Extra Credit Opportunities
Aug/19/2021 04:06 PM
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 at the beginning of the semester! – the process for getting extra credit will remain the same.
1) I will announce in lecture an “extra credit opportunity” and also post it on the lecture Canvas page / Announcements.
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. This reflection should be about one page, double spaced, so therefore at least 350 words. But if you want to write more, you’re certainly welcome.
4) You upload that short reflection essay to the lecture Canvas page under “Extra Credit” assignments 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 any single one will be worth less than one percentage point. So when you're working through each extra credit, understand you are not adding full points to your final score. In early December, when the semester is almost over, I will calculate how much each opportunity is worth.
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 at the end of the semester.
These opportunities are designed to give you space to explore interesting topics related to our course. Please know going into them that you cannot be sure exactly what points you'll get for the work, so I recommend you approach these as interesting opportunities rather than a mathematical formula.
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 at the beginning of the semester! – the process for getting extra credit will remain the same.
1) I will announce in lecture an “extra credit opportunity” and also post it on the lecture Canvas page / Announcements.
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. This reflection should be about one page, double spaced, so therefore at least 350 words. But if you want to write more, you’re certainly welcome.
4) You upload that short reflection essay to the lecture Canvas page under “Extra Credit” assignments 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 any single one will be worth less than one percentage point. So when you're working through each extra credit, understand you are not adding full points to your final score. In early December, when the semester is almost over, I will calculate how much each opportunity is worth.
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 at the end of the semester.
These opportunities are designed to give you space to explore interesting topics related to our course. Please know going into them that you cannot be sure exactly what points you'll get for the work, so I recommend you approach these as interesting opportunities rather than a mathematical formula.