Question 3

Give your honest opinion on the article. Do you feel you deserve grades based on your effort or is it that you earned the grade you received because of your effort? Anything else you would like to add?

While I think that while the article had some great content, the article required little to no effort from it's author in that basically the entire article was what other people had to say on the matter. There were more quotes than anything else. However, like I said the content was good. As far as grades relating to effort. I think, while it's a great concept, it would be hard to actually do. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to actually judge the level of effort that was put into something. While I can agree that sometimes it's very easy to see that the creator obviously didn't put any effort into something, the looks of some works can often be deceiving. For instance, myself and friends have all received comments on work before that have said things like "all your hard work and effort shows" when we spent little to no effort on it. Then there's the question of what would happen to the homework assignments that are things like "answer these 5 questions from the book" or "do this activity from the book"? How can you display your level of effort when following a step by step assignment that doesn't allow for deviation or individualization? Especially if the questions from the book have a-d answers. Sure, you could assume that the student read based on the fact that they were able to answer the questions. However, the student could have skipped to the questions and looked up the answer. So when it comes down to it, grading on effort most often would mean grading on the appearance of effort which is not the same thing. Again, it is a great concept I just don't agree that "effort" is something that can always be judged appropriately.