Participation points

In a class I just finished participation points were an important part of the grade. Although the value of the grade, 10%, is a typical value associated with participation points in most classes, in our course it seemed to be more important. In fact, every day turned into a competition for participation points, which spurred some lively--if not sporadic--discussion. I think there are two reasons for this.

First, our professor explained that the not only would we receive a 10% grade based on participation, but also that our grade would be based upon the ratio of our number of participation points to other students in the class. This means that if one person received 2 participation points and everyone else received 1, then the person with 2 would get the full 10% and everyone else would get 50%. Conversely, of course, if everyone had an equal number of points then everyone would earn full credit.

Second, the points were distributed directly from the professor during class time for nearly any constructive comment that was made. That is, a student contributing 3 separate and unique comments to class discussion would receive 3 participation points.

The above criteria represent the rules of the game, and the combination of both rules created incentive in the class to speak up and to speak up often. Typically I have found that participation points are awarded secretly and arbitrarily by teachers so that students don't have much idea when their contributions are contributing back to their grade or not, but in the case with this course, every comment was tangible and held weight. Not only could you control your sum of points, but proportionally you could estimate your grade compared to others based on your perception of how talkative your neighbors were.

Every so often the highest participation score would be posted on the online system for everyone to see, and, because the highest score was usually much higher than the score you had, it was usually something that caused general despair. There was even a small coalition to convince the student with the most points to shut-up during the last few class times so that the rest of the class could catch up. (I believe at this point the high amount was 23, and most people had between 6-15 or 26-65% respectively.)

If the point of the game was to achieve vocal participation, then it was obviously successful, but at what cost? There was a distinct sense at some points, that the comments made were specifically for participation credit instead for improving the learning atmosphere of the class. Then again, the ability of a comment to be thought provoking and promote further discussion does not always lie with the intention of the student to have it do so, and often the mere energy created by the high volume of comments was enough to improve learning. In this regard, therefore, I believe the game accomplished its goal, and provide an excellent example of the mechanics of the game can integrally affect the outcome of the system.