Music 1A: Dan Mitchell: Intro to Music

Dan Mitchell: Intro to Music

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Retroactive Announcement: Listening Examples on Test 2
The short story is that listening examples will not be a part of test 2. The test will consist solely of the written portions of the test that you completed on class on Monday. (I had originally considered doing a listening portion of test 2 in class today.)

I will incorporate a bit larger number of listening examples on Test 3 at the end of the term.
[ Discuss]

Test Make-ups
A surprisingly large number of students missed test #2, for various reasons that seemed legitimate. If you missed the test and need to arrange a make-up it is critical that you speak to me today!
[ Discuss]

Special Grading "One Time Offer" On This Week's Quiz
This week only, rather than averaging the score on the new quiz and the score on next week's optional retake... I will instead simply give you the higher of the two grades. Not a bad deal, right?
[ Discuss]

An Experiment: An Alternative to the Second Alternate Concert Report
Given the number of concert reports this quarter that (as described below) had certain problems that lowered the earned grades, I have decided to offer a second, alternative to the optional second report that may make sense for some students. So, there are now two options:

OPTION 1: You may do the second optional concert report as previously described, and submit it no later than the deadline date in the course calendar - Monday of week 12, also known as "finals week." This option is the most appropriate one for students whose grade on the first report was lower than they might have hoped for reasons primarily related to things such as:

Did not submit a concert report.
Submitted only a partial report.
Did not have sufficient notes needed to write a full description
Credit was disallowed for reasons such as basing the report on material other than what student heard/observed at the event.
Very significant departure from the required format of the assignment.

~~OPTION 2~~: As an alternative to option 1, you may submit a revised version of your original report, accompanied by the original graded paper. As with the optional second report, the final report portion of your class grade will become the average of your origin report grade and the grade on your revision, as long as the revision earns a higher grade. This will be due one week earlier than the deadline for the second optional report - on Monday of week 11, one week before final exam week, and the former due date for the optional second report. This may be the appropriate option if:

Significant writing, proofreading, and editing problems significantly lowered your grade on the first report.
You left out a very minor portion of the report - limited to only a missing Quality of Performance section or missing Subjective Reactions. This option will NOT allow you to add other sections to the report that you missed the first time.
Your grade was significantly lowered due to the inclusion of substantial amounts of subjective reaction material in your objective descriptions.
You may choose one option or the other, but you may not do both. In other words, you may not submit a revised version of the first report (option 2) and also submit a second report (option 1).

Because this is an experiment - i.e. the first time I have tried this - expect that I will clarify and possibly revise some requirements between now and the deadlines. [ Discuss]

Concert Reports Returned Today... and More
I finished grading concert reports yesterday, and they will be available for pick-up at today's class.

I have some comments:

There were many fine reports among those submitted. The best of them did a fine job of providing reasonably detailed and varied narrative descriptions of the objective musical features of the pieces that were performed, included appropriate subject responses in the correct places in the report, covered the entire event and gave evidence of careful work at the level we expect in a college general-education class.

I was surprised this time around, however, by a number of papers that appeared to have been rushed to completion. In these, some of the symptoms included: reporting on less than the full event, confusing the objective and subjective portions of the paper, not reporting on the entire concert (more than one student apparently left their concerts at intermission!), leaving sections out of the paper (a surprising number forgot the Quality of Performance section), and some examples of writing that needed a lot of additional proof-reading and editing.

If you were not satisfied with your performance on the first paper, please read my comments very carefully. Then review the assignment guidelines and other material regarding the report at the web site - perhaps you missed some of this before you wrote your paper. Then:

If you still have questions or concerns about the first paper, please speak to me individually about this starting on Wednesday.
Consider doing the second optional concert report as a way to improve your overall concert report grade. If you do this, be sure to avoid repeating any mistakes you made on the first paper, and plan to set up a meeting with me for a review of a draft of your paper about a week before the deadline.

For those planning to do the second optional report, I have one again begun to update the Concert List.

[ Discuss]