The most important part of your assessment is your self evaluation. This is where you reflect on the learning you have done for the semester and match it to your goals and to the course’s learning outcomes and evaluation criteria. Completing a self evaluation is a valuable part of the learning process itself, helping you to identify and integrate all the learning you have done and to draw lessons you can take to future courses and beyond. You will complete an informal self evaluation at the course midpoint as a chance to practise and get feedback, as well as to calibrate your work and goals for the second half of the course. The midterm evaluation will be a bit more structured, with a mixture of backward-looking and forward-looking aspects described in a template we will post in week 5.

Throughout the semester. The most important thing to do for your self evaluation is to engage with the course so that you have plenty of things to talk about at the end.

Weeks 1-3. Think about what you want and need from the course and what you bring to it and write these down so you can refer back to them later. Think ahead about what you will need to do to meet your goals.

Weeks 5-6. Using the midterm self evaluation as a guide, look back on your work and think ahead about what you want to achieve, and make any needed adjustments to your approach to the course.

Week 10 and afterward. Using the four sections described on this page, reflect on your work this semester and start compiling notes into a formal self evaluation. If there are major gaps, there is still time to fill them with more coursework to help you demonstrate your achievements.

There are four components to your self evaluation: Goals, Activities, Outcomes, and Mark.

Everyone comes to this course with a different background and interests and has different needs and priorities for the course. Your outcome for the course should be understood in the context of your own situation and aims. What were your initial goals for the course (and why), and have they changed during the semester (and why)?

There are many ways to approach the course and we deliberately make available many more possible activities than any one student could or should complete. What did you do in this course to achieve your goals? What worked well to help you learn? Were there activities that were initially a struggle where you saw yourself improving? How did you approach your reading, writing, and other learning activities? Were there activities where you put in a special effort or that felt especially significant? Were there activities where you missed out or did not devote as much attention as you think you could/should have?

What did you achieve in this course? Is there work of which you are particularly proud? Look at your goals as well as the official learning outcomes and point to evidence from your activities and portfolio submission that demonstrates what you have accomplished.

What mark would you give yourself, and why?

Read more about the two marking options here.

If you are taking the course for a pass-fail mark, please explain how you have met the learning outcomes and expectations for the course.

If you are taking the course for a numerical mark, please refer explicitly to the numerical marking criteria. We do not think marks should be mysterious, and hopefully this evaluation process gives you an accurate sense of where your work stands, but we may raise or reduce your mark if we think it should be higher or lower after reading your whole submission.

Here are a guidance document and example prepared for a previous edition of the course, when everyone had a numerical mark. Note that the example is more detailed and longer than we expect from most students so that we could demonstrate a variety of different things you might discuss. If you are taking the course for a pass-fail mark, instead of the numerical marking criteria you should discuss how you have shown that you meet the learning outcomes for the course, or what else you would need to do if you are submitting a partial portfolio that you do not think does this.

Your mid-course self evaluation is a chance to reflect on the first half of the course, make any needed adjustments, and to put some thoughts in writing as a starting point for your final self evaluation. You can write down as much or as little as would be helpful: this is for your personal use and benefit, not for submission.

Goals. Revisit the goals you identified at the start of the course. Have you made progress toward achieving them? Are there aspects you would change or new goals you would add? Write a revised set of goals for the second half of the course.

Activities. Look back at the learning activities you have done since the start of the course. How have you been approaching the lectures, tutorials, synchronous activities, exercises, writing activities, and readings? If you have a reading journal (highly recommended!) how much have you been recording each week? Has the time commitment been manageable, and how have you prioritised what you need to meet your goals for the course? Can you identify skills or areas of knowledge that have improved directly from your activities so far? Are there skills or approaches you want to work especially on developing in the second half of the course?

Outcomes. You have learned a lot already! Take a moment to reflect on some subjects, concepts, terminology, or methods you have encountered so far, and write down some learning achievements. What are you proud of from this course so far?

Mark. (For those taking the course for a numerical mark.) Have a look at the marking criteria and check whether you are on track for the mark you are seeking. At this point in the course, the biggest difference for ‘pass’ versus ‘distinction’ marks will likely be evident in your reading. If you are aiming to ‘pass’ your coursework so far has probably focused more on the lectures and a textbook and you have been following up ideas or topics you find interesting without worrying about breadth or comprehensiveness. If you are building toward a ‘distinction’ you have hopefully been doing some more focused reading from the resource list to follow up a variety of topics and ideas from the weekly units, and have done some more thinking and potentially even some writing about ‘proofs’ or other topics for your portfolio.

The official learning outcomes of the course are as follows.

On completion of this course, you will be able to:

1. Explain major developments in the ideas, institutions, and products of science in world history.
2. Apply contextual and comparative perspectives to scientific knowledge and practices from disparate times and places.
3. Discuss how scientific knowledge and practices relate to their wider political, economic, social, and cultural contexts.
4. Critically evaluate the use of historical evidence in historical argument.

Dr Barany’s unofficial additional outcomes are as follows.

Unofficially, I want you to be able to:

1. Read like a historian (useful in many fields!).
2. Know how to find reliable information about the history of science and how to tell when you are looking at unreliable information.
3. Be comfortable talking about science and history and have a sense of ownership over both.
4. Get better at university-level writing skills, including citing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and constructing a contextualized argument.
5. See the history of science around you and relate it to your life.

This course uses the official marking criteria for the School of Social and Political Science. Ultimately, the teaching team needs to justify to the School and to our external examiner that your work matches these criteria, and you should have a look at the official text. Here are some things the criteria mean in the context of History of Science:

0-30: marks in this range usually mean you have not been engaged with the course or had personal circumstances that meant you were not really able to attempt most of the learning activities. Things happen, and we understand. Whatever your reason for not having time to put into the course this time around, we hope you will be able to come back to the material and get credit through a resit.

30-40: marks in this range usually mean you have engaged a little with the course but not quite enough to show that you have grasped the material at a passing level. Perhaps you ran out of time preparing your assessment or were not able to give your reading the attention it needed. Perhaps you relied a bit too much on your prior encounters with the topic and catch-up sources from outside the reading list rather than using the assessments to show your understanding of the course itself. Usually submissions in this category can be described as “doing the assessment without really doing the course” and one goal of this assessment design (matching assessment to learning activities more directly) is to limit the chance of accidentally falling into this category.

40-50: marks in this range correspond to work that shows you have been paying attention and regularly participating in the course, perhaps with some weeks of greater or lesser interest or attention. Your portfolio may be mostly based on lectures and limited reading from a textbook or other sources. You won’t necessarily show that you have gotten all the key lessons from the course and there may be some misunderstandings, but it is clear you have learned something valuable this semester.

50-60: if you are aiming for a “pass,” regularly following the course and attempting a variety of learning activities, doing some reading, and do not have major disruptions or distractions that take you away from the course, you can generally expect a mark in this range (or higher). You may have some topics of greater or lesser interest or attention, but you have a broad understanding of the main lessons across the course. Your submission shows that you have learned from a combination of lectures, readings, and other activities, which you describe and cite accurately (with some room for misunderstanding). You have taken opportunities to explore topics of interest, but you do not need to show particular breadth or depth of learning activities.

60-70: marks in this range show a consistent effort across the course, including following lectures and attempting a variety of learning activities and showing independence in exploring readings from the Resource List. Your submission uses complete and accurate citations to demonstrate your engagement in ways that connect ideas from lectures and a variety of readings and shows an understanding that goes beyond basic comprehension.

70-80: marks in this range show a greater degree of independence and understanding, demonstrating that you have engaged your readings and other course materials enough to come to your own conclusions and develop a perspective on the history of science that integrates ideas and methods from multiple parts of the course. You have challenged yourself to read and understand a variety of sources, practise and improve your writing and analysis, and build new skills and frameworks. Your submission shows polished writing with thorough citations that match your analyses to readings from the course.

80-100: marks in this range show considerable independence, wide and deep engagement, and a clear effort to go above and beyond the core requirements of the course. Your assessments show a degree of craft and critical understanding that we tend to look for from students in honours courses and beyond.