From: Neelam Soundarajan To: CC: , , , Subject: Re: Question about Rubrics. Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 17:16:28 -0400 Rajiv, and others, > This is an ABET related question, so getting you folks involved. Thanks for forwarding that. >> Re: Rubrics for Capstone. >> I want to clarify the use of rubrics in our courses so far (past two >> semesters). We grade the students on the following >> Attendence - 5 % >> Kickoff presentation - 5 % >> Midterm presentation - 5 % >> Final presentation - 5 % >> Technical paper detailing learning - 5 % >> Documentation and code - 15 % >> Delivered and working code - 60 % ( a portion of that is impacted by >> peer review and peer feedback.) >> The oralTeamPresRubric has been used for all the presentations and all >> students in a team therefore get the same grade (even though some may >> be better presenters than others). But it would make sense to, given your observation, to refine that rubric to include a dimension that evaluates the individual as well. You would have the team dimensions but you would add another (or more than one additional) dimension that evaluates the individual. In that case, you would be able to assign different grades to different team members ... >> The lifeLngRubric can be used for Technical paper, although out >> expectations regarding the content of the paper is little different >> than what the rubric expects (we asked the students to present what >> they found novel and their learning as part of this course) which is >> pick one new technology that they may have used. Again, you should then refine the rubric as you think is appropriate. Ideally, given that all the 5911 sections are organized in the same way, I would expect that there would be convergence among the various instructors; or if not convergence, at least willingness to look at each others' approaches ... >> oralPresRubric - did not use because all oral presentations were at >> the team level. So you could simply borrow one or more dimensions from this rubric and add it to the oralTeamPresRubric. >> teamworkRubric - can be used instead of peer review - which solicited >> from each student what they thought their effort to the total project was. This may not be the right place for it but let me go into it anyway:-) Rubrics are really a general purpose tool for grading of all kinds of things. The point is that if someone is evaluating something, he/she should be clear about what is being evaluated and what to look for in deciding whether whatever is being evaluated exceeds/meets/falls below expectations ... how can you decide this unless you know what the expectations are? Sometimes you see rubrics that say things like, "the writing was excellent/acceptable/mediocre/poor". That is *not* a rubric! How do you decide that a given piece of writing is "excellent" or "poor"? *That* is the question that the rubric should answer. So in case of peer review, how do you expect the students to evaluate other students' efforts? If you don't give them precise guidance, each student will evaluate using his own ill-defined notion of "efforts". For example, maybe you think that, for the team to succeed, the team members should not only present their own ideas but also try to understand other students' ideas. If some students don't recognize this (and why would they?), their peer evaluation is not very useful. By giving them rubric to use which explicitly lists this as one of the key dimensions, you are making sure that the students will recognize this factor and account for it in their evaluation. So it is really helpful for all kinds of grading. >> A large chunk of the grade come from the sponsor feed back which has >> no rubric. You should make up a rubric and ask them to use it! From the point of view of the evaluator (in this case the sponsor), using the rubric is really no effort at all. The rubric tells them to evaluate the student/team with respect to specific factors and tells them, for each factor, what "excellent", or "good", or "poor" etc. *mean*. In other words, the rubric doesn't just say, "evaluate the student team with respect to quality of the final product on a scale of 1 through 5 (5 being excellent)" or something like that. The rubric has to define what it means for the quality of the product to be "excellent". It does take effort to come up with sensible rubrics but the payoff is that the evaluators job becomes much easier, and the results tend to be consistent across evaluators. (In other words, you are much less likely to come across situations where different evaluators assign completely different scores to the same student/team.) >> In the past we have sought sponsor feed back using 5 question and I >> am assuming that we can continue to do that. That may be the start of a rubric. The 5 questions may be the *dimensions* for the rubric. To complete it, what you should do is specify, for each of them, what the student/team has to do in order to achieve various levels of performance. If one of them was "team work", a possible factor could be how effectively the team members helped during each others' presentations (*without taking over the presentation*! That is *not* team work!) Best, --Neelam p.s.: There was a time when I was highly sceptical of rubrics. Now that I understand them a bit better, I am convinced they can be very useful. In fact, I am convinced that, for anything that you want to evaluate, if you can write a really good rubric, you can pretty much hand over the responsibility of grading to the *students*! Give each student, say, three papers to evaluate (after, somehow, masking the names from the papers); and give, to each student, the average of the grades they received from the three students who graded that student's paper! And the students will *learn* by grading each others' papers ... truly a win-win approach! [I am talking here about arbitrary courses, not capstone design courses.] >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> *From:* Ramnath, Rajiv >> *Sent:* Thursday, August 21, 2014 3:08 PM >> *To:* Jayanti, Suribabu; John Thomas; Soundarajan, Neelam >> *Cc:* Ramasamy, Perumal N. >> *Subject:* Final list of projects, WORD format - Re: Enrollments in >> your classes .. >> >> Hi John, Ramasamy, Suri, Neelam, >> >> Attached is the final list of projects in Word format. The projects >> are in order of priority, to when you do your project assignments, try >> to make sure that the earlier projects are assigned. >> >> I will be contacting the sponsors shortly, after which time you will >> be taking over the communications. >> >> Also, and because the Capstones are so important with respect to our >> ABET accreditation (which is soon), we are going to require >> standardized grading of the presentations and the project, and will >> need the grading data collected and returned to us. To that end, I >> have attached grading rubrics. Some of you may already have seen these >> rubrics; but feel free to direct any questions to me. Also make sure >> to save copies of the project workproducts and the final report - >> electronic copies are fine. >> >> (Neelam, anything more to add in this regard?) >> >> Regards, >> >> Rajiv >> >> On 8/21/14, 7:54 AM, Jayanti, Suribabu wrote: >>> >>> Hi Rajiv, >>> >>> Can you please provide me the project list in a Word document. I >>> want to share the projects available to my class to help them form >>> the groups. >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Suri Jayanti.