Humane Course Policies that Make Life Easier

[polly_mer]

Years ago, LarryC started a very useful thread on how to make life easier on the faculty member that are defensible to chairs as being in the students' interest.

I thought we should have a thread dedicated to sharing classroom policies that--however we might defend them in front of our department chair--really exist to make our lives easier. Here are some of mine (most of which I got from the rest of you over my years of reading these boards):

Policy: Drop the lowest quiz or even lowest two quizzes in case of weekly quizzes in survey classes.

How it makes life easier: No need to create makeup quizzes or to excuse absences or any of that. And no appeals to the dean over refusal to do these things. "You are going to miss class that day? No problem, we drop the two lowest quizzes and that will be one of yours. Just make sure you don't miss another."

Policy: No policy regarding attendance.

How it makes life easier: Again, no having to evaluate doctor's notes or sob stories. No having to take attendance (though I still do once a week because the college needs the records for financial aid). How do I prevent lecturing to an empty classroom? Frequent quizzes and a hefty class participation grade.

Policy: Use rubrics for grading feedback, but never assign point values to the categories.

How it makes life easier: Quick check boxes for the comments I would otherwise write out tens of times--"Needs more evidence" "Awkward sentence construction" "Improper citations." Students get lots of feedback with minimal effort. You can make students pre-grade their own papers with the rubric. No point values means you can use the rubric to justify the grade rather than to determine the grade, and also that there is no math to slow you down. Read the first page, glance at the rest, write a grade and check some boxes, repeat.

Policy: All make up exams will be blue book essay examinations.

How it makes life easier: Students dread the blue book and will bend over backwards to avoid it. I don't have to write a new test, just one big-ass comprehensive unanswerable question. Grading is also easy. The best students actually do pretty well in this format, the slackers fail hard.

Policy: Five page research paper due the first day of the second week of class.

How it makes life easier: This one is counter-intuitive but powerful. Students are confronted with the choice of writing a paper over a weekend when all of their friends are partying or dropping the class while they can still get their money back. Ten percent of the class will choose the latter--and they are the very students who would cause headaches the rest of the semester. The remaining students prioritize your class over their others and you get better work from them. Also, it is part of my Stockholm Syndrome teaching method--terrorize the students for the first couple of weeks, reward them the last weeks, and they will follow you to hell.

What about you guys? I know that the easiest thing of all is to become a classroom tyrant--No late anything ever! Miss two classes and you fail! But those are bullsh*t and also dramatically increase the odds of the student going to the chair or dean and wasting far more of your time than you thought you were saving in the first place.  I am looking for humane, pedagogically sound time-saving strategies.

Post your favorite from that thread (https://www.chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,82798.0.html) or share your own policies as you reflect on the term just finished or the term for which you are prepping.

[LibbyG]

I've been a long-time lurker on the other forums and benefited enormously from reading them pretty much every day. I'm so excited about the new home and taking the opportunity to delurk.

My favorite humane course policy is the virtual tokens suggested in specifications grading. Students start the semester with a few tokens and they can spend them at will for giving themselves extensions, redoing assignments, or missing class without an excuse. It evens the playing field between "ask" and "guess" culture students, and I hope it gives students a heightened sense of autonomy over their work. It saves me from having to adjudicate every little thing, and enables students who make a weak start to the semester see a path to success.

[the_geneticist]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

[aside]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

I'm not in a lab situation, yet I also begin each class with a quiz for these reasons, as I mentioned on the old fora.  Each quiz typically has 5 questions worth 10 points each, and they get 50 points for just showing up and writing their name.  This grading scheme reduces the number of complaints I get about all the quizzes while still achieving the purposes for most students.

[pepsi_alum]

Policy: When students submit a written assignment in the CMS (Blackboard at my soon-to-be former place), they are instructed to upload the assignment file and to copy/paste the submission in the "write submission" box (or whatever the equivalent is).

How It Makes Life Easier: The copied/pasted submission function as a backup to the uploaded file. It's much easier for me to adjudicate cases of "I know I turned that in!," "I submitted the wrong assignment," or "that was my rough draft." If there really is a problem with a file (which is rare), I allow the student to resubmit and compare it to the copied/pasted submission.

Not surprisingly, complaints about "the computer ate my homework" have dropped significantly since I adopted this policy.

[ohnoes]

Policy: When students submit a written assignment in the CMS (Blackboard at my soon-to-be former place), they are instructed to upload the assignment file and to copy/paste the submission in the "write submission" box (or whatever the equivalent is).

Love it.  Syllabus changed.

[genericusername]

I'm sure I read it somewhere on the fora but it works like magic...

Policy: I have assignments due either Sunday night before class or the night before class if it's one later in the week.

Benefits: if students are "late," it's easy for me to give them an extension without it interrupting anything, which makes me seem kind, plus they are less likely to skip class because they pulled an all-nighter trying to finish the assignment. If you are using blackboard or another system, it is trivially easy for them to submit things for the time and day of your choosing.

One downside: sometimes students come in expecting that I had already graded their assignment, even if it is a 9am class and they handed it in late the night before. Also, I have to carefully check my dates to make sure that I've gotten everything right later in the semester.

[pepsi_alum]

I'm sure I read it somewhere on the fora but it works like magic...

Policy: I have assignments due either Sunday night before class or the night before class if it's one later in the week.

Similar to this, I find that having 11:59PM deadlines with a 3-hour grace period (which means the deadline is really 2:59AM) greatly decreases the number of panicked emails I get pleading for extensions.

[Phydeaux]

Similar to this, I find that having 11:59PM deadlines with a 3-hour grace period (which means the deadline is really 2:59AM) greatly decreases the number of panicked emails I get pleading for extensions.

I tried something similar last semester, and it worked pretty well. In the fall, I had significant issues with students (a) coming to class late because they had not yet turned in their work (everything came in via Bb); (b) trying to upload their assignments during class; or (c) not turning them in at all because of various tech issues ("my battery died," "I couldn't get a good wifi connection," etc).

So, for the spring, I set the assignments up to disappear right at the start of class, which eliminated issues (a) and (b). I then turned them back on after class, with a "grace period" to 11:59pm, to account for issue (c) and other matters. After 11:59, late penalties applied, no matter what the circumstances. But just about everyone got their stuff in on time, so I rarely had to apply the penalties.

[cc_alan]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

We used to do this but stopped because of the amount of time required (as in they obviously weren't brief enough!). We currently have prelab assignments but some students just don't put the time into it.

Our "new"* goal is to do the quizzes/prelabs through the cms and allow students an unlimited number of tries to earn 100%. We hope this increases the student buy-in and gives us better prepared students in lab.

"new"* because it's not really a new goal. We just have had sooooo much free time to implement it.

[marshwiggle]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

We used to do this but stopped because of the amount of time required (as in they obviously weren't brief enough!). We currently have prelab assignments but some students just don't put the time into it.

Our "new"* goal is to do the quizzes/prelabs through the cms and allow students an unlimited number of tries to earn 100%. We hope this increases the student buy-in and gives us better prepared students in lab.

"new"* because it's not really a new goal. We just have had sooooo much free time to implement it.

I give 3 tries; another colleague tried giving unlimited tries and claimed students didn't bother reading but just picking random answers instead. FWIW

[cc_alan]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

We used to do this but stopped because of the amount of time required (as in they obviously weren't brief enough!). We currently have prelab assignments but some students just don't put the time into it.

Our "new"* goal is to do the quizzes/prelabs through the cms and allow students an unlimited number of tries to earn 100%. We hope this increases the student buy-in and gives us better prepared students in lab.

"new"* because it's not really a new goal. We just have had sooooo much free time to implement it.

I give 3 tries; another colleague tried giving unlimited tries and claimed students didn't bother reading but just picking random answers instead. FWIW

Many of them have calculations but that is something to consider. Thank you!

[the_geneticist]

Policy: Brief quiz at the start of every lab.

How it makes life easier: Students are well-motivated to come to lab having read the materials AND they show up on time.

We used to do this but stopped because of the amount of time required (as in they obviously weren't brief enough!). We currently have prelab assignments but some students just don't put the time into it.

Our "new"* goal is to do the quizzes/prelabs through the cms and allow students an unlimited number of tries to earn 100%. We hope this increases the student buy-in and gives us better prepared students in lab.

"new"* because it's not really a new goal. We just have had sooooo much free time to implement it.

I give 3 tries; another colleague tried giving unlimited tries and claimed students didn't bother reading but just picking random answers instead. FWIW

Many of them have calculations but that is something to consider. Thank you!

I don't ask students to do any calculations on the quiz.  It's 4-6 questions on key terms, key figures, key concepts for the lab.  Very basic stuff if they read the lab manual.  Questions are multiple choice, true/false, add a label to a diagram, define a term, etc. so they are easy to grade as well.

[bibliothecula]

I love larryc's policies. What's a good humane policy for late work? In a course with a scaffolded writing assignment, I can't just let students turn things in whenever they want, because I want them to get feedback on their paper proposal and bibliography before they write the paper, for example.

[pepsi_alum]

I love larryc's policies. What's a good humane policy for late work? In a course with a scaffolded writing assignment, I can't just let students turn things in whenever they want, because I want them to get feedback on their paper proposal and bibliography before they write the paper, for example.

My policy is a sliding scale with a 10% penalty per day late, with a 5-day maximum. My experience with this at two different institutions has been that most students will still do the work on-time because they don't want the late penalty, the ones who submit late still get feedback that they can incorporate into future assignments, and there's less whining compared to "no late work, ever." I do occasionally get requests for blanket exemptions (ie, students who want to turn in late work without penalty), which I seldom grant unless they have documentation of a true emergency.