BIS 140

To help alleviate stress and focus on learning, I grade all my assignments as complete/incomplete. My instructions for each assignment will be clear, so you can grade your own work before turning it in to guarantee that you'll pass it. In case you have questions beforehand, we'll go over assignments in class before they are due.

The main focus of this course is completing a portfolio that demonstrates what you have learned this quarter. You will choose which assignments you want to improve and include in your portfolio.

Because this is a hybrid course, there are a lot of assignments to compensate for the time we're not in class. They typically take 6-12 hours a week.

Types of assignments

Readings and comments

We will complete most of our readings/watch most of our videos in an app called Hypothesis that is integrated into Canvas. This app lets you and your classmates annotate the texts you are reading. You can highlight text and write notes in the margin. Here, though, the notes in the margin are also opportunities to ask questions your classmates will answer and to answer questions that others have raised. Each comment becomes a thread. Keep in mind that you will need time to reply to comments before an assignment's due date. You’ve been divided into small groups, so that the number of comments that you are reading is reasonable.

Hypothesis helps me, too, as the instructor. Because this is a large class, I will rely on Hypothesis’s automatic grading system. Hypothesis will assign a grade to you based first on the depth of analysis in your comment. Are you working with the text? Are you offering deep insight about it? It also looks at how you ask and answer questions. Are you making enough comments? Are they distributed throughout the text?

I will drop your lowest reading grade.

Participation

I grade in-class assignments how thoughtfully you do your in-class work, including your individual work and contributions to small group and whole-class discussion. I will grade participation based on quizzes that cover the material we discuss in class and the activities that you complete in your lab notebook.

I will drop your lowest participation grade.

Analysis of news media reports

In weeks 4 and 6 of the quarter, you’ll apply what we’ve learned in class about how to analyze numbers in the news media. For each assignment, you’ll find news media reports from reliable sources that visualize different numbers—for example, you can look at sports, election polling, health, budgets, etc. The list is endless! You will identify the practices that make communication clear in these examples, as well as looking for ways that communication is unclear or even misleading, and then you’ll suggest ways to improve the graphics. Everyone must present on a different news reports from a reliable news outlet.

Final Portfolio

Your final project for this course is a portfolio of the media reports you’ve analyzed. You’ll compile your accomplishments throughout the quarter, with reflections about what you learned. To prepare your portfolio, you will:

• Reflect on comments you made on two of your favorite readings
• Reflect on and improve two class activities
• Reflect and improve one of your news media reports

Very occasionally, I have questions about a final portfolio, for example if it is close to a passing grade, but still incomplete. If this happens, I will reach out to you during finals week for a meeting, and you will have the opportunity to correct your work after we meet. This opportunity doesn’t work if the final portfolio you submit is a very poor quality.

The following graphic summarizes all of your assignments:

Figure 1 caption and alt text. This stacked bar chart shows the four categories of course assignments. 15% of your grade will be based on your in-class participation. Another 30% of your grade will be based on your commentary on the readings and videos assigned for homework. in class participation. 20% will be determined based on your analysis of news media reports. Lastly, 35% of your grade will be based on the final project, which allows you to explore more thoroughly the analyses of news stories that you completed.

Complete/incomplete

I grade all assignments as incomplete/complete. Because we learn through a combination of making mistakes, correcting our work, and repetition, you have the opportunity to resubmit each assignment once.

What if I get an incomplete on an assignment?

Making mistakes—and correcting them—are part of learning! If you receive an incomplete on an assignment that you turned in, then you can redo it and resubmit it within a week of having the grade released.

Each assignment can only be resubmitted once.

Please include a reflection with your resubmission in which you think about what you learned through the process of revision by answering the following questions:

• What did you do to improve your understanding before this revision?
• What resources did you use to study and prepare for this revision?
• What important mistakes were in the original, and how did you fix them?

Please note that you cannot resubmit the final portfolio.

Due dates and late work

Because I prepare for class by grading your homework, it’s important for you to turn things in on time. Quizzes on in class material are due Tuesdays at midnight. Other assignments, such as comments on readings and analyses of media reports, are due Thursdays. Your final portfolio is due Monday, December 14, 2026.

Sometimes, you turn in work late. The only way to get credit for late work is to use a token—this will give you one extra week to complete an assignment. You have 4 tokens to use during the quarter, and I will track these in the Canvas gradebook. Note that we have 3-4 assignments due each week, so it is possible to use all of your tokens in just one week.

I try my best to grade assignments within one week of submission.

Estimating your grade

To calculate your grade at the end of the quarter, I will take your grade as a %, subtract 50 points, and then divide by 10. For example, if you score 80%, I would calculate your grade as (80-50)/10 = 30/10 = 3.0. If I feel this score does not reflect the high quality of your work, I may increase your score by up to 0.3 points above the one that is calculated. The maximum possible score is 4.0.

Monday, December 14 at midnight is the last opportunity to submit assignments.