MC 6010 Cultural Studies in Communication

Attendance in this class is mandatory.   You will not be allowed to make up any assignments missed due to an unexcused absence.   In addition, you must be in class on time. 

Reasonable Accommodation for Students with Disabilities:   If you have a disability that may require assistance or other accommodation, or you have a question related to any accommodations for testing, note takers, readers, etc., please speak with me as soon as possible.   Students also may contact the Office of Disabled Student Services (892-2783) with questions about such services.

Academic Misconduct Policy:   Plagiarism, cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty are prohibited.   Students guilty of academic misconduct, either directly or indirectly through participation or assistance, are immediately responsible to the instructor.   In addition to other possible disciplinary sanctions which may be imposed, the instructor has the authority to assign an F or a zero for the exercise or examination or to assign an F in the course.   If the student believes he or she has been erroneously accused of academic misconduct, and if his or her final grade has been lowered as a result, the student may appeal the case through the appropriate institutional procedures.  

Attention Hope Lottery Scholarship Winners! Students receiving Lottery scholarships must earn a 2.75 GPA after attempting 24 credit hours and a 3.0 GPA after attempting 48 credit hours or more. Students who drop below full-time status (12 hours) during the first 14 days of the semester will have their awards adjusted and will owe money to the University. Students who drop after the 14th day of classes will have their future lottery scholarships suspended unless the drop was approved in advance by the Financial Aid Office. Students may appeal the suspension if the drop is due to documented personal illness, illness or death of immediate family member, extreme financial hardship, military service or other extraordinary circumstances beyond the student's control. The lottery appeal form may be obtained at www.mtsu.edu/financialaid/. For more information please see www.tennesseescholardollars.com.

There are three assignments for this course.  

Weekly Homework: 40%
Midterm: 30%
Final Exam: 30%

The first is a weekly homework assignment.   I intend this assignment to do three things:   first, to provide direction for your reading of the next weeks' assigned materials; second, to help you to build a theoretical vocabulary for thinking about culture and communication; and third, to prepare you for a substantive discussion of the relevant issues during class.   I will make these assignments available each week during class and also post them on the course website.   You will complete the assignments AND make two copies, one of which you will hand to me at the beginning of the next class, and one of which you will use as a structure for your note-taking during class.  

The second assignment will be a mid-semester take-home midterm handed out in Week 7 and due Week 8.  

The third assignment will be an end-of-semester take-home final exam handed out in Week 14 and due Wednesday, December 14th.

You will obviously be concerned to learn more about the way in which assignments are graded in this class.   In the College of Graduate Studies, students must maintain an overall GPA of 3.0, or a "B" average, to maintain good standing.   This requirement considerably truncates the traditional A-F grading scale in that it effectively transforms a "C" into an "F" grade.   For this reason, I use the three letter grades to represent the following conclusions:   An "A" represents an excellent mastery of the material; a "B" represents a satisfactory mastery of the material; and a "C" represents unsatisfactory mastery of the material.

Now, as to how I allot these grades.  

On your weekly homework, I will simply determine whether you have made a good faith effort to complete the assignment.   By this I mean that it should be apparent that you have thoughtfully reflected on the questions raised and that you have completed the exercises listed.   You should recognize what this means: 40%   of your final grade has everything to do with effort and nothing to do with performance.   An "A" on the homework portion of your final grade is equivalent to missing no more than one of these assignments.   A "B" is equivalent to missing no more than two of these assignments. A "C" is equivalent to missing no more than three, and so on.  

To understand how and why I grade your midterm and final exam in the way that I do, you need to know something about two philosophies of grading.   In the most common approach to grading, assignments are graded according to how well students have replicated a fixed body of knowledge.   Given the assumption that instructors have seamlessly conveyed this knowledge to students, the idea is to measure how much and how well students are able to reproduce this knowledge in assignments.   Typically, lecturers who use this approach assign letter grades according to a 90-80-70 percent scale (that is, students who get ninety percent of answers correct receive an A and so forth).  

A second approach questions the assumption of seamless communication between instructors and students.   In its place, it assumes that there is likely to be some miscommunication between students and instructors such that what a given instructor means to convey isn't always understood, or understood clearly, by students.   If this is true, then it is obviously unfair to assign grades according to how well students have reproduced a fixed body of knowledge (which may or may not have been effectively conveyed by instructors).   Instead, instructors who adopt this approach typically use a natural curve in their grading.   This means that they begin with the best student performance on an assignment--whatever that might happen to be--and rank others according to this standard.  

For example, let's say that the assignment is a midterm exam composed mostly of essay questions.   In this system, an instructor looks for the best respond to each essay.   Upon finding this response, she then compares other responses to it (rather than, as in the first grading system, to a fixed "ideal" answer defined by the instructor).   This means that even if the best response missed some information deemed crucial by the instructor, it would earn an "A" because it is, by default, the most excellent answer within this particular group of students.   In this way, we get a grading scale naturally curved to the performance of the best students.  

I adopt this latter approach to grading.   Here are the mechanics of the process. When grading your midterm and final exam, I look for the essays that best reflect the criteria I set out for the exam: is it the most cogent? does it use class materials well? etc. I then use these essays as a standard by which to evaluate others. When I turn back assignments, I include a note explaining the way in which I evaluated the papers, that is, what the typical "best" answers included, what "satisfactory" answers included, etc.   This gives you a standard by which to compare your essays, and how I evaluated them, to the rest of the class.

Your midterm and final exam will be assigned a letter grade. At the end of the semester, I translate these letter grades into a number on a 1-10 scale (A = 10; A- = 9; B+ = 8; B = 7; C+ = 6 and so on). I then plug these numbers into the following equation:

Homework grade x .4 + Take-Home Midterm x .3 + Final Exam x .3 = final grade.  

An example.   Let's say that a student earned the following grades: Homework: A (10); Midterm: B (7); Final Exam: B+ (8).   The resulting equation is:   10 x .4 + 7 x .3 + 8 x .3 = 8.5 or a B+.  

This system may look complicated at first, but really it is very simple. This is extremely important: if you have any questions at all about a grade you've received on an assignment, please come talk to me within a week of receiving the grade. This is always a good policy--even if you don't want to complain, but just want clarification, it can be helpful in adjusting your performance to my expectations.

This page last updated August 11, 2005.

Copyright ©2005 by David Ryfe. Please direct any questions about this site to dryfe@mtsu.edu.