Did class participation affect your grades in school?

11 comments

1. Yeah, unfortunately. I’ve only had one class where I only needed to attend exams.

2. They can, depending on the class

3. Sort of, it was on our report card but it never gave me trouble and I *never* participated in class.

4. Small classes are exactly where you’d expect to see that grading structure. You couldn’t exactly expect everyone in a 100-seat lecture room to pipe up every session and still have time for the professor to teach anything.

   And yeah, at my college profs had great liberty to design their own grading structure, as long as it was transparent. Some preferred to lecture and for us to quietly take notes with the occasional question for clarification, others held a Socratic style class where the bulk of the information transmission was supposed to be through reading, and class time was mostly for gaining deeper understanding through group discussion. In the latter, it was customary for participation in the discussion to be evaluated as part of your grade.

5. I had a great history class in college where the professor would start each class by calling on people and asking them questions based on the reading. If you had no answer (and therefore hadn’t done the reading) he kicked you out of the class for the day.

   Yes, it affected your grade.

6. In some classes, unfortunately.

7. Yes. It is a common thing to be graded on. It depends on the teacher and the class.

   In law school it was an absolute requirement in most classes. Some professors let you join in when you wanted to but required participation. Others just called on students off a list until everyone had participated so you never knew what question you would get or when.

8. in high school yes, I think there was a small percentage for almost every class. in college, I can only remember participation points for my german classes (understandable) and for one of my engineering classes but literally everyone hated the teacher and she was kind of nuts, so

9. Yes. For as long as I’ve been receiving grades in classes, participation has been a factor.

10. Most of my upper level college courses were based on the Socratic method. Not participating would bring your grade down an entire grade level, at a minimum.

    I’ll never understand why people complain about it, either. It shouldn’t surprise you that you are expected to demonstrate you understand the course material.

11. Depends on the class, but yes there was some 5-10% of my grade that was “class participation.” That percentage got even higher when I was doing an MBA where the discussions are a big part of the coursework.