We are all lucky to be at a university with such a fantastic schedule of activities and events. I’m talking about excellent visiting speakers, film screenings, and workshops, among many other possibilities.
In order to reward you for engaging the vast range of opportunities available here, over the course of the semester, I will offer a number of extra credit opportunities. Although the events will shift - indeed, I don’t even know about all the opportunities as I write this in late August! - the process for getting extra credit will remain the same.
1) I will announce in class and on this website an “extra credit opportunity.”
2) If you are able and interested, you attend that event.
3) You write a short reflection on the event, what you learned, what surprised you, and / or how the issues discussed relate to our course. I’m imagining this reflection to be about one page, double spaced, so therefore around 350 words. But if you want to write more, you’re welcome to.
4) You upload that short reflection essay to our Canvas page under “Extra Credit” within one week of the event itself. I.e. if you want extra credit, you have to stay on the ball and write a reflection within a week. You cannot go back and do more extra credits after this deadline has passed.
As long as an extra credit reflection essay meets these requirements, it will receive full credit. I won’t be grading the essays beyond credit / no credit, but I will certainly be commenting on them.
Because I am not sure how many extra credit opportunities will occur over the semester, I cannot now tell you how much credit each individual assignment will be worth. But I can say that all the extra credit opportunities will add up to an additional 10% on your final semester grade. This is a lot but there will also be a lot of extra credit opportunities, so I fully expect that any single one will be worth less than one percentage point.
Just to make it clear, this means that a student who manages to attend and reflect on every single extra credit opportunity will move their final grade an entire letter grade. A B- would become an A-, etc. I think that’s a great result of going to a bunch of talks or events that you might already find interesting!
Although I will track your completed extra credit reflections on Canvas, the total extra points you earned won’t be visible until I calculate your final grade in December.
