ENG 260 syllabus > main parts of the course > Assessments

There will be two main types of the eLearning Assessments tool that will be used in this course: readings quizzes and essay examinations.

 

quizzes

On the last day of most of the "weekly" periods of this course--and remember how I'm defining a week as I explain in the previous "Calendar" subsection of this "main parts of the course" section of the syllabus--everyone will have to take online, at the same time, a time-limited quiz on only the literary works assigned for that particular "week." (And remember how I point out in the "Discussions" subsection that a reading period on the Calendar always ends one day before the quiz and when your Discussions posting on those readings is due; just my way of discouraging you from trying to cram in all the readings on the day of a quiz.) There will be nine quizzes overall, and each will consist of five multiple choice questions. Here are three other important numbers concerning the quizzes:

  • A passing score on each quiz is answering four or five of its questions correctly.
  • You must get a passing score on at least six of the nine quizzes given to complete this course.
  • You must take ALL nine quizzes REGARDLESS OF HOW MANY YOU'VE ALREADY PASSED.

O.K., now that I've scared you good, I can tell you not to worry too much about these quizzes. The questions will be really easy, consisting of just superficial, basic comprehension questions about the literary works we read. Also, I point out once more that the quizzes are all multiple choice, and the questions will be so relatively simple that pretty much all you'll need to do to pass them will be just to make sure you've read all the works for the period. And that's the only reason I give these quizzes, just to keep you all up with the readings, and let's face it, there's really no getting around that in a literature course.

And here's something more about these quizzes to get straight right at the outset: as specified in the "evaluation of student performance" section of the syllabus, your scores on these quizzes will NOT count in any way in the computation of your final grade; again, all that is required is that you get passing scores on at least six of them.

Especially if you've never done these quiz assessments in eLearning or online anywhere else, you should look through the tutorial I've made about taking and completing our eLearning quizzes, which you can view in the following ways:

I've also made a video version of this quiz tutorial, and you can view the video at these places:

However you view these quiz instructions, it's especially important to review all of them first before you try your first quiz since there are a couple of special tricks involved in doing these right; one of the most important, as I illustrate in the tutorial, is how you need to SAVE each answer before going to the next question. In the tutorial (and also in the instructions when you actually do the quizzes) I also emphasize the fact that unlike with a lot of other online assessments (and unlike on our exams), you WON'T be able to go back to a previous question to change an answer or put one in at all if you didn't before. The reason I set these up this way is related to why I make you do these timed quizzes in the first place: I'm just trying to ensure that I get from you a clear indication through a more-or-less reflexive response that you've completed the readings and done them with some amount of attention, and for that purpose I try to make the questions so brain-dead and obvious that you shouldn't need to mull over them at all, hence there shouldn't be a need for unlimited time nor the ability to go back and change earlier responses.

To help you get used to this whole setup for the quizzes, you might want to try the Sample Quiz that will always be available through the Assessments tool. But as I point out in the Description of this quiz, a couple of things that are different between this and the "real" quizzes is that this sample one has only two questions instead of the regular five, and you can retake this sample quiz as often as you'd like but all the nine actual ones you'll be able to do only once each.

And a final note about the quizzes which also relates to their purpose: unlike during the three written exams, you may not consult the source readings nor any other material to help you complete a quiz, and you must do these quizzes on your own with nobody helping you. (This is another reason that I make the quizzes of limited duration and try to have as many people as possible do them all at the same time.) The idea again is that if you've already read everything you shouldn't need to consult the readings to find the answers to these easy questions. But fair warning, I will have to consider failure to comply with these security rules as a violation of this course's policy on academic integrity.


exams

Three time-limited essay examinations, including the Final Exam, will be given. In each of these I will ask you to write two short essays, and on each exam you will have a choice of questions to which to respond. The questions will ask you to respond intelligently and analytically to the readings we have done, much as I'll have asked you to do in your postings to the Discussions board. Now, unlike our quizzes, all the exams will be open book, so feel free to have with you the readings that are the subject of the exams, and you can also consult past postings of yours or anybody else's on the entire Discussions board while doing any of the exams.

No surprise here, like everything else in this course you'll be doing all your exams in this eLearning environment. And just as for the quizzes, I've made tutorials for you that will show you step-by-step how to do our exams in eLearning:

And like with the quiz instructions, I've also made a video version of this exams tutorial, and you can view the video at these places:

Now, I'm going to assume that most of you when you've done essay exams elsewhere have always written them by hand on paper, so doing these on a computer in eLearning may be a quite new experience for you. And it does have its own peculiarities and perils, one of the most dangerous being the possibility of a computer or system crash, power failure or Internet outage that can wipe out all your hard work in a second. We all know these things happen, frequently without warning, in this digital age so don't kid yourself, it could happen to you here as well. In recognition of that, and also of some other quirks about doing this kind of assessment in eLearning, the College's eLearning support team has created a very good tutorial on doing assessments which you can access through the "tutorial on Assessments" link in this TechInfo posting. Of particular interest in that tutorial is the following warning:

what that eLearning assessments help document says about periodically saving your exam answers

Note especially that wording "perceived inactivity" at the bottom; what this means is that even if you've been typing away at an answer in a response box for a while, if you haven't saved or done anything that requires a response from the eLearning server, the system will "perceive" that as you NOT being active and will log you out. So I'd strongly advise you to keep this in mind in addition to the other steps detailed in both that tutorial from our eLearning help and in my own one above about doing our exams. If you want to be extra cautious, here's something else you might try:

Before you submit either of your two exam responses, you might want to click inside the response text box and then press your Control (Ctrl) and A keys (or if you use a Mac, the Command/Apple and A keys) to select everything you've typed, and finally do a Ctrl + C (or Command + C) to copy it all into your system's Clipboard so that if eLearning crashes or you get timed out whatever you typed in the box will be preserved. And then to be doubly sure your response has been captured at least by your system, maybe paste all that text you just copied into a word processor or text file (and if you're obsessive-compulsive like me, you'll actually save that file temporarily somewhere on your computer).

After you've finished your responses to the two questions you chose to respond to (you'll always have a choice of at least three questions to work on) and have submitted your complete exam in the manner I demonstrate in my exam tutorial, I will grade your exam using the following scale which is based on the "Grading System" subsection of the "Academic Policies" section of the SUNY Cortland 2009-2010 Undergraduate Catalog, and I pledge to do my best to apply this scale objectively:

the system of letter grades I will use on your exam responses

What I'll do is comment on both of your submitted responses and assign one of the letters under the Grade column in the chart above to each response based on my evaluation of the merits of each response (and I have a site where I give examples what I would consider to be A+ or A level responses from the three exams in this course). As I note in slides 19-21 of my exams tutorial, you'll be able to view both my comments on each response and the letter grade I assigned it.

Now, here's where it gets a little tricky. eLearning assessments accept only numerical grades or "scores," not letter grades, so I have to manually convert each letter grade I give you on an exam response into a number, and for that I'll use that same grading chart above and give you the score that's under the Point Value column for its corresponding Grade. And as I noted above, you always have to respond to only two of the questions on an exam, not all of them, but eLearning doesn't get that; as I note in slide 13 of my exams tutorial, not only will eLearning ask you before you finish if you're aware that you haven't responded to all the questions, when I grade your exam I'll have to put in a score of 0 for the one question you DIDN'T respond to, but this DOESN'T mean you somehow failed any part of the exam!

How I calculate your overall single grade on each exam is I take both the letter grades I gave you for each exam response and average them out based on the following scale:

how to calculate your overall score on an exam from the letter grades on both responses

But once again, eLearning won't play ball with us [pardon the pun]. I've looked and tried but apparently there's no way in the current version of this eLearning/Blackboard system to have it calculate automatically your single numerical grade on a whole exam like this, but instead it will tell you just the TOTAL of the two scores for each response. For example, say I give you a C for one of your responses on an exam and a B+ for the other one; by the immediately above scale that comes out to an 83 for the whole exam and that's what goes into my grade book, but if you look in the My Grades tool (see slides 16-17 of my exams tutorial) eLearning will tell you you got a "166" (from 77 for the C plus 89 for the B+; see above) on this exam. So you'll always see reported a single number in the range of 130 to 200 for each of your exams, but again, DON'T go by this figure (indeed, it'll be pretty meaningless); rather, come back here again if you're not sure how to figure out what the actual grade I've given you on a whole exam actually is. Really sorry for this inconvenient way of doing things.

Just some other notes about our exams:

  • Unlike on the quizzes where you'll be able to answer only one question at a time in the order the questions are presented to you and you can't go back to a previous question, on these exams you'll be able to view all the questions at once and then start with either of the two questions you decide to respond to, and you can also switch to working on either at any time during the 60 minutes allotted for both Exam One and Exam Two and the 120-minute duration of the Final Exam (though remember to now and then save whatever you've typed for your responses so far).
  • As I stress throughout the lectures of my ENG 260 Guide to Reading and Writing about Literature, and as I'll be harping about all the time in my mini-lectures and in my responses to your posts on the discussions board, because this is a GE 7 course, I feel it's my duty to enforce the convention of putting the titles of short stories and poems in quotation marks and the titles of novels, plays or books in italics or underlining these. The latter will be a problem for you when you do your exams in eLearning since you'll be entering just text that you can't format, so as a workaround I want you to adopt the common online shortcut for underlining a whole title in which you put an underscore (i.e., hold down the Shift key while typing a hyphen) before the first letter of the title and then another underscore after the last letter of the title. For instance, if you're writing about the novel Shoeless Joe on an exam give its title like this:

    _Shoeless Joe_

  • Or the play That Championship Season, like this:

    _That Championship Season_

    But even in these eLearning exams you'll still be able to, and indeed you must, put the titles of short stories and poems in quotation marks, e.g., "A Young Man's Game" and "Soccer at the Meadowlands" (notice no underscores for these, just as you DON'T use quotation marks for the titles of novels). Again, just to do my job here as I see it considering this is a GE 7 course, I will have to take points off your exam responses if you don't follow these conventions for writing literary titles.


on the timing of quizzes and exams

You'll notice that when I put an assessment, i.e., either a quiz or an exam, on the Calendar, it will be for a specific starting time and duration, in contrast to the rest of the work for the course like the readings and Discussions posts where there is no specific clock time or day that you have do the work on, only a period covering several days. There are reasons I’ve set the assessments up this way; the main one is for course security, that is, I’m hoping that the more people who are online and doing these assessments at the same time the less opportunity there will be for academic dishonesty. And as I demonstrate in my quiz and exam tutorials (see above), you WON'T see the link for a specific assessment appear until its actual start time as given in the Calendar; if you’re logged into eLearning before that, you’ll just have to reload or refresh your browser at the exact start time (and this’ll be particularly important for the short, five-minute quizzes).

You’ll also see that most--but NOT all--assessments will be scheduled to begin on Friday afternoons at 4. There’s a reason for this too: I pick 4 o'clock on Fridays to be the normal assessment start time on the belief that that's the non-weekend time that the greatest number people will likely be available to do these assessments seeing as that there usually aren't too many classes or labs going on that late on a Friday. There might be some, I know, just as it's always possible people will have to work, will have gone home or be heading there, or they'll have a practice or a game or be traveling to one. As a result, I'm always flexible about this; to wit, if for any reason (including your observation of a religious holiday or celebration) you can't take a quiz or exam at its scheduled time just give me ONE SPECIFIC time (a.m. or p.m., or use the 24-hour clock)--and day if not the same--that you would like to start the assessment and I'll set it up for you. Here are some further things about this to keep in mind:

  • Whatever new time you give me, let me know what it is at least 24 hours in advance of it so I have time to retrieve your message, set up the new time for you to do the assessment and send you a confirmation message that I've done so.
  • Always be specific about which assessment it is you're referring to, i.e., give its number. And on that score [pardon the pun], never refer to the assessment as a "test"; note that I never use that term anywhere in this syllabus in reference to these assessments, but instead I always refer to them as either quizzes or exams (or examinations). Further, I employ a little system to help distinguish between these two main types of assessments: I give a quiz number as a numeral, e.g., Quiz 1, Quiz 2, Quiz 3 and so on but for exams I write out the number, i.e., Exam One and Exam Two (and then there’s the Final Exam). So to avoid confusion I ask that you follow this system also.
  • If you know beforehand that you will not be able to do an assessment at its scheduled time, you must let me know that in advance--but understand that doesn't mean you need to take it in advance--or I will have to deduct one point from the "class participation" portion of your final grade. Similarly, if you had some technical difficulty or emergency that prevented you from doing an assessment as scheduled, you must let me know that too.
  • And as I stated above, I'm figuring most of you won't have prior commitments on Fridays at 4 but I know some of you will and some of those may in fact be every Friday afternoon throughout the whole semester. If that's your situation, again that's perfectly fine and I'll work with you to get our assessments in, but even if you're sure you'll have something else every Friday at 4 and you tell me that early in the semester please still let me know every week before each assessment that's scheduled for then and thus you can't do and arrange a specific new time/day with me for it. Sorry, it's just that I'm your prototypical absent-minded professor, and as I'm getting older I forget things like individual students' schedules even more frequently.

Rest assured that some of the quizzes and exams will not be on Fridays, and a couple might not even start at 4. So to help you keep track, I promise always to put a notice in the Announcements whenever there's a new assessment listed in the Calendar, and both the Calendar listing and the announcement of it will be well in advance. Therefore, as I say right on our eLearning Home Page, always watch both the Calendar and the Announcements. And as per the policy stated in the SUNY Cortland 2008-2010 College Handbook, if regular classes at SUNY Cortland are canceled for a certain day due to inclement weather or similar reasons, any of our assessments that were also scheduled for that day will also be canceled, and again I'll let you know through these same ways about the rescheduling of that assessment.