Bill Millholland

I'm saying that I don't understand the purpose of needlessly inflating point totals for a class. why make a course work 1000 points if only 100 are sufficient. Say for example I need to grade a student's tray of 15 chocolate chip cookies. If the assignment is worth 30 points and a few things are wrong with a couple cookies (one is misshaped, another is burnt, etc.) then I can simply deduct 1 or 2 points for those errors. But inflating the value to 100 points or even 150 points for the sole purpose of trying to meet 1000 points… >>>

I always try to assign fair point values for a specific project. For a culinary example: If a student assignment is to create a plate of food containing a protein, a starch, a vegetable and a sauce, and each of those are to be evaluated. I try to assign a resonable point value for each, so, the plate total might be only 20 points - 5 points for each component. 5 points is realistic as the instructor may evaluate 5 areas like taste, temperature, consistency, cooking technique and appearance. Some instructors inflate point values to 100 or even 200 points… >>>

At my school, students have the ability to log on to the campus portal and submit an electronic evaluation of each course and instructor. The frustrating thing as the instructor, though, is that the predetermined statements to which students simply agree or disagree do not allow for further qualitative responses. So for example, one statement might be "This course was valuable to me." A student might strongly disagree, but that response alone gives no clue as to how the instructor can improve the course. When writing evaluations for students to fill out, it is critical that the response - whatever… >>>