Choice in the classroom

Abstract

Not all decisions that an instructor makes about a course are well-founded and set in stone. Indeed, for some decisions, students can be empowered with choices that allow them to take control of some aspects of their coursework. We describe two techniques for accomplishing this: time banks and contract weighting. Time banks are a way of allowing students to customize assignment deadlines; contract weighting is a novel derivation of contract grading which allows students to set their own assignment weights. Both have been tried in the classroom, and proffer benefits to the students and the instructor. Surprisingly, neither requires much effort from the instructor to implement. We report on six years' worth of experience with times banks and one year of experience with contract weighting.