How do I know what my grade is?

A student wrote and asked a good question, namely, "How do I know if I am caught up in the course, and how do I know my grade?" Find my answer below.

"Every two or three weeks, double check the class blog to make sure you have done all the tasks assigned. Make sure to revise your work based on the recommendations of your group--once these are finished being set up. If I see you heading in a direction you shouldn't, and your group doesn't catch and correct your course, then I will intervene and let you know what revisions should be made."

"That's it. Your grade will be based on your class participation (40%)--that is, how well you work with your group, if you complete assignments, and if you revise and improve your assignments on a regular basis--and your final portfolio(60%), where you'll argue for your grade, show me what you have learned, and put together a collection of your work from the semester."

"As you'll soon discover, this class is all about learning and taking advantage of the opportunities to learn which are presented to you, and I value process over product, that is, follow the process, make the most of the opportunities to learn, and I don't care a whole lot about the success of any one or five products. After all, you are learning how to revise them and make them better."

For right now, the things you need to be worried about are joining a group, learning how to use google docs, and reading your classmate's rhetorical analysis to figure out how you can make improvements to your own. Oh, and asking very good questions like the one which prompted this response.

The upshot is only you can judge how much effort you are putting into the course and how much you are learning. I won't make a final judgment about your grade until I read your final portfolio. Up until then, you've got the opportunity to continue to improve your work, and *you* are learning to answer the questions: 1) "Is this piece of writing successful?"; and, 2) "Do I want to put any more work into figuring out how to improve this piece of writing and how?" Having said this, as I said during the orientation, students tend to receive high grades in my class, because they have the opportunity and time to do their best work. The students who receive low grades are those who don't take advantage of these opportunities, who try to squeeze all their work into too small a piece of time, or who don't do the work at all."

Steve