Assessments#

For my own courses, I use a combination of participation problems, online homework, quizzes, and exams.

Participation Problems#

These are problems that I pose to the class at the beginning of our daily Zoom Meeting. I intentionally write these very similar to the examples covered in the lecture videos due that day.

I give them time to work on the problems using their lecture notes. After a sufficient amount of time, I either collect their work on Gradescope, or have them hold up their work to the Zoom camera. And then we go over the solutions.

  • These participation problems are not usually graded on correctness or even completeness. I just want to see if it looks like they put in an honest effort to solve the problems. I use a simple binary scale (0 or 1) on whether they get credit.

Online Homework#

These are problems that they students complete outside of Zoom time using WeBWorK or some other platform. I do allow some time during our daily meeting to go over homework questions.

Quizzes#

These use the 2-device proctoring setup with one exception: they are given during our regular Zoom Meeting with only me (the instructor) acting as proctor. Once finished, students go through the usual check-out procedure and upload their work to Gradescope.

Using the 2-device proctoring for the quizzes accomplishes a few things:

  • Lowers the number of cases of academic dishonesty.

  • Prepares students for how the higher-stakes midterm exams will work.

  • Prepares students for correct camera positioning.

Recording: I use the cloud recording feature of Zoom, but I also do a local screen recording for large classes that have more than 24 students. When students check out, I pin their video in Zoom so that their work is actually legible. The local recording captures the pinned view, while the cloud recording captures the gallery view.

Screenshots: As students checkout, I also take a screenshot on my computer. This gives me a bigger image that I can use to compare what they showed me versus what they uploaded to Gradescope. If the class is a manageable size, I will do this for all students. If not, I will do this for a rotating subset of students so that everyone at least gets checked at least a few times.

Exams#

These use the same 2-device proctoring setup as the quizzes, but now with a separate Zoom Meeting for each group of 24 students.