GRADING IN NON-INTENSIVE RUSSIAN COURSES

Everyone worries about grades, and rightfully so. Grades are important, not only because the determine who gets what scholarships and into what grad schools or jobs. Grades also give you direct feedback as to how you're doing. As a teacher, I'm very receptive to students who worry that their grade does not properly reflect their performance.

Their are a few principles that govern how I grade. Here's the short version:

Grades should reflect what you can show you can do, not what you seem to know.
You should have lots of oportunities to "show your stuff." Therefore there is a lot of graded work in my classes. (As a student I hated classes where there was just a midterm, a paper, and a final.)
You should have a chance to correct an occasional screw-up.
Tests should require you to show what you're supposed to know on your worst day, not what you might know on your best day. Tests should have no surprises, no trick questions. Instead, tests should reflect what's been going on in class, in the lab, and on the homework. It should be within the grasp of any diligent student to score a 100 on a test. For that reason, I never curve tests.
Class attendance is of paramount importance. You cannot learn a foreign language by mumbling to yourself alone. So my attendance policies are sort of... Stalinistic.

Now let's get specific. Grades in Russian are given on your performance, based on the following criteria:

Unit tests. These occur about once every 10 class days. You may retake disasterous tests. (50% of your grade).
Dialog memorizations and readings. (10%)
Small quizzes - Declension, vocabulary, etc. All quizzes are announced in advance (10%)
Oral proficiency interviews. Every student has no less then three on assigned topics in the course of a semester. (10%)
Final exam. (20%)
Attendance is mandatory. Severe penalties apply.

You may make an appointment to check up on your current grades at any time. Call me at 4-7081 or get me on e-mail: rrobin@gwu.edu.