English 351 Grading Guidelines
Your grade in this class will be based on participation, on completing the reading assignments and the reviews, and on the quality of your web projects in your portfolio. In looking at the quality of web projects, I pay most attention to and am most interested in your improvement over the semester. Of course, students with a deep web design background may produce three wonderful sites over the course of the semester that do not show dramatic growth, and that is OK, doing consistently high quality work is another route to success in the class, but for most students, I am interested in where you end up not where you start. Consequently, I pay particular attention to your final project, and I take the ambition, scope, and execution of the creation project to be the best evidence of the quality of your work in the class.

I will not grade your web sites at any time in the semester. I do not grade because my emphasis is on improvement not on the quality of each project. Your final grade will be based on the quality of your work in your web portfolio and on your completion of other class requirements. Although I do not grade your websites, I will do formal evaluations at the conclusion of each project. In these evaluations, I try to give you a sense of how you are doing and help you establish goals for your next project. If towards the end of the semester, you do not have a sense of how you are doing in the class, please come and talk to me.

The Impact of the Small Stuff
You have already discovered that this class contains a variety of small projects and other requirements. These small requirements mostly impact your grade when you do not do them. I will lower your grade if you do not attend class, if you do not participate in our class activities, if you do complete the blogging assignment and write your reading responses, if you do not participate in the peer reviews, or complete the reflections or the final class portfolio. My grading philosophy is to reward excellence and/or growth over the semester and to punish non-participation.

In general...
People who get an A in the class have participated; they have either shown steady grow as web designs or produced three strong projects. They have met the deadlines in the class, and their work demonstrates mastery of all the different aspects of web site authoring. They have written a reflection about each project and have done a nice job of assembling a class portfolio.

People who get a B in the class have usually done good solid work. They have three fine projects, but no one project really stands out or the projects do not show much progress. These projects tend to be fairly ordinary in terms of ambition, features, content, etc. Often their participation or attendance is slack. They may not have not completed all of the responses to the readings or turned in the reviews late. B students show much less change during the semester.

People who get a C in the class have usually done the minimum. Their projects are modest in scope and execution. Often their navigational strategies haven't advanced beyond the linear. Nonetheless, these students have mastered the essential skills of creating websites, moving pages to servers, and testing them.

My Evaluation Criteria
Although I am not yet ready to start attaching letter grades to hypertext projects, I have gotten a much better sense over the years of the criteria that I use to make judgments about projects. I pay particular attention to at the following issues:

• Content
  Is the content of the web appropriate and sufficient for its purpose?
• Ambition
  Is the site substantial.
• Overall Look
  Is the site attractive? Is the look of the site appropriate to its audience and purpose?
• Entry Page
  Does the initial page(s) provide a good orientation to the site? Do I know why I am there, what I will find, and where I can go?
• Navigation
  Do I know how to get around? When I click on a link do I know what to expect? After I arrive, do I know how to get back? Do the links make sense? Does the site need/support nonlinear navigation? Are the breaks between pages sensible?
• Proofreading and testing
  Does each page have an appropriate title? Do the links all work? Has the interface been tested? Has the text been proofread and spell checked? Has the author tested the site with real users?

Things that Drive me Crazy
Here are some things to look out for as your work on your projects. Many of these are copy editing type issues and should be particularly attended to as the term ends and you are working on your. I will add to this list through out the semester.

• Be sure all of your links work. Nothing makes me crazier than broken links and/or images at the end of the semester, especially in your portfolio. Look at your site on lots of different computers in different settings using different browsers. The most common reason that students end up with broken links is that they have used a single computer all semester and not tested their work adequately.

• Be sure all of your pages have page titles. A page title is not the same thing as the name of a file. It is the name of your page that appears in the history list then you try to go back. When you have no page title, your pages appear in the history list as "untitled document" and are essentially unusable. Add the page title at the title text area at the top of the dreamweaver work area.
• Be sure to use the spell checker (under the text menu in Dreamweaver). Copy editing is hard on the screen, but typos are just as embarrassing. Get in the habit of spell checking your pages.
• Learn to think in terms of screens rather than pages. Though there is a place for long scrolling pages (like this web site), in general, pages that fit in a single screen are more effective and easier to use.
• Don't get in a rut, whether in terms of navigation, information architecture or graphics. Try new things: grow.