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Overview
What is the relationship of the work you assign students and their learning? Ken Bain, director of the NYU Center for Teaching Excellence, offers self-reflective exercises that ask you to do a critical exploration of an assignment you use in one of your classes.
The University of Washington has developed a Student Learning Objectives System (SLO), a Web-based set of tools by which “all courses (including independent studies) … are encoded by their instructors in terms of the learning objectives that they offer. Every course has a total of 100 learning-objective points. It is entirely up to the faculty member to decide how to divide up those points among the 15 university-wide standard-learning objectives, and any custom-learning objectives.” The tools to do this are at their Web site. This system has been put in place with “three principal purposes: (1) to improve our understanding of the learning experiences offered to students; (2) to advance the assessment of learning; and (3) to prepare for the … decennial accreditation.”
Tests and exams
When planning a syllabus, remember that final exams may not be given during regularly scheduled class periods such as the last week of classes. Courses that include final exams must schedule them during the assigned Summary Block period. The faculty legislation that states the policy includes this explanation: “The academic semester consists of an advising and a registration period, a regularly scheduled instructional period, and an eight-day summary period. The first day of the summary period is for individual study and review, and no classes or exams are to be scheduled then. The last seven days are prescheduled to include one two-hour summary block for each course of two or more credits. This two-hour block shall be used for an examination or for other instructional activities as deemed appropriate by the instructor and as approved by the instructional unit offering the course. Final examinations or other summary period activities cannot be scheduled during the two weeks preceding the summary period. Take-home final examinations are due at the scheduled two-hour block.”
The Office of Testing and Evaluation Services offers instructional support services.
A student may request alternative testing arrangements in your class because of his/her disability. What should you do? See the Alternative Testing fact sheet.
The UW–Madison Teaching Academy short-course, Exam Question Types and Student Competencies, is a Web-based course that discusses and evaluates different kinds of exam questions that takes about 20– minutes to complete.
Quizzes, Tests, and Examsand Allaying Students’ Anxieties about Tests, two chapters from Barbara Gross Davis’s Tools for Teaching (Jossey Bass 1993), provide long lists of tips and references.
Grading and providing feedback
The undergraduate grading system policy, as adopted by the Faculty Senate in 1980 states that allowable grades include A–F plus intermediate grades of “AB” and “BC” . For more information, including rules about courses offered for “CR” (credit) or “N” (no credit) and pass-fail option procedures, see the Faculty Senate policy.
Grading Practices, from Barbara Gross Davis’s Tools for Teaching (Jossey Bass 1993), provides a long lists of tips and references.
The University of Washington’s Faculty Resources on Gradingcontains sections on philosophies and practices of grading.