Well, I am pretty much bound by the syllabus on this one. I read the submitted selection and assign +/0/- marks (+ better than average, 0 average, and - poorer than average) on my assessment of:
- how well what was submitted conforms to the form and format detailed in the syllabus
- content and completeness
- utility (how useful will the submitted journal be when the student has a final exam and needs to use the journal as a reference for the source material).
I then make overall assessments
Generally if I am convinced that the student read and understood the source then the student will get 5/10 just for that. The other elements: form/format and content will pretty much give the remainder of the mark.
The journals from week 1 were marked Thursday but I forgot to pass them back (and in fact I was hoping that some missing journal selections would be coming in). My overall reflections on what has been submitted so far:
- please refer to the syllabus for form and format requirements
- there seems to be an issue concerning content. In a summary that is faithful to the source material I was expecting a) points made by the source b) logic and narrative (how were the points in the source connected) and c) globally key concepts and expressions. It would appear that a significant number of you are going straight to c) and in the process have caused a problem with differentiation of the positions contained in the source and your own interpretation. The danger in this is that it may be difficult in the final exam to recover what the actual source was saying.
- some of you have chosen an essay / paragraph style of summary that does indeed show that you read and understood the source but really ... how useful will that be in the final exam when you are going to be trying to find something from the source quickly? I mean, are you going to read your whole journal to find what you are looking for? On the utility question I think you need some running titles and structure to your summaries so that you can quickly go the to points in the source that you are looking for.
- there is an issue with quotes and some of you need to make sure of the source of the quotes that you select.
- discrimination is a point as well. You can report the line of argument from a source but if you give equal space to an example that the source used it shows that you are giving too much emphasis on secondary content.
- a diagram is a diagram not a scan of a page from the source.
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