Preliminary Grade Form – How To Complete (Electives)
Grading is the part we all find most challenging – after all, we want to be teachers, not graders.
The e-value system that UWSOM uses is not so user friendly, and there are changes every year to try to “improve” (i.e., “make less bad”). Here’s a step-by-step that I hope will help:
- Credits: Usually this is “4” or “8”. Credits are given on a basis of “2” credits per week of full time clinical experience. Feel free to leave it blank we can fill it in. BTW – any time I say “leave it blank” and the system seems to insist that you write something, feel free to put in “XX” or some asterisks or “I have no idea” and we can still fill it in.
- Clerkship director/faculty: Feel free to put in your name here.
- Student number: That’s the UWSOM student ID. If you don’t have it leave it blank – we have them all.
- Final grade: All students in an “Elective” course (not an APC or APC Sub-I course) are limited to a “Pass” or “Fail” for a final grade.
- 12 domains marked as Likert scores: Each one of these has some verbiage that is supposed to make it clear what we mean by levels of performance for “Knowledge of Subject”, “Data-Gathering Skills” etc. Mark for each or “N/A” if it’s something the student really doesn’t do.
- Bioethical Component and Mini-CEX: You can just type in “N/A”.
- Final Examination Grade: You can just type in “N/A”.
- Overall Assessment: Almost everyone is “Meets or Exceeds Expectations”. If the student is “Meets or Exceeds Expectations”, leave the next text box blank. If you click “Needs Development” or “Unacceptable”, explain it in the text box that comes next.
- Concerns about Clinical Performance or Concerns about Professional Behavior/Conduct: If marked “Yes”, it needs explanation in the box below. If “No”, definitely leave the text box blank (typing into the boxes even the words “No concerns” flags the system that there is a problem, so better to leave blank).
- Areas of strength/areas for work-growth: here, we ask for 2-4 bullet-point-type comments. If there was a problem that didn’t really rise to the level of the “Concerns” boxes above, you can put it in here using some constructive feedback wording.
- Summary of overall performance (the “MSPE” Box): Here, we type in the overall commentary, trying to touch on all the Competencies. The Dean’s office has said this must be <300 words – not so easy! This paragraph gets dropped into the MSPE (the “dean’s letter”) when the student applies for residency, so this one is important.