End of Week Survey Feedback

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The goal here is to give you an idea of what our expectations for survey answers are, but also to give you a sense of the range of “right” answers.

In terms of evaluation: Canvas gives you the point if you turn anything in - we didn’t take it away for this one (everyone has something that was at least barely OK, except for one person who added the course late).

Generic comments (applies to End of Week Surveys, Online Discussions, and Seek and Finds)

We also looked at things more carefully. We keep score separately (we haven’t decided how to return the individual feedback to you, yet). Expect a number and (possibly) a brief comment.

The “scale” will be:

  • 0 = meets our high expectations of CS grad students (roughly an AB) - or, hasn’t been determined otherwise (*)
  • +1 = exceeds our high expectations
  • +2 = really exceptional and notable (we don’t expect to give too many of these)
  • -1 = does not meet expectations (we didn’t give that for EOW Survey 1 since we felt that we haven’t provided enough information about our expectations - that’s what this is for)
  • -2 = unacceptable; generally we will leave this as 0 and take away the “credit” for doing the assignment

Because this is subjective, and because we don’t have the resources to “grade” everything carefully, the “0” score is kindof stochastic: you might get a zero because we missed checking carefully. If you consistently exceed expectations, than these random factors will average out. And that’s what matters for Grading. At the end, we’ll look at the numbers but also look back at what you wrote over the whole semester (this applies to online discussions and seek and finds).

We’ll gather all of this up and use it to dertermine grades.

Comments on Survey Answers (Generic)

Length is only a rough correlate to quality. Often a good answer can be concise, and an answer can be long and rambling but not make the key important points it needs to. However, a terse answer rarely makes secondary points, or makes the primary points well.

“Misses the point” (or “doesn’t convey the point”) is a more common problem than being wrong. Here we pick some example answers that get to the point (which may be one of several possible) very concisely.

Example Answers to The Questions

For those interested in the ‘correct’ answers to End of Week Surveys, you can view those on the ‘Survey Answers’ page for that week.