Characteristics of My Best Students
Over the last two years of professing, I have certainly noticed traits that separate the good students from the bad ones. In this post, I'll examine three characteristics of my very best students.
Participation
Being the curious sort, I started with a simple question: What's the relationship between class participation and final grade?
By way of background, five percent of students' grades in both of my courses stem from class participation. Yeah, it's a subjective measure, but I try to mitigate that with rubrics in my syllabi.
I then exported the grades from Blackboard to Excel for all of my 2017 classes. A simple scatterplot in Tableau reveals what I long suspected: students who show up and participate in class generally do much better than students who do not.
Here are the results:
It'll only take a moment.
