very skilled teacher who used extra credit as the core of his class. He was teaching introductory calculus, but I think that the general principle could probably be applied to any class.
The work for the class (homework + tests) accounted for %80 of your grade. The other %20 was what he called "AB problems" which he said "if you want an A or a B in this class, you should do some of these problems. If not, don't worry about them."
How was that extra credit? Because there was somewhere from 60-80 "points" of AB problems, so you only had to do about a quarter of them to get an A. Thus, you could pick and choose from the problems that interested you, but you had to do at least some of them. As an added bonus, if you missed work or got a bad grade on a test, you could make up for it with more AB problems.
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