Office of the Provost
Mid-term Resources and Reminders
Dear Colleagues,
The middle of the semester is always a good time to assess progress personally and for our students. As we did in the spring at this time, I wanted to share a few resources for all instructors to utilize in their instructional plans, as an opportunity to review your and your students’ trajectory through the end of the semester. I appreciate the support of the Senate Executive Committee and leaders in the undergraduate and graduate student senates in pulling these materials together.
Formative feedback
Mid-term formative feedback surveys can be a useful tool for instructors to hear anonymously from their students on course materials, lectures, assessments, and other elements of course design. We encourage all instructors to implement a mid-term formative feedback survey in their courses. These surveys can be valuable resources to make mid-course adjustments, as well as to broaden student engagement. The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness offer resources to develop and distribute formative feedback surveys. In all cases, these are designed to be private (for instructors’ personal use only, not to be shared with department heads or other administrators). If you are interested in utilizing formative feedback, you can begin with a resource guide prepared by CETL.
Mid-term grades
Sharing mid-term grades with your students is another important part of reviewing student progress, which can have positive impacts on your students’ engagement in coursework. University Senate By-Laws state that by the end of the sixth week of the semester, instructors shall submit midterm grades for students in 1000- and 2000-level courses who have earned less than a C, or U, or N grade up to that point.
In these challenging times, however, I encourage all instructors to share mid-term grades with their students in all levels. This feedback on progress will help students make adjustments and access resources as necessary to stay on track academically, and assess their trajectory in the course to make decisions earlier on potential withdrawals or pass-fail designations in courses. This is also an opportunity to refer students of concern to academic support resources like the Academic Achievement Center (AAC).
We are sharing guides here with different options to submit grades to PeopleSoft. Informing your students of their grade or posting mid-term grades in HuskyCT is helpful, but posting grades in PeopleSoft is necessary to ensure this information regarding student progress is available to staff at the University who provide academic support. Grades can be submitted beginning on Monday, October 4 through Thursday October 28. Instructors can submit grades three different ways into StudentAdmin:
- Manually into Student Admin utilizing these instructions
- Via an Excel file utilizing these instructions
- Via a direct feed from HuskyCT utilizing these instructions
For any instructors who have yet to administer any assessments in their course by which to determine a mid-term grade, now is a good time to administer an assessment to ensure you and your students know how they are progressing in the course and mastering the material.
Finally, I want to encourage faculty to be as considerate as possible, and exercise as much flexibility as possible, regarding make-ups for students who may report being ill. Students are urged not to attend class when they are feeling ill and this health precaution extends to scheduled exams, as well.
As always, thank you for all you are doing.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey