Studying updatyness

[triskellian]

This is your regularly-scheduled beginning-of-semester rant/glee about being a student. Look away now if you're thoroughly bored of me talking about this :-)

This semester we have a bit of rant and a bit of glee...

The rant
I'm doing Content, Design and Technology in Publishing this semester. Just the one, because it's a double module, and takes up a whole day. Should be fun. The rant comes because 60% of the mark is awarded for group work, for which all members of the group receive the same mark. There are formal methods for dealing with a group member who is not pulling their weight, and I've been luckier than I feared in the rest of my (randomly selected) group, but I'm still worried. This is more-or-less the stuff I do every day for work, and should therefore provide me with a relatively easy good mark. This way, I might have to choose between accepting a lower mark or doing more than my fair share, and I'm not wildly happy about it. Still, I like the people I'm working with so far, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about the subject matter, and it could all be fine.

But I would like to see some statistics on the spread of marks in individually-marked assignments compared to group assignments, because I suspect the latter tend to clump around the middle of the scale, and therefore represent a worse deal for students who tend to get marks towards the top of the scale.

The glee
I'm nearly finished. Most of what I have left is the honours-qualifying modules, most of which will probably be made up of one large dissertation and one smaller "independent study". I've got people who've agreed to supervise me for each of these, even though I haven't quite decided what I'm doing. The deciding part is most of the source of the aforementioned glee. I've got lots of ideas of things I want to do, some more well-formed than others, and it's all very exciting. I might compare the Girl's Own Paper with a modern webzine equivalent. I might do some feminist-focused critical discourse analysis. I might make a zine of my own. I might do any of several things on the theme of comparing the web and books. I might abandon all of these ideas and do something else entirely! I might keep the best ideas back and do them for a masters instead! The possibilities are endless :-)

Comments

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Zine?

Nice to hear you're getting near the end. How long are the last bits? Another year? Or less?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Magazine. (That is to say shortish article-based publication, typically with very informal content.)

@triskellian> Go on, do your own Zine ! :-)

[igniscience.livejournal.com]

I would like to see some statistics on the spread of marks in individually-marked assignments compared to group assignments, because I suspect the latter tend to clump around the middle of the scale, and therefore represent a worse deal for students who tend to get marks towards the top of the scale.

hmm, is it possible that it's a deliberate mechanism designed to normalise marks for the benefit of the less able students ? and is any portion of the marks given for teamwork and contribution to group dynamics and such rather than the actual work produced by the team ?

[glittertigger]

All of your ideas sound interesting. And if you need to know anything about paper or printing, I'm happy to talk about them anytime.