Stub: An Evaluative Component I'd Like to Introduce

 This article is a stub. I copied Wikipedia terminology blatantly. Cry more. 
NOTE TO SELF: This needs to be worked upon a bit. Or a lot idk.

With the kind of competition that relative grading a typical college course breeds, hostility and toxicity among peers is likely begin taking root. To avoid that, and to nurture a spirit of comradery and a sense of compassion among peers, it might be interesting to experiment and introduce an extra credit grading component.

The suggestion is this - the top 20% of the class which was most helpful for the entirety of the class over the entire semester, will be awarded 10 extra credit points in their course totals. How will this helpfulness be quantified is a reasonable question, and the answer is simple - democracy. Towards the end of the semester, a poll could be held among the students taking the course. The question in the poll - name five people who helped you in any significant way in your learning of the course content. 

I romanticize the essential goodness of people, Could this system have pitfalls? Possible. Is it worth experimenting? Totally. The safeguard against this is simple - if no one really helped, an average student would typically tend to typecast a "topper" as someone more helpful. And this doesn't really hurt or skew the sanctity or the fairness of the evaluation, because it is more likely than not that the person being deemed as a good performer would perform well nonetheless. And speaking of a pitfall of a popular kid who may not have necessarily helped out with the course, but regardless receiving votes? Well it doesn't really matter, because in case the said popular kid did poorly in the course, an additional 10 points to their course total wouldn't affect the outcome of their grade.

For low-scoring course totals where this may significantly hamper/impact the grading, a safeguard could be introduced - a minimum XX marks are required in traditional evaluative components to "unlock" this extra credit. But I see that as defeating the purpose - there are non-traditional learners, people who know the content and are helpful but have anxiety/performance issues. Their good-natured helpfulness should be rewarded, and I don't see any issues with it compensating slightly for slightly lower performance in regualar/traditional evaluative components.



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