Proposed changes to compensate for lack of a final exam

Updates March 23:

• Voting is now open. I need your approval to make this change. Please go to Quercus, navigate to CSC240, and find the poll I just added in the "Quizzes" section. (It's not a real quiz. That's just how polls work in Quercus.)
• Proposed dates changed to April 7-9.

Hi all,

Here's a draft of the plan for compensating for the lack of a final exam. I will be asking you to vote on some version of this over the next week.

I'll start with the changes, and then list some reasons why I want to do it this way, and answer some anticipated questions.

If you have questions or concerns, please read the reasons and answers below, and if they don't answer you, send me an email or post on the forum.

The proposed changes

• Add a new take-home assessment.
  • Worth 25% of your grade.
  • Tentatively scheduled for April 13-15 7-9 (3 days).
  • The questions will be comparable to a three-hour final exam. Since you have a bit more time, we might expect your answers to be a bit more carefully written.
  • Policies:
    • Open-book, but not open-everything.
      • You can use the course textbooks and your own notes.
      • You can use other textbooks if I approve them --- email me what you want to use.
      • I will design the questions so that searching the web will not help. If you violate these open-book rules, you'll probably just be wasting your own time.
    • You may not discuss the questions with each other.
  • You'll download the exam from the course website and submit it through MarkUs. Latex not required; just submit your answers in a format we can read. You can even write your answers on paper and take a photo.
• The new assessment will have questions in common with the CSC236 one (they're also planning a take-home assessment). Final grades will be adjusted relative to the final grades in CSC236, depending on the relative average performance of CSC240 students and CSC236 students on these questions. (Normally we use the final exam for this.)
• Changes to quizzes:
  • Instead of "10 or 11" quizzes, I'll edit the grading scheme to say "between 7 and 10" quizzes, in case online quizzes don't work out well.
  • Since I'm making changes anyway: I'll remove the "no part marks" rule for quizzes 7 and later --- instead, you may get 0, 0.5 or 1 on each quiz. (I copied the 0/1 policy from last year but it does not suit my grading style.)
• The new grading scheme:
  • New take-home assessment: 25%
  • Assignments: 50%
  • Midterm: 12.5%
  • Tutorial quizzes: 12.5%

Why do we need an assessment at all? Why not just scale up other grades?

There are two reasons.

• We need to compare the CSC236 and CSC240 averages. We use this information to scale CSC240 grades to compensate for the fact that CSC240 is a more difficult course.

In ordinary years, the CSC236 and CSC240 final exams have questions in common, and we compare the averages of both classes on those common questions. If CSC240 students did better on those questions than CSC236 students, but CSC240 students got worse overall grades than CSC236 students, that's a sign that the CSC240 grades need to be increased.

This year, the plan is to use a take-home assessment for this purpose. (CSC236 is planning a similar assessment.)

• We need more to grade you on.

You've worked hard on the assignments, but we need to grade some work where you are not allowed to collaborate. The midterm was difficult, so I don't want to scale it up by too much. The quizzes don't go into a lot of depth because you only have 10 minutes each.

Do I need to spend the full three days on it?

The questions on the assessment will be comparable to questions from a three-hour exam. You can spend more than three hours on it to make your answers more polished, but at some point you'll get diminishing returns.

What if I can't write it April 13-15 7-9 (or whichever dates it turns out to be)?

If those dates don't work due to a personal circumstance, I can reschedule it on an individual basis, up to April 25. Send me an email.

Please do not discuss the questions with anyone, even after the assessment is over, unless you are sure they have already written it. Don't post about the questions publicly until after April 25.

If you don't think you will be able to write it at all between April 13 7 and April 25, please contact me as soon as possible.

What if I need an accommodation?

A couple of options:

• You can contact accessibility services online; more information here

• Email me directly.

Will the assessment be hard because it's open-book, or to prevent cheating by searching the web?

I've seen speculation like this (about other take-home tests) on discussion forums. No, I don't expect it to be harder.

For example, if I were adapting the midterm to be a take-home test, I think the only question that would need replacing would be Question 5, which happens to be the hardest.

What about CSC165 vs CSC240 marks and POSt?

A couple of students have raised some concerns since CSC165 is not replacing the final exam.

The CS department knows that CSC240 is a harder course than CSC165 and always takes that into consideration for POSt applications. I asked the department about this issue specifically, and they assured me I don't need to copy CSC165's plan.

The goal for my grading scheme is to assign grades as fairly as possible under the circumstances.

What if I can't access MarkUs, or the course home page?

Send me an email now if you think you will have trouble with Internet access, or you know of another student who can't access this.