Assigning Credit to Completing Muddy Cards
s part of this study, unit coordinators are required to assign a small amount of credit for students to complete muddy cards (0.5 - 4%). This could be offered as extra credit.
We wanted to provide some practical tips on ways to do this; however, it is ultimately up to you how you satisfy this requirement.
Create an assessment item
This would involve creating an item in your Unit Outline in Sydney Curriculum, giving some credit to it. Jonathan has done this in his NLP graduate course (~400 students). See the instructions below for details on how he set that up. To give students flexibility, you can allow them to miss a few muddy cards and still get full credit. For example, if muddy cards are worth 2% of a student’s grade, you might choose that a muddy card response for each week is worth 0.25%, meaning students have to complete at least 8 weeks of muddy cards to get full credit.
Assigning Muddy Cards Redular Credit In the Unit Outline:
- Assessment category: Discussion - open
- Assessment security: open (prefilled)
- AI allowed yes (prefilled)
- Assessment type: contribution
- Assessment title: Muddy cards
- Length/duration: n/a
- Assessment type description: Questions to promote synthesis of concepts
- Weight: between 0.5 and 4%
- Non-weighted/variable: no
- Early feedback task: no
- Week due: Multiple weeks
- Due date & time: leave blank
- Closing date: leave blank
- Learning outcomes: select any related to knowledge
- Individual or group: individual
- Hurdle task: no
Extra credit
Alternatively, credit for completing the muddy cards could be added to a student’s score on unsecured assessments for the unit. For example, if your unit has unsecured tasks worth 40%, and you made the muddy cards worth 2% then a student who would have gotten 30% can increase their mark to 32% by completing the muddy cards. For a student who achieves over 38% the muddy cards would only bring them up to 40%. Jonathan has had experience implementing something similar for a unit in the school of computer science.
Whichever approach you choose, it is important to communicate to students how the credit will work. We are happy to help with language in Canvas for that.