Category Archives: grading

Miscellaneous announcements: Guest Lectures, Test, Fun

We’ll have two guest lectures from PSU Grad student, military historian and WWII reenactor Dustin Strong: “Napoleon and his Wars” on October 9 and “WWII” on November 16. Mr. Strong’s lectures, like my own, are required, and I will expect to see his presentation reflected in your test answers and essays where appropriate. Mr. Strong has also announced two WWII reenactments open to the public as extra credit opportunities: Sept. 26-27 at Bristow Jones Memorial Airport (Bristow, OK) and Nov. 7 at Forest Park (Ottawa, KS). For the extra credit, include in your summary/reaction paper a description of the battle, and those of you doing WWII topics for your book review are strongly encouraged to talk to members of one of the units, as they are usually very well-informed on the equipment and history of the units they portray.

My apologies to the 2pm section for missing Monday: I have put the lecture outline online, so that anyone who missed class due to the weather or illness can review it. Those of you were there for the 11am class are welcome to look at it as well, obviously.

Regarding the Test on Monday, covering chapters 15 through 20, inclusive, and the lectures, the format will be very much like the pop quizzes: I will choose four or five (or six) terms from each chapter — the terms in the “Key Terms” lists, of course — to put on the test. From those, you will pick twelve (12) to answer: at least one from each of the six chapters, and the rest from any of the remaining terms. I will supply the test and paper; you bring something to write with and everything you can remember about the last month’s readings and lectures.

Finally, for fun, here’s pre-Revolutionary satires on French aristocratic hairstyles, including a recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill [mildly adult content]. The one that made me laugh was the one with the hairdresser using a nautical navigational tool — the sextant — to arrange the hairstyle.

Pop Quiz Grading

As I said previously, I grade ID questions on the familiar 4-point scale, with half-points. I give some credit for incorrect identifications — when you identify the wrong thing — if you actually identify that thing reasonably well. Your pop quiz grades for the semester will be handled much like the tests: I total up everyone’s scores and take the highest as 100%.

Also, I hand back pop quizzes when I have them graded — and I’ll try my best to make sure that’s the next class — but if you’re not there when I hand them back, I’ll just hold onto them until next time I have something to hand back. If you missed my handing them out, feel free to ask me for them before or after class.

ID Tests

The pop quizzes and tests will be Term Identification tests: I will give you a list of terms selected from the “Key Terms” list at the end of each chapter, and you will write a short paragraph defining and explaining the importance of the term.

The answers I’m looking for have three important components:

  • Definition: Basic information about what the person did or what the event involved or what the term means.
  • Context: What country or region, what time period does this fit into? What else is happening around this term that’s important to know? What other people or events or concepts play a role?
  • Significance: Why is this an important person or event or concept? What does this change about the world, and what comes after this that couldn’t have happened without it?

Definition alone, which is what you get if you memorize the textbook sidebar or a sentence or two from the text, gets you up to about a C. Context gets you to B-range. You need all three to make an A. (All of this assumes that you’re getting it right, of course.) You can get all that from the textbook, if you read it carefully, but it’s a lot easier if you listen to the lectures, too. Your answer on tests need not be limited to the material in a single chapter: many names and terms and processes will appear in multiple chapters; pop quizzes, on the other hand, will focus on the term as defined in the chapter assigned for that day.

You can find some exemplars of good work from previous semesters here and here.

I grade the individual questions on a 4-point scale: 4=A, 3=B, etc. On the tests, I then total those up and, taking the highest grade in the class as 100%, convert them back to a letter grade with pluses and minuses. I record that grade (on a hundred point scale, so F is still worth more than zero) as your grade on the test.

Test 4 Results

As I expected, about a third of the class exercised the “drop this grade” option and didn’t take the test, so the distributions are a little odd. The most popular terms were Einstein and the Holocaust, followed by a near tie between penicillin, Hitler, atomic bombs, WW2, the Great Depression, UN and the greenhouse effect. What a century! Humanism, nationalism, secularism and the EU were the bottom of the pack.

The high score in the class was 44 out of a possible 48 (again!), but I used the second-highest score, 40, to preserve a reasonable distribution. The median score was a B again, but only barely. Here’s how the grade scale worked out:

Grade minimum points distribution
A+ 40
A 38 15%
A- 36
B+ 33
B 29 50%
B- 26
C+ 23
C 19 30%
C- 16
D+ 13
D 9 5%
D- 6
F 0

The extra credits were a little helpful, but seemed more challenging than I thought they’d be (each person was responsible for the two quotes immediately to their left, in order!)

Test 2 Results

The most popular terms were French and American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon. Only one person did Qianlong and only two did Kant.

The high score in the class was 39 out of a possible 48. The median score was a B; as you’d expect with a lower top score, the median was a bit higher than last time. Here’s how the grade scale worked out:

Grade minimum points distribution
A+ 39
A 37 20%
A- 35
B+ 32
B 28.25 45%
B- 25.25
C+ 22.25
C 18.5 25%
C- 15.5
D+ 12.5
D 8.75 10%
D- 5.75
F 0

11 people were helped by the extra credit, moving up a grade because of those points. That’s more than a third of the people who attempted the extra credit questions.

Two procedural notes and a small test change

  1. If you email an assignment to me, I will email you back with an acknowledgement (or a question, if the file is missing or I have difficulty with opening it). If you don’t get an email confirmation from me, then I haven’t gotten it.
  2. I take class time to hand back assignments when I have finished grading them. If you are not in class when I hand them back, you need to come to me to get it; I don’t spend extra class time later trying to track down people to give them assignments. (Or you can wait until the next assignment is graded, since I do run through everything in my folder.)

On the next test, I’m going to keep the structure of the last one — Twelve terms: two from each chapter, plus four from any remaining terms — with a slight modification. Because we spent more time on the Enlightenment/revolution chapter, I’m going to require three from that one. You still have three “free choice” terms, though.

First Test Results

The most popular terms were monsoons, Columbian Exchange, Columbus and Martin Luther. No surprises there. Only one person did Timur the Lane and only one person did the Dalai Lama, in spite of the Tibetan Monks visit.

The high score in the class was 44 out of a possible 48 — pretty good for the first test. The median score was a B-, which is actually quite good. Here’s how the grade scale worked out:

Grade minimum points distribution
A+ 44
A 41 6%
A- 39.5
B+ 36
B 32 55%
B- 28.5
C+ 25
C 21 33%
C- 17.5
D+ 14
D 10 6%
D- 6.5
F 0

Over the weekend I’ll put some of the 4-out-of-4 answers up here for reference.

When looking at your papers, you can ignore the little diagonal I put in the upper-left and lower-right corners of pages: that’s a note to me that there’s nothing before or after (respectively) that page which isn’t graded (just keeps me from having to flip more pages than necessary). If I underlined or circled something in one of your answers, though, it almost certainly means something you got wrong. If I put an “approximately” sign in the margin (and I do this on essays, too) — it looks like this: ≈ — that means something which is almost right, or nearly wrong; questionable, in other words.

Here are some sample answers. As always, these earned 4 out of 4, though that doesn’t mean perfection: it just means that the historical issues are covered, clear, and the significance really is significant.

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More thoughts on the document assignments

the average score was a C-, roughly. I’ll put another sample at the bottom of this post.

I’m going to give some general comments here, and then go section by section. If you got an A or B, then you need to pay more attention to my comments on your paper than to this general statement. If you got a C, then a lot of this probably applies to you. If you got a D or F, then you need to take this very seriously: this is your blueprint to improve. Here is the original assignment, for reference.

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Apology and comments

First, the apology: the first round of document analysis assignments is taking me longer than I expected to get done. I’ll have them Friday, for sure, though, so you’ll get them back before you have to start the next one, on Columbus.

I’m noticing — and this is part of what’s taking me so long — some patterns, though. Here are some suggestions and thoughts that should get you started thinking about the next one:

  • The “content” section isn’t just summary: you can (and should, if you can) discuss the tone and style of the piece, reliability, whether the author is being up front about goals and honest about the situation, etc.
  • The “historical use” section isn’t just “what I learned from this document” though that can be a good starting place. It’s more about what bigger questions — and I can’t emphasize that enough: “questions” — can be asked which this document helps to answer.

I’ll add to this list as I notice more patterns, things that might have been unclear on the first round.

More comments:

  • The Author section is boring, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean that you should copy, i.e. plagiarize, what’s in the document introduction. It can be used as “setup” for the context and content sections.
  • The Context section, which is where you should be talking about the geographic and historical environment, will usually benefit from attention to the textbook in addition to the document introduction.

The average and median grades for the document assignments was a C.

Samples: Here are three samples of the document assignment, and one from the pop quiz (since you do have a test coming up next week, as well!). They aren’t ‘perfect’ but they are very good answers: complete, careful, thoughtful. Notice that the pop quiz answer on Martin Luther and the first document analysis are actually fairly short: you don’t have to be long-winded if you get right to the point. Note also that the other two document analysis answers are longer, in fact longer than average for what was handed in: to be complete, to cover the issues and get a lot done and done well, sometimes takes extra time, energy and space.

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