I ran across an interesting idea in the British journal, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education involving the use of something called interactive cover sheets. First-year students in an outdoor studies degree program took a two-semester, six module course which required preparation of a number of written assignments. After preparing their papers, students attached an interactive cover sheet on which they raised questions about the paper they had just completed, thereby identifying the specific areas for feedback.

A colleague shared an excellent but not yet published paper on the syllabus. It got me thinking as this is the time of year when most of us are revisiting these venerable documents. Oh, I know, some of you finished yours back in May when the semester ended. And then there are the rest of us who are working on them feverishly as the beginning of new academic year quickly approaches.

In a recent conversation, a faculty member expressed great dismay at the amount of cheating taking place in higher education and the cavalier attitude of many students toward it. His dismay is well founded. Depending on the study (and there have been many) anywhere between 40 to 60% of students report that they have cheated and they indicate a much higher percentage of their peers have as well. The faculty member I was talking to then went into a detailed description of all the measures he took to prevent cheating.

The July 20 post on extra credit has generated a record number of responses; 42 at last count. I thought it might be useful to consider what we learned from our exploration of this topic.

A number of excellent comments were posted in response to the July 7 post which raised questions about how much participation should count. Thank you to those of you who contributed and a suggestion that those of you who read the post early might want to revisit the comments section.

I keep one of my all-time favorite teaching books here at our place on the lake. It has a lovely title: Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach. It’s a collection of essays written by educators at all levels. In each essay, the writer introduces a favorite poem—one with significance for that teacher’s life and work. The essays and poems are wonderfully inspirational and motivating. It’s a great book for reading along side the lake.

I remember being surprised when I first read the results of a survey on extra credit published some years ago in Teaching of Psychology. Almost 20% of the 145 faculty (across disciplines) reported that they never offered extra credit and another 50% said they offered it only under exceptional circumstances. The two most common reasons for not giving extra credit were that it encouraged lax, irresponsible student attitudes and it was unfair to offer it to select students (say those doing poorly). I also think it is avoided because it means more work for faculty and most of us already have more of that than we can handle.

“Few teachers effectively prepare students to learn on their own. Students are seldom given choices regarding academic tasks to pursue, methods for carrying out complex assignments or study partners. Few teachers encourage students to establish specific goals for their academic work or teach explicit study strategies. Also, students are rarely asked to self-evaluate their work or estimate their competence on new tasks.” (p. 69)

Two faculty researchers assembled a large collection of syllabi from introductory courses in their field and then analyzed them to see how much active learning it looked like the teacher would be including in those classes. It’s a really neat research design which I explain in the next issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter. They also looked how much participation and in-class discussion counted in the total grade calculation and that’s what I want to write about in this post.