I want to brag a little bit and tell a story about one of my favorite on the spot extra credit assignments I’ve ever given. My business calculus class had just taken their second exam and they had done quite abysmal. I believe the class average was in the early to mid 50s. So, as I learned to do in the past, the first thing I decided to do was give them another chance. After grading the exam, I composed an email to the class outlining the extra credit assignment. In a nutshell, they would get points back if they wrote an essay about how they’ve been studying for my course and what they should do to improve their performance in the future. The second part of the extra credit assignment involved them having to answer which was a better curve – getting half of the points they missed back or taking half of the grade they made and adding 50 points to that? Naturally, the two options are the exact same but why not tease your students a little bit?

Well, in that class of 127 students I got something like 90+ responses – a lot of people wanted those points back. There were a lot of “I will go to more office hours” and “I will ask for more help”. But of course, college kids will be college kids. I think only one more person started coming to office hours regularly.

They had their next exam a month later, and while they did slightly better, it was still pretty abysmal. I believe the class average improved by only about five points. This time, I gave them another extra credit assignment but for only ten points. They had to read their original essay from the first exam,  and write an update to it – did they follow their own advice? Why or why not?  If they did and they did better, then more props to them, otherwise who’s to blame?

Huge classes are notoriously difficult to control. One voice of dissent can easily turn all 127 students against you. By making each student criticize themselves for not following their own advice, I believe I avoided a lot of conflict that could lead to terrible wastes of time on both my and my students’ parts. Not to mention that those were their own words, you know? Criticism from someone else often leads to resentment and conflict. Criticism from your own self leads to reflection.

Most students did end up doing quite well on the final, too 🙂

Vazgen Zakaryan