User:Benjamin Mako Hill/Assessment of case discussion

Many of my courses rely heavily on the case study method. In these courses, your primary form of homework will be preparation for case discussion each day of class.

A standard "case" usually involves reading an example—perhaps up to 20-35 pages of background about an organization or group facing an ambiguous or difficult challenge. I will mark certain readings as "[Cases]" in the syllabus and I will expect you to read these particularly closely. It is important to realize that I will not summarize case material in class and I will not cover it in lecture. I expect everyone in class to have read it and we will jump in and start discussing it.

Cases ask students to put themselves in the positions of individuals facing difficult situations to tease out the tensions and forces at play in the case and to construct — through group discussion — the broader lessons and takeaways. Cases are a wonderful way to connect the sometimes abstract concepts taught in many academic courses to real examples of the type of ambiguous situations that you will likely encounter in your career. Generally speaking, there are not right and wrong answers in cases.

Cold Calling
Cases rely roughly on the socratic method where instructors teaching cases cold call on students—i.e., instructors call on people without asking for volunteers first. I will be doing this in each class.

Because I understand that cold calling can be terrifying for some students, I will be circulating a list of questions we will alongside the weekly announcements (i.e., at least 6 days in advance). I will only cold call to ask students for which you have time to prepare your answers. Although it is a very good idea to write out answers to these questions in advance, we will not be collecting these answers. You are welcome to work with other students to brainstorm possible answers. Although I may also ask questions that I do not distribute ahead of time, I will never cold call when asking these questions.

I have written a computer program that will generate a random list of students each day and I will use this list to randomly cold call students in the class. To try to maintain balance in discussions, the program will try to ensure that everybody is cold called a similar number of times during the quarter by weighting in favor of people who have been called upon more in the past. Although there is there always some chance that you will called upon next, you will become less likely to be called upon relative to your classmates each time you are called upon.

Rubric for case discussion answers
Each time you are called upon randomly, I will assess your preparedness based on how you answer. I tend to do these assessments generously but I don't treat this as a "gimme" either. The rubic I will use for evaluating each answer you give is:


 * Engagement: Do you respond in a way that makes it clear that you have been following and engaged with the case discussion?
 * Preparedness: Does your answer demonstrate that you have prepared for the case? Have you clearly done the reading?
 * Fluency: Are you able to refer to relevant course concepts from lecture and the non-case material in framing your answers or opinions. Can you engage in synthesis using material we've covered?

For every question answered during the year, I will assess readiness and participation as "GOOD", "SATISFACTORY", or "POOR". These correspond to a 4.0, a 3.0, and 2.0 on the UW 4.0 undergraduate grade scale. I am generous and, in the past, the large majority of answers (~90%) have been assessed as GOOD.

Absence from class
Although no part of your grade will be determined by attendance, attendance is important. Of course, if you do not attend class, it will be difficult for you to engage in case discussion at the same level of your classmates. My cold calling algorithm will do everything it can to balance the number of questions asked of each students even if some folks are in class more often than others by calling on folks more when they are present. In the past, every students who attended the large majority of classes were able to participate on the same level of their classmates and had full credit for their case discussion assessment.

For classes conducted entirely remotely, you do not need to tell me if you will be absent. If you cannot attend an face-to-face class, you must tell us in advance by filling out a simple Google form that asks for two things: (1) your UW student number and (2) the date you will be absent from class. You must fill this out one hour before class begins or I will not be able to incorporate it into the program that select names. I will also record absences based on whether you were not present in class when your name was called. If you fail to use the form and are cold called but are not around to answer, your case discussion grade will be lowered.

Overall case discussion grade
Final grades for are computed at the end of the final case using the following algorithm:


 * 1) I compute the median number of questions that students were asked. Because the distribution is rather narrow, a majority of students in the class in the past were asked at least this many questions (typically around 2/3 of the class).
 * 2) I will take everybody who has been answered the median number of questions or more and assess their grade to be the mean question assessment of the questions they were asked minus 0.2 points for every day they were absent from class when called upon (i.e., because they didn't answer when called upon despite being presenting the chat channel for remote classes or because they did not record themselves as absent for a face-to-face class).
 * 3) Next, I identify the subset of remaining students who were asked fewer than the median number of questions and identify those that were simply "unlucky" (i.e., were they asked fewer questions not because they absent more often than their classmates). For all these  students, we compute their grade in the same as described in (2) so that these students are in no way penalized.
 * 4) For any remaining students, I compute average scores for as per (2) for any questions but assess students with no credit (0 points) for each question below the median. For example, if the class median were 3 questions and a student asked only 2 questions despite being "luckier" than their classmates (i.e., they missed so much class and even the weighting algorithm couldn't adjust things), I would assess students as a zero for 1/3 of their case participation grade and provide them with the assessment as per (2) for the two questions they did answer. In the past, the only students in this category have missed an extremely large number of class sessions.