FSEM Week 12: Finals Are Coming

November 11, 2018 by
ADVISING NOTES: Ask your students how registration went. Discuss the opportunities to drop/add for the spring term. Students most likely had trouble getting into a few of their desired courses (more so than they did in June when they were registering for Fall 2018), so be supportive and offer advice on drop/add. You should also encourage each student to run a degree evaluation after they have registered. This will help them to see how the classes they signed up for count toward the various requirements.
As your students start thinking about their upcoming final exams (Fall 2018 schedule here), it would be good to review the policy on final exams. You can follow the link to read the full policy, but here are a few highlights which you may want to bring to the attention of your students. If you get questions about any of these items, please refer to the complete policy.
  • Examinations are scheduled for specific periods and should not interfere with subsequent examinations.
  • A student who has not taken a required final examination has not completed the course requirements and therefore fails the course.
  • In instances of multiple sections of the same course taught by the same instructor (including lab periods), it is permissible, at the discretion of the instructor, to allow students to take final exams in either scheduled exam period.
  • Students who have more than two examinations scheduled within a 24-hour period may reschedule until there are only two exams within that 24-hour period.

CO-CURRICULAR ANNOUNCEMENTS: Time to get ready for final papers and presentations, and the Writing and Speaking Centers are here to help!  Please encourage your students to make appointments with either center, and to book them early as the appointment times fill fast at the end of the semester. The Writing Center will offer another citation workshop, this time on Chicago/Turabian Citation on Monday, Nov. 12th, at 5pm in HCC 427.

QEP ANNOUNCEMENTS: I appreciate everybody who has offered to have their class discussions and final presentations recorded. If you didn’t have a chance to complete the Google form, please contact me directly so that we can schedule a time to record your class discussion and/or student presentations. Please reassure your students that these recordings will not in any way affect their course grade, and will not be seen by anybody not associated with the accreditation efforts.

As a reminder from my request last week, I also need to collect a sample of final papers from the classes. Once your final papers are in, please select 4 at random and have them sent to the QEP office electronically (to Leah Tams, ltams@umw.edu) or in hard copy to: Anand Rao, ELC Department (Combs Hall). To be clear, you are not to do any assessment whatsoever. All I need are the ungraded papers.

Students in your seminar will be receiving a link to complete a survey before they leave for Thanksgiving break. This will come from the QEP office and is completely separate from the student course evaluations. This survey will ask for their input on several aspects of the First-Year Experience. There will also be indirect assessment questions about the learning outcomes associated with the FSEM which will be used for QEP assessment.  It is very important that students in their first semester at UMW complete this survey. In the spring, I will share the results with you along with a comparison to the results from the last several years.

Once the semester ends, I will also be sending out assessment surveys for any faculty/staff involved in the delivery of the First-Year Seminar Program.

Filed Under: Fall 2018 Correspondence Tagged With: