General Engineering Introduction/For Instructors/Grading Details

There are three suggested prongs for grading an Introduction to Engineering Class:

Quiz/Final Grading

This book focuses on quiz/final grading. Scattered throughout the book are wikiversity quizzes that are graded instantly, and provide no feedback. Eventually these quizzes will be linked up for use inside your college's LMS. This way you can hold individual students accountable to reading this on line book, get feed back on the questions and grow your own, edit this book, etc.

The goal is not to make power point presentations of sections of this wiki book. In the first three weeks, team students up in groups of three, give them 10 minutes to prepare a presentation and then ask them to talk to the web pages. Don't let them try to control the presentation agenda through power points. Pick some sections of the book to present yourself as an example. Do the scattered quiz questions together. Give them presentation points. Make this class about them standing up and talking .. about everything.

Project Grading

Freshman projects need to be graded entirely on project documentation with subjectivity minimized. The majority of the grading must focus on individual work. Class time is used for presentations and project face time. Face time ideally is used to negotiate individual work. Individuals work alone over the weekend, documenting their work. During the next weeks face time, they review what was done, renegotiate and repeat the cycle. Suggested details of this can be found in wikiversity.

Instructor Project Grading Spreadsheet

A gradebook spreadsheet has been made public in Google Docs. It is organized for one 3 week project, three 4 weeks projects and finals week. It just focuses on grading projects. It has a print out for each week of the semester, so grading occurs first on paper, and then is typed into the spreadsheet once the weeks grading is done.

Student Project Grading Spreadsheet

This is a spreadsheet for students to use to hold the instructor accountable to entering project grades correctly. Students can compute their grades in parallel with the instructor. It is formatted differently, but uses the same formulas.

Integration with LMS

The goal is to not burden your LMS with over 100 columns of project grading detail. Most can not handle it. It must be done in a spreadsheet with many "sheets." The LMS sheet suggests that only three columns be uploaded "project" "bucketPlus" and "bucketMinus." The "bucketPlus" and "bucketMinus" columns always add to zero. Your LMS must be able to can handle negative scores.

The goal of the bucketPlus and bucketMinus is to let students know how many points they can expect to be added to their grade when the team documentation is finished. Teams will not finish "We documentation" without personal incentive. For more about this, read the wikiversity project grading pages.

Engineering Club

The goal is to get students connected to the engineering world outside of the college. Give them points for arranging speakers, tours, visiting hackerspaces, working with engineering associations, and working on club "projects." Club projects could be documented using this same system with perhaps different funding.