Dan Melzer is a professor and Director of First-Year Composition in the UC Davis University Writing Program. He is the author of the book Assignments across the Curriculum and coauthor with John Bean of the book Engaging Ideas and with Michelle Cox and Jeffrey Galin of the book Sustainable WAC. His articles have appeared in College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, Journal of Basic Writing, The WAC Journal, CompositionForum, Kairos, and Journal of Response to Writing.
See So Your Instructor is Using Contract Grading… to better understand the goals behind a grading contract based labor. A rangeB rangeC rangeD to F rangeClass and one-one-one conferences attendanceAlways attends class and conferences and is rarely late for class (no more than one absence)Regularly attends class and conferences and is rarely late for class (no more than two absences)Does...
Throughout your time in school, most of your classes have probably been graded. If you met certain criteria, you received an “A,” a “B,” a “C,” and so on. Maybe your school used numbers, grades, or GPA-style grading, but whatever the grades looked like, the mechanism was pretty similar. Your teachers probably used a combination of tests, quizzes, essays, presentations,...
