Você está na página 1de 2

Quiz Regrade Policy

Proposed Policy I offer students the ability to request their quizzes be regraded according to the policy outlined
below. Students who ask for a regrade can earn either a maximum score of 93% on the quiz or a
maximum of 93% missed points back, whichever is higher.
1. If you believe that one or more quiz questions could reasonably be interpreted in more than one
way, you may request your quiz be regraded. To do so, you must email me a short document
explaining the following:
a. How you interpreted the questions and why your answers, given such interpretation, are
reasonable,
b. Why your answers were marked as incorrect, and
c. Why all the answers that were marked as correct are plausible responses to the relevant
questions.
2. After you have submitted the quiz, you must wait at least 24 hours before submitting your
grade change request.
3. Your request must be received by 1PM on the Sunday immediately following the quiz deadline.

I will consider your request seriously, but do realize that sometimes you have interpreted a question
in a way that is atypical or simply incorrect. So while I intend to be generous, I will not allow you
to earn points back unless (i) at least two students in the course answered the question incorrectly,
(ii) the question I asked is plausibly interpreted in the way you describe, and (iii) your answer
is consistent with the way that you answered other questions. Moreover, I will never regrade an
assignment in your presence. All regrade requests must be received in writing.

Rationale Although one or two quiz questions do require a bit of creative thinking, the majority of quiz
questions are not intended to trick students or to assess mastery of concepts. Rather, they are
designed to encourage students to read the assigned texts (or watch the appropriate lectures) and
to learn the relevant vocabulary before class. Consequently, if a question was designed only to
test vocabulary acquisition and nonetheless a student could answer the question incorrectly despite
having appropriate grasp of the relevant vocabulary, then the question ought to be regraded.

However, it is critical for me, as an instructor, to provide students strong incentives to (a) think
carefully about quiz questions before class, rather than justifying their answers post hoc, (b) recognize
why other answers to a quiz question might be considered better than the ones they provided,
and (c) to accomplish the previous two tasks before new material is covered. Reason a explains why
students the maximum grade that one can earn on a regraded quiz is not 100%. Reason b explains
why your document must contain the items outlines in 1a-1c in the policy above and why you must
wait at least 24 hours before submitting a regrade request. Finally, reason c explains why your
request must be submitted by 1PM on the Sunday immediately following the quiz deadline.

Background As a graduate student, I wrote and designed part of an online textbook for logic that continues to be
used by thousands of students each academic year. But I was part of a much bigger team. I worked
with two full-time faculty members, three full-time programmers, and one undergraduate assistant
in designing exercises and writing the textbook. Moreover, the textbook I wrote was the product
of nearly fifteen years of research, design, and testing. In my experience, undergraduate students
rarely appreciate how much research, time, and effort is required to design good teaching materials.

1
Because I am currently designing this course alone, not every quiz question will be appropriate,
and this policy is a reflection of my fallibility. However, please realize that, although I am younger
than some of your other instructors, I have been designing online activities for more than ten years.
Moreover, to be quite blunt, I know more about educational research than most of the professors
from whom you are currently taking classes. Pre-class quizzes are currently believed to be one of
the most effective ways of increasing student reading and vocabulary acquisition. Research indicates
that, in the absence of pre-class assignments, only approximately 30% of students complete the
assigned readings [Hobson, 2004].

References [1] E. H. Hobson. Getting students to read: Fourteen tips. In: Idea Paper 40 (2004), pp. 110.
url: http://www.ideaedu.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/IDEA%20Papers/IDEA%
20Papers/Idea_Paper_40.pdf (visited on 04/11/2017).

Você também pode gostar