Discussion grades

A student expressed confusion when she saw her points for a discussion topic were 10/10 but I said that there could be 20 points per topic with a maximum of 80 for all discussion (8 topcis total). I replied:

Each of the 8 unit discussions is worth 10 points for a total of 80. I do not want to devalue the other assignments that make up the class grade, so I leave at 80 the maximum points that can be earned through discussion. However, I recognize that some students will find certain topics more interesting and I also want to encourage communication among students, so I award points for quality responses to what our classmates write. These are extra credit within that discussion topic with a maximum of 10 extra credit points, so the score for an individual topic can be up to 20/10. Therefore it is possible to earn all 80 of the discussion points possible in just 4 discussion topics.

Plagiarism and the discussion board

I discovered a student who copied text directly from Wikipedia and submitted it as his entry for a chapter commentary discussion topic. The student submitted an attached file instead of putting text in the Message box. I downloaded the file to read it and opened it using Mac's preview function to read the text. Some of the words were underlined in blue and I hovered my mouse over them and found they were links to wikipedia.org and about.com.

I did not have a specific note regarding plagiarism on the discussion board (I have it for the written assignments) but my instructions for the chapter commentaries mention providing evidence from the text and citing page numbers for direct quotes. I will need to start including that in the future.

It is too bad that our system's integration with Turnitin.com does not include the discussion board.

I am glad I discovered this after my last class before spring break, as I now have more than a week to recover from my disappointment.

Discussion setup

I have one discussion topic per chapter and the assignment is for students to write a two-paragraph commentary on the chapter. To help them get started I provide several prompts and say they could choose to respond to one of those. To encourage peer interaction I give extra credit for replies:

• Original author: 16 points possible for the original post
  2 points per quality reply
  1 point per courtesy reply
• Reply author: 8 points for a quality reply that is properly supported (quotes and page nos.)
  4 points for a quality reply
  1 point for a courtesy reply

I do not limit extra credit, and some enterprising students are testing how far they can go, so I added the following additional rules:

• No points for additional posts by the original author in the same thread
• Only the highest quality post gets graded for reply authors in the same thread

For the next time I teach with this, I will add the additional rule:

• Only the highest quality post gets graded for reply authors on the same specific topic anywhere in that chapter discussion topic (all those original authors still get extra credit for writing a post that inspires a reply)

Discussion prompts

I had all of the discussion topics due before the midterm listed at the beginning, and the topic description includes the prompts that students can choose to answer. I decided to make the prompts a link from the topic description after the topic is locked. This should make the discussion topics less obtrusive and not require as much scrolling, especially toward the end of the semester.