Eval Sessions

Self-Evaluation and Feedback

 

Our in-class evaluations will test your completion of the assignments and allow you to catch up with important concepts. There may also be questions on the concepts and methods, especially their computational aspects. You may be asked to give your opinion on possible improvements or generalizations and to think through some "problem solving" questions, and apply solution strategies. It may be useful to discuss your understanding with your classmates in person or on the mailing list. Also, at times, you may be asked to bring material to class (see below).

These evaluations (normally) consist of five integrated parts: collecting questions, review, quiz, take-up, and final assessment.

1:	Prior to the evaluation session, we will collect interesting questions on the Student Wiki. A more detailed discussion on Quiz questions is there, we strive to identify checkpoints in the material that assess the degree of understanding and ability to put the material into practice. Pure memorization questions will probably not make it to the actual Quiz, good questions should stimulate you to think. Designing, writing, editing, and improving these questions will contribute to your participation mark. I will compile the actual Quiz largely from these questions, so if you know how to answer them, you will be well prepared. I really need you to think along with the course, and designing your own quiz questions is an excellent way to do this. remember: a part of your participation marks will depend on your contributions to these pages. On these pages I have provided a sample question for every week from previous quizzes so you can get an idea of what you may encounter.
2:	We start off each class session with an open ended Question and Answer period to address and discuss any remaining questions. If you are able to guess what will be on the quiz, good on you: I'll answer every question in class to the best of my ability.
3:	Write the actual "Quiz", it will be about 20 minutes long. You write it with a black or blue pen. The rules are the same as for other academic evaluations: don't cheat. This is actually slightly more responsibility than you might think: it's not the intent that counts, but the action and this means that "not knowing you are committing an Academic Offence" does not mean none has been committed. If there are any questions about what that means for the practice of writing or marking the quiz, ask me for clarification.
4:	Immediately afterwards you will mark your own Quiz while we discuss the answers. You will mark with a red pen and you will make sure the correct answers are recorded on your Quiz. This is crucial: at some point you need to have a (the?) correct answer written down, either at the outset, or while marking. If the answer still isn't clear to you, ask, ask again, until you understand. You are responsible for marking your answers honestly, for prorating partially correct answers correctly, and for recording your final proposed "mark" without error. Please refer to further clarification below. Please understand that this is a trust-based process that requires a high level of academic integrity. If you fail to apply such integrity to your marking, you may be committing an Academic Offence. You should record your "mark" for your records and if done correctly this will be identical to the final mark that I will assign for the quiz. This will also give you some indication of where you stand, before the course drop date. I won't return the quizzes since I need them for reference when I assign final term grades. I also don't want to foster the misconception that you could prepare for the final exam by memorizing answers to quiz questions. Rather we should collaborate on the Quiz Questions section of the Student Wiki and make that a useful resource for intelligent questions and annotated solution strategies. But if you must have them as a record, you may of course take a picture of your quiz.
5:	I will confirm your proposed marks while reviewing your work and spot-checking some quizzes in detail. If I find errors including but not limited to: that the correct answer is missing, that a wrong answer has been marked as correct, that an inappropriately high partial mark has been recorded, that errors have been made while adding the marks, I will revise the Quiz mark. This may include further deduction of partial marks, full marks for a question, or for the entire quiz. To be very clear: if you mark incorrectly, you may receive zero marks for the quiz. However, in addition, if it appears that there is a pattern of incorrect marking or that the error indicates intent, I will consider whether an Academic Offence may have been committed. If I need to change a mark for a quiz, I will e mail you, but in general that won't be until shortly before grades are due.

 

Assigned material

At times the assignment will ask you to bring material to class and hand it in with your quiz. These materials will always be marked by me. Typically we will discuss this material in our pick-up session. Therefore I can't grant extensions on missing material.

Grading

If the material includes workflow diagrams, concept maps or similar, the following grading rubrics will broadly apply:

Category	Excellent	Good	Adequate	Marginal	Inadequate
General	Advances the field: strong evidence of original thinking; good organization; material is understood in broader context; capacity to analyze and synthesize; superior grasp of subject matter with sound critical evaluations; evidence of extensive knowledge base.	Knowledgeable and competent: evidence of fundamental understanding and operational grasp of subject matter; awareness of context; some evidence of critical capacity and analytic ability; evidence of familiarity with literature.	Basic understanding: able to reproduce a majority of facts; basic understanding of the subject matter; ability to develop solutions to simple problems in the material; evidence of exposure to the literature.	Significant gaps: some evidence of familiarity with subject matter; not fully able to reproduce factual knowledge; some evidence that critical and analytic skills have been developed; vague knowledge of literature.	No evidence of competence: little evidence of even superficial understanding of subject matter; weakness in critical and analytic skills; limited or irrelevant use of literature.
Concepts	Adds to expected concepts; well balanced between broad perspective and crucial detail.	All required concepts present; granularity appropriate.	Contains most main concepts; too broad or too deep in parts.	Contains a few of the main concepts; granularity appears somewhat arbitrary.	Contains a limited number of concepts and/or irrelevant ones; haphazard granularity.
Relationships	Meaningful and original insights; precise representation of relationships; no ambiguities.	Expected relationships largely complete; relationships meaningful and accurate	Missing some important relationships; generally correct.	Many omissions; existing ones not fully thought through; meaning vague.	Trivial connections only and/or erroneous connections; meaning not clear.
Organization	Clear and compelling; cuts through superficial complexity but all essential relationships present; discovers unexpected associations; independently finds appropriate level of abstractions.	Thoughtful; clusters and pathways clear; expected relationships present.	Mostly represents topic adequately; some higher-order relationships shown.	Not all parts coherent; missing significant structure.	Choppy; confusing; with erroneous application of principles.
Form	Inspiring	Effective	Adequate	Hasty	Careless

 

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Note: in general, marks will be "holistic" in the sense that a high-level achievement in one category can not simply compensate for an inferior achievement in another category. It is the overall, integrated quality that counts. Therefore it would not make sense to attempt a "marks-breakdown" for these items and in general rubric-based marks negotiations will be pointless.

 

Missed quizzes

You may miss as many quizzes as you want, I will initially score these as zero. For your final grade, I will record the marks of the (lower) quartile of all your quizzes to replace the zeros. This value is easily calculated with the R summary() function. If all your quizzes have perfect marks and you miss less than the quartile break, the missed quizzes will get perfect marks too.

To illustrate:

# some vector of quiz results. Three quizzes have been missed.
x <- c(3.3, 0, 3.2, 3.6, 0, 2.8, 2.5, 4.0, 0, 2.9, 3.7)
 
summary(x)
#   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
#  0.000   1.250   2.900   2.364   3.450   4.000 
 
# Replace all zero values with 1st. quantile
x[x==0] <- quantile(x, probs=c(0.25))
 
x
 [1] 3.30 1.25 3.20 3.60 1.25 2.80 2.50 4.00 1.25 2.90 3.70

sum(x)
# [1] 29.75
 

# Almost the same vector. But four quizzes have been missed.
# I am removing the lowest mark: 2.5.
x <- c(3.3, 0, 3.2, 3.6, 0, 2.8, 0, 4.0, 0, 2.9, 3.7) 

summary(x)
#   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
#  0.000   0.000   2.900   2.136   3.450   4.000 
 
x[x==0] <- quantile(x, probs=c(0.25))
x
# [1] 3.3 0.0 3.2 3.6 0.0 2.8 0.0 4.0 0.0 2.9 3.7
 
# Note that in this case all zeros remain, since the lower quartile is zero.
# You will probably want to avoid this situation and thus miss as few 
# quizzes as possible to have a buffer for unexpected situations.

sum(x)
[1] 23.5  # Missing an additional quiz has dropped the total marks by 6.25 points.

Notes