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Assignments

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Photo: Justin Lubin / NBC.

I will measure your progress and success in Social Philosophy by using two forms of assessment:

  1. In- and out-of-class participation for displaying your ongoing attempts to better understand and apply the course material presented in the readings and discussed during our class meetings, and
  2. Ten short foundation assignments that have you practice and develop the skills needed for effectively analyzing and creating arguments.

I will be assessing your work using a form of specifications grading. In this grading scheme, each assignment submission is marked Accepted or Incomplete based on whether it satisfies a detailed list of criteria, or specifications. In addition, you may revise and resubmit Incomplete work until it is marked Acceptable.

Meanwhile, your final course grade will be determined based on the specifications you satisfy, as illustrated in Figure 1 below. When looking this over, keep in mind that to earn a particular grade, you must also satisfy the specifications of all the grades below it. So, for example, to earn a B, you must satisfy S4—and also S1, S2, and S3. In addition, your participation on Twitter will determine whether your final course grade also has a + (plus) or a − (minus). So, to continue the example, if you satisfy the specifications for a B and you have only 99 Accepted Tweets, then your final course grade is a B−.

A grade of an A is earned by satisfying specifications S1 through S5; a B is earned by satisfying S1 through S4; a C is earned by satisfying S1 through S3; a D is earned by satisfying S1 and S2; and an F is earned by not satisfying S1 and/or S2. A + (plus) is earned if at least 113 tweets are Accepted; a - (minus) is earned if fewer than 100 tweets are Accepted; and neither a + (plus) nor a - (minus) is earned otherwise. Finally, UB does not allow final course grades to be either an A+ or a D-. Therefore a final course grade of an A+ will be assigned an A and a final grade of a D- will be assigned a D.

Figure 1: Determination of Your Final Course Grade.

Please do look over the Grading Scheme for this class, which goes into a lot more detail about how I will calculate grades.

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Photo: Colleen Hayes / NBC.

12-Hour Grace Period

All foundation assignments have an automatic 12-hour grace period. This means that you are free to finish and submit any foundation assignment up to 12 hours after its posted due date/time without penalty.

In short, all foundation assignments have an automatic 12-hour extension. Further extensions will require the use of a free pass and/or reasonable accommodation.

Please keep in mind that the Twitter assignment does not qualify for a grace period.