
As I will show later, what scale you use does not really matter, as you can normalize them to whatever you want later in the process.Īnyway, assume the course is finished, and you have entered comments and points for everything – for the individual student, in the Student sheet…. I tend to give the students a score of 1-3, sometimes 1-6, with some definition. As mentioned in the book, it is extremely important that you do the participation evaluation immediately after each class. …and then I am ready to start teaching my course.Īs the course rolls along, I enter points and comments for each student. With that done, I assign students to groups in the Students sheet… This is what I use for students who drop the course or don’t do the group assignment. Note that I also create a group numbered 0. If you have several group assignments, this is where you will put them:

The group sheet is exceptionally simple, just group number, points and comment. (In this example, the individual examination has six questions, of which the students should answer four.)įor the group project, I create a separate sheet (in the same workbook, called “Groups” Then I add columns for each of the assignments that I am going to grade: (If I have the time or can get the administration to create it from their databases, I ask to have first and last names in separate columns. I start with a spreadsheet of students and email addresses, provided to me by the administration or downloaded from our LMS. I will show the various details of building the spreadsheet below – if you want to skip ahead and inspect the thing your self, I have made it available for downloading. I will demonstrate this, with an example for a fictitious course with three in-class sessions (with participation grading, 40% of grade), an individual written examination (30% of grade), and a group assignment (30%). The idea is to use the spreadsheet to organize all your feedback, and to set it up so you use as little time as possible to give as much feedback as possible.
#Serialmailer review serial#
(For myself, I use Excel and SerialMailer, a cheap serial mail client for Mac.) You can probably use online software as well, for instance a Google spreadsheet (which is nice because editing by more than one teacher is easy) and Gmail, though I have never tried it.

You probably already have all the tools you need on your computer – a spreadsheet and an email client that works with your spreadsheet – such as Excel and Outlook, for example.
#Serialmailer review how to#
This blog post is a detailed guide on how to do it – too detailed for the technically inclined, probably, but we all have to start somewhere. Our argument is that by giving every student individual feedback in addition to the grade, you reduce the number of grade justification requests and complaints. In our book Teaching with cases: A practical guide, Bill Schiano and I talk at a fairly high level about how to give effective student feedback by using a spreadsheet and personalized emails.
