Assessment

I will not assign grades for any of your work until the end of term. In a midterm and end of terms assessments you will evaluate your own work and propose a mark. The only piece of work I will assign a grade to in first term is your end of term research project. I will provide you with feedback throughout the term, so you should have a sense of what you are doing well and what needs improvement.

Traditionally at Carleton, fourth-year classes in History are full year (two semester) courses. We do this so that students are given the chance to delve deeply into their subject matter and attain a certain mastery over the whole year.

This class is designed to start off slow, getting you to question what you already know about the Middle Ages and teaching you the building blocks of historical analysis/writing. I hope that you are able to experience the class as collaborative, not competitive. You are all starting off together and I want you to see each other as peers, colleagues and potential friends from whom you all can learn. Assignments are thus designed with the expectation that you can work together with others or that you see/read other students' work and learn from it. Your peers can be inspiring.

This "Medieval Manuscripts in a Digital Age" is likewise designed for gradual entry, with the first term designed to have no formal grades assigned for work, but rather you will receive feedback about your progress but no marks. At the end of the term, you also will be responsible for writing up an evidence supported self-assessment of your participation and work (see Process Letter), taking your work, effort and other qualitative features into account. I am using this system in order to avoid a system of grading that has the potential to make you all less collaborative and more competitive. For more on why I am not using traditional grading, see the next page, "Why are there no grades".

In the second term, together as a class we will decide whether to retain a non-grade system, or whether you corporately wish to return to a more familiar system.