Assignment Overview:
This page provides the evaluation philosophy for UMF music history courses as well as links to information and rubrics for specific assignments.
Evaluation Philosophy: Feedback vs. Grades:
Feedback tells you how you your work is progressing. Am I understanding the material? Is my work heading in the right direction? What is a good next step? It is the most individualized aspect of the learning experience and the most important. In contrast, grades provide a ranking. Where does my work fit on a scale of criteria provided by the professor? While grades are necessary in our current academic structure, too often they dominate feedback. In this course, we will reverse the paradigm: the final grade will be the only grade you will receive. Throughout the semester my responses to your work will consist solely of feedback.
So how will we determine this final grade? And how will you know how you're doing grade-wise, say, halfway through the semester? A grading rubric is provided for each of the three categories of assignments (Blogging, Research Paper, and Participation). About one month into the semester we will meet individually, review your contribution and determine how your work translate into a grade. This will help insure we're on the same grading page. At the end of the semester, you will submit a written evaluation which will help determine the final grade. You will know how you did before the conclusion of the semester.
Assignments for Spring 2006:
All courses have three areas for evaluation. MUS 277 Beethoven and INT 277 The First Modern Decade involve: Blogging, Participation, and the Research Paper.
MUS 277 ElectroAcoustic Music will be slightly different: Participation, Blogging, and Performance/Composition in place of the Research Paper.
MUS 377 Music History Seminar II will involve Blogs and the Analysis Paper
Clicking on the Breadcrumb links at the bottom of the page will navigate you through each assignment's details and grading rubric.