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intro:assessment

Assessment

Overview

The assessment philosophy for this course is that you should focus on activities that will help you learn and explore the subject and connect it to your interests, and the assessment should follow straightforwardly from the work you are already doing to learn. Learning in this course is structured around a wide variety of lectures, discussions, readings, writing prompts, and other resources and activities to support your developing relevant skills and perspectives. These will be shared and explained in connection with the weekly themes for the course, and you will have opportunities to discuss them with your tutor and receive feedback during the semester.

The number and kind of activities you do will depend on your own learning goals and the mark you hope to attain in the course. We will signal what kinds of activities to focus on if your goal is to learn something new and obtain a passing mark, as well as what to do if you are taking the course for a numerical mark and your goal is to work toward higher marks.

The course is designed to be challenging but not difficult: we want you to think in new ways and build new skills, and this can be done in many different ways. All the work you do for the course, whether you are engaging at a baseline level or diving in depth, should be worthwhile and should respond to your needs and goals.

At the end of the semester you will submit a portfolio of your work from the semester along with a self-evaluation demonstrating how you met the learning outcomes and accomplished your personal learning goals for the course. We will build systematically to this evaluation during the term, so as long as you are consistently engaged with the course you will be ready to go with a minimum of extra effort. (We also know that some people fall behind for all sorts of reasons, and there will be plenty of room to catch up.) We will discuss more of what this involves during weeks 1-2, and it will also become clearer simply by participating in the course and attempting the learning activities.

Timing

The work you do to learn in this course is the work that is needed for your assessment. You will have the chance for feedback on a portion of your draft work during the term from your assigned tutor. This most often happens during scheduled tutorial meetings, and is a good reason to attend tutorials!

Most of you will be ready to submit your portfolios shortly after the end of classes, at the start of April. We encourage submission in early April if possible. The final day to submit your portfolio is Thursday, 25 April and late submissions are not accepted for this course. This deadline includes an automatic extension of a couple weeks for everyone.

If something gets in the way of a full submission, we are still happy to give you feedback on whatever you have completed, which you can continue to use as part of a resit submission if needed. Please use the university's Special Circumstances process if there is an exceptional circumstance affecting your ability to submit on time, as this will allow your resit to count as a first submission.

Submission Components and Format

Your portfolio comes in three parts (follow the links to learn more):

Only the middle section (Proofs of Learning) counts toward your word limit.

Your submission will be in the form of a blog you set up and develop during the course on the university's blog hosting platform.

Here are instructions for how to set up your blog and prepare it for submission.

Writing Resources

Here are some generic writing resources and references that may be useful:

Academic Integrity

The philosophy of this course is that students are basically honest and interested in learning, and if we are doing our job as instructors you will not be interested in cheating and there will be nothing much to gain from it. If you ever feel tempted to submit work that you haven't actually done for yourself for this course, we'd rather you just talk to us about time management, study skills, or making the assignments more interesting so that you can actually learn from the course!

Worthwhile assessment means using tools and practicing skills that are appropriate to the course. We ask students in this course to focus on understanding (and demonstrating your understanding of) materials in the (very large!) resource list rather than use external sources or reference materials, because in this course working with these materials is an important skill we want you to develop. We ask you to practice writing from scratch without the use of assistive technologies such as automated translators, text generators, or composition assistants, not because these tools cannot be useful in the right contexts but because in this course they get in the way of the kinds of thinking and writing we want you to learn.

We also think it is our responsibility to teach you good habits of reading, writing, and referencing. These are lifelong skills that go beyond slogans like “write in your own words” and “cite your sources”. As long as you take these lessons seriously and follow the assignment guidance there is no need to stress about “plagiarism rules” or “accidental misconduct”.

Rule-based and policing-based approaches to writing are not just often ineffective; they can be fundamentally contradictory or confused, often in ways that reinforce pernicious forms of inequality and injustice in academic settings.

If you are struggling in the course or do not know how to do something you think you should be doing, we would always rather have a conversation with you about it and try to help, even if the deadline is near.

This course does not use commercial similarity-scoring software. Researchers at our university and colleagues around the world have shown such software to be dubious and harmful for learning.

With that in mind, and with a commitment to take the most humane and constructive approach to these as we possibly can, the course is still subject to the policies set by the School of Social and Political Science at this website.

intro/assessment.txt · Last modified: 2024/03/11 21:32 by mjb