Marking Schemes

If you're a true gamer at heart you're constantly looking at life through a particularly odd lens. How do I play? How do I win? It doesn't matter if normal people could possibly imagine something as a game... To you everything is a game and you need to win!

MITx's first course, Circuits and Electronics, started today. The first thing I did after logging in to the system was check out the syllabus and find the marking scheme. This was always the most important thing to do for a class back when I was still in school. It lets you know what the professor thinks is important and where you're likely to need to focus your energy.

I can remember having a class with 10% for assignments, 20% for the midterm, and 70% for the final. There were 10 assignments so each was worth only 1% of the final grade and they were each likely to take 10ish hours to complete. By contrast studying for the final was only likely to take 10ish hours on its own and would be worth 70 times as much. These numbers are really out of whack! It's here that you need to figure out what exactly you're trying to accomplish with the class. Are you trying for the highest mark possible? Do you just want to barely pass? Do you want a merely good mark? Is your goal to learn the material? Will pounding away at long assignments help understand the course or will it merely occupy a lot of time?

Personally I found I learned things just fine from a book and didn't have a lot to gain from doing overly long assignments. It depended on the class, of course, but the one referenced above? I didn't do those assignments. I wish I could say I spent the saved time on something more valuable than sleeping and playing bridge but that would be a lie. On the flip side I remember spending a lot of time on low value assignments for some of my programming classes because I enjoyed doing them and thought I did have something to gain by slogging away at them.

At any rate, what is the marking scheme going to be for 6.002x? 15% assignments, 15% labs, 30% midterm, 40% final. There are 12 each for assignments and labs where they're only counting your top 10 scores. The claim from the announcement is that the whole course should only take 10 hours per week which includes the assignment, lab, watching the lectures, and reading the book. This seems like a split more in line with actually forcing people to do the work each week than my anecdote. The assignments should be substantially shorter and worth more. The final is worth significantly less. And the threshold for success is higher, I think. You need to get at least a C to get the credential for the course. I don't know how they're translating numbers into letters but I think 63-66 is a C. (Looking at the course profile it seems 60 is a C.) So it's not possible to pass with only doing the final. Midterm and final combined could do it but they've come right out and stated that problems from the assignments/labs will be on the midterm and final. Also everything is being marked by a bot and not real people so there's a lot to be gained by doing the work to see how the bot will mark things. So even if I was interested in just doing the least work possible to get a credential I'd probably want to do some of the assignments anyway.

Of course, I am interested in actually playing around with their lab environment! So even if optimally I should game the system by skipping the labs I'd be trying them out anyway. I'm just happy to see that's probably not the case. The assignments can be done with other people and the exam is a solo affair so it makes sense to have it be worth proportionally more per time invested but the 70:1 ratio from some of my older courses was just too much. This course feels, on the surface at least, like it has a better ratio. Time will tell if I end up wanting to do even 10 assignments let alone all 12.