Turning scores into marks
As a teacher, it is up to you decide whether you use Gameface scores as a formal assessment item.
The pros of doing so are:
- It provides a huge boost for motivating students to take class time seriously. You'll find that students will be much more likely to prepare well for class and to participate actively while they are there if there are marks on the line.
- It may reduce your marking load/budget by allowing you to drop more time-consuming forms of assessment. Marks from Gameface are produced within class.
- It may improve academic integrity by allowing you to drop one or more other forms of assessment that generative AI has made difficult to invigilate (e.g. reports and take-home exams). Gameface assesses live participation and in-class understanding, so it reduces opportunities for plagiarism, collusion, or other forms of academic dishonesty that are more common in take-home or asynchronous assessments.
The cons/risks are:
- It will make class-time busier for teachers/tutors, particularly if you aren't careful about how you use class-wide tasks (so be sure to follow the tips mentioned here).
- It may stress students out, and cause them to fixate on earning high marks, particularly if you don't provide a lot of bonus questions/tasks to make assessment more forgiving (so be sure to follow the tips mentioned in the Ensuring assessment is fair section below).
- It will raise the stakes for each class. Students will be much less forgiving if you arrive late or messes up an in-class activity, since these mistakes may impact their marks (so be sure to practice your lesson plans).
What kind of assessment is fair?
If you do choose to use Gameface for formal assessment, it is important that you take a step back and consider the implications of doing so.
Gameface is designed to be used in the classroom, during labs, tutorials and workshops. These classrooms should primarily focus on helping students learn. If they focus too much on assessment, then students will start feeling like every class is an exam, and that they need to do all of their learning before coming to class rather than during class. This will stunt their curiosity and willingness to get messy, take risks and make mistakes.
If you do use Gameface for formal assessment then it is important that you do so in way that is perceived by students as fair and forgiving. If a student is making a reasonable effort to prepare well for class and to be reasonably active and engaged during class, then they deserve full marks from Gameface.
You should rely on other forms of assessment to separate out the students who deserve high distinction, etc. It isn't fair to try to make that distinction while students are still in the early stages of learning the skills that you are trying to assess.
The main way to make assessment more or less forgiving is to adjust how many bonus questions and tasks you offer and how many points they are worth. This is something you should pay attention to and tune over time throughout a teaching session.
How should a single attendance be graded?
If you use Gameface for formal assessment, then we strongly recommend that each attendance is simply graded as either the student's participation health or understanding health, whichever score is lower.
Examples:
- Participation: 85, Understanding: 76 → Attendance mark: 76%
- Participation: 92, Understanding: 100 → Attendance mark: 92%
- Both scores: 100 → Perfect 100%
As explained previously, participation health reflects how actively the student engages (e.g., answering questions, joining tasks), while understanding health reflects how accurately they engage (e.g., buy answering questions correctly and making high-quality contributions).
Taking the lower of the two scores is a simple way to ensure that both behavioural engagement (showing up and trying) and cognitive engagement (thinking and learning) are essential in your classroom. Students won't be able to earn marks by being present but disengaged, nor by being sharp but passive.
The student guide assumes that this is the approach you will follow if you use Gameface points for assessment. You will get a lot of questions from students if you deviate from it.
In Gameface there is a number that is simply referred to as the score. This number should not factor into grading, because it can vary wildly depending on how many opportunities a student is given to engage (for example if one tutor uses volunteer tasks a lot more than another) and on random chance (if a student is frequently chosen to volunteer).
Participation armor and understanding armor should also not factor into grading. These serve only to cushion health scores and make the system more forgiving. Only health scores should determine marks.
How should a sequence of attendances be graded?
To calculate an overall mark, you can simply average out the marks earned for each individual attendance. You can download a CSV file (i.e. a spreadsheet) of all individual attendances by:
- Logging into Gameface and selecting the relevant course
- Navigating to the Students tab
- Selecting Export to CSV and then Export attendances
The only complicating factor is that it is not reasonable to insist on 100% attendance from students. Over the course of a teaching session there will be many legitimate situations that prevent a student from attending their classes. You should have clear documentation ready about what they should do if that happens:
- Can they attend an alternative class without penalty?
- Can they be granted a waiver if they have good reasons for not being able to attend a class? What reasons would be accepted?
- How would students apply for a waiver, and how will it be taken into account for their grade?
If you have a large cohort and run the same lesson plan multiple times, then Gameface does not require students to attend the same time-slot every week. In Gameface students will simply be recorded as having attended whichever room they successfully scan into (each room gets a unique QR code).
You can cut down on a lot of administration if you just share the full class schedule with students and let them know that if they can't make their regularly scheduled class for any reason, then they are welcome to attend any other one that works for them.
Another way to cut down on a lot of waiver-related administration is to only consider the best X out of Y attendances for each student. For example if Gameface is used for 10 weeks throughout the teaching session, then a student's final mark could be the average of their best 8 out of 10 attendances. That way students know that they can afford to have one or two off-days and don't need to bug you about getting a waiver for every single missed class.