CS8801 GTA Designing Assignments and Exams

Learning Objectives

• Review and critique an assignment and exam to assess coverage of learning objectives, feasibility, workload, implementation, and design style.
• Practice designing an assignment for that class complete with grading criteria.

You will be critiquing the design of an assignment and an exam from either a class that you are taking (you are not permitted to choose an assignment from this workshop - it creates too many levels of recursion) and designing a different assignment for that same class.  The purpose is to gain experience with looking at the design of assessment materials critically and to practice designing an assignment yourself.

• Part I (60%) - 30 points for the assignment critique and 30 points for the exam critique
• Depth and quality of analysis of assignment / exam (20)
• Style and grammar (5)
• Choice of assignment (5)
• Part II (40%)
• Content and quality of the assignment (10)
• Creativity (15)
• Justification of assignment design (10)
• Completeness, style, and grammar of Assignment description (5)

Instructions

Choose an assignment with a deliverable component and an exam (midterm or final exam), preferably from a class that you are taking.  If none of your classes have assigned any work or tests to date, find one on-line from a 3000, 4000, or graduate level class offered in the College of Computing.  You may not choose the Graduate Teaching Workshop as one of the courses.  Critique both the assignment and the exam using the following questions.

• What are the learning objectives?  In other words, what is the assignment designed to reinforce in terms of the class objectives?  What are the skills and knowledge elements covered in the assignment?
• How feasible is the assignment / exam?  Feasibility addresses the student's ability to complete the assignment or exam.  What do the students require to do the assignment in terms of equipment, readings, and resources?  What will they require in terms of the necessary foundations to do the assignment?  What will they need to learn / acquire / derive over the course of the assignment?
• What are the difficult obstacles in the assignment / exam?  What are the hardest portions of the assignment?
• Is the workload appropriate to the level of the course?  What are the time requirements?  How long will the assignment take (or how long did it take) relative to the amount of time available (between the time assigned and the time finished)?  If the assignment / exam was not feasible in terms of workload, how would you modify the assignment / exam?
• How would you implement the assignment /exam while still addressing the same learning objectives using a different method?  Describe in general details how you will modify  Include what the tradeoffs of the new implementation would be.  For exams, you may rewrite a question or choose a different method of examination.
• If grading criteria was available, did it provide sufficient guidance for highlighting the important parts of the assignment?  If grading criteria was not available, how would you allocate percentages and points?
• Was the assignment / exam description sufficient?   Describe the clarity and style of the instructions and justification for the assignment / exam.  What was missing?  What could have been improved?   Did the assignment/exam leave room for exploration or purposeful ambiguity (where the students are expected to develop the problem space)?

• A copy of both the assignment and exam that you critiqued.  To save space, you can simply provide the text for the assignment description, a URL, or the exam questions.
• Answers to the above questions following the order provided.  Please answer them item by item as opposed to an essay or long paragraph form.

Instructions

You will develop an assignment for the class that you chose in Part I that addresses either 1-2 of the general learning objectives as stated in the course syllabus and at least 2-3 weeks worth of lecture topics.  Your assignment description must contain the following:

• The class number and name  (i.e. CS 4000 Computerization and Society)
• Title of the assignment
• The learning objectives addressed by this assignment
• An explanation of the purpose of the assignment in relation to the learning objectives.
• Grading criteria
• Instructions for completing the assignment including an overall estimation of the amount of time or effort that the assignment will take.
• What form the deliverables will take.
• The format and submission process for turning in the assignment.
• What the difficult portions of the assignment will be?  (Critical learning areas)

Part of your grade will depend on how creative you are with either your assignment description and/or with how you design the assignment to help the students accomplish the learning objectives.

Deliverables

• A copy of the assignment that you designed that contains the points as listed above.
• Ideally, you will want to imitate the format used by this assignment.

• All work must be completed by the individual student following the guidelines outlined by the Academic Honor Code.  Students may (and are encouraged to) ask the instructors of these courses for clarification or guidance about design decisions as long as these sources are cited somewhere in the paper.
• The deliverable should be typed and formatted with 1" margins, 10 point Times New Roman font, double spaced text.  No strict page requirement but it should probably require a minimum of 3 pages.
• Each assignment should be spell-checked.
• Pages should be numbered.
• Assignments failing to meet the above criteria will be returned to the student for a resubmittal and will lose 20%.  The assignment must be resubmitted by the next day or it will lose 20% per day.
• Assignments are due no later than 5 minutes after the start of class.  Late assignments will lose 20% per day late.  A student failing to submit this assignment at all will not pass the course.
• Electronic submission is only permitted with permission of instructor and only with good reason.