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Lots of great ideas for final evaluations but in the EMRN rubric (and elsewhere) how about substituting "Evidence (of learning)"for "work?"

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Hello from two doors down (well not today). You and David are sure tempting me between these last two posts. I know what course I would try this final exam suggestion on if I were to get a wild hair. I do have some questions.

Say there's two or three or four key topics to assess them on. Would those point values (I know they're somewhat arbitrary) correspond to each topic and then get averaged or totaled? How do those points values get mapped to the letter grade system? Presumably, if instructors are trying this out now for the first time, their other assessments haven't been scored on that same scale, and they've already posted the point totals or weights on their syllabus. How do you suggest this get woven into that ship that's already well underway?

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Hey Bob! You could do this either way -- grade each concept EMRN and then somehow combine them, or grade the entire exam holistically. David is right in saying that I was thinking of it in the latter way, but there's no one best way. If you do it the one-concept-at-a-time approach, you're basically grading each item on a 4-point rubric like usual, then just scale everything up so it's out of 100 points or whatever the total is.

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Hi from also-not-quite-down-the-hall! Basically, you could do anything you suggested, and it would probably work. I think Robert's original suggestion was to grade the entire exam holistically: Did the student show consistent understanding of all topics (up to minor errors)? Assign a single point value based on the answer to that question. But you could apply the same principle to four key topics separately, and add the totals together. I've done that in several classes before, and it works fine.

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