Re: UU & Grading

[Anatoly Volynets <av@total-knowledge.com>]

1. Which UMO is gradeable?

Now I think - any. The question is - how? When it comes to a problem or
exercise its obvious. What about a test? It is not for grading in
itself, it's to grade some other UMO (which is to test): course, topic,
even explanation. So, if we want to implement some grading, a teacher
must have choice of tools: like assign points to problems, tasks (we
don't have such an UMO), summarizing them and assign to a topic or
whatever other UMO he wishes. Results of a test can be added to that. Or
we can allow the teacher to use his own formula to aggregate different
points? Actually, teacher would like to aggregate grades of different
UMOs to another one of higher level, like it happens in normal school.
Teacher is grading different tasks, then use those grades to grade some
topic, then latter grades--to grade the class (course). In the end those
grades are used to complete a final certificate.

2. How to grade?

There are different ways.
A) The casual one is to assign numbers within different systems.
B) Yet, there is a way more productive, in my view: a critique note
attached to an UMO.
C) Also, an objective statistic may be used. For example, time of
studying, or quantity of problem solved, etc.

The problem a teacher can face is that his grading system (say B) does
not match his institution system (this thing happens). In that case
teacher must have a tool to map his final grades to "social interface"

3. Regarding completion of an UMO. I think it can be stored and used in
another class in one case only: if the teacher (institution) accepts
this, for different teachers can have very different requirements.
Probably, it would be useful to provide such a functionality--to make
mutual grade acceptance working automatically. It has a bad aspect
though (like all this grading related stuff): big universities or just
fashionable schools, may use grade acceptance as a marketing tool to
disrupt the entire Authoright concept within UU.

Anatoly Volynets, President
total-knowledge.com
culturedialogue.org