OOC #3: We Have Problems

So, Thursday was the deadline for the third out-of-class story, and barely half the class submitted the story. 

That's a huge problem. Every out-of-class assignment is worth about 13 percent of your final grade, meaning that if you do only two out of three (or four, if you also skip the optional fourth one) but get 4.0s on every other assignment, your final grade for the semester can be no better than a 3.0.

Since the start of class, I've tried to emphasize the importance of turning in all your assignments, and not missing any. This is from a June 30 blog post:

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The worst thing we can do in journalism -- even worse than getting a fatal -- is to blow off an assignment. A newspaper can't go to print with blank spots in the pages, and a 30-minute newscast can't to to air without content that fills up all 30 minutes. That means in the media business, you can never miss a deadline.
And yes, to reinforce good habits and deter bad ones, assignments that are not done will have a much more severe impact on your final grade than fatals will, and if I have to use a tie-breaker in determining your final grade, the first categories I will use will be whether you blew off any assignments, since that tells me how seriously you are taking this class.
I express that value in the grading scale. Everything we do in here translates to a 1,000-point scale to which your grade is converted to a smaller subset of points that add up toward that. So when we get a 4.0 you get 100 percent of points, a 3.9 gets us 99 points, a 3.8 gets 98, and so forth.
 
And under that scale, a fact fatal that gets us a 1.0 still gets us 70 points. If we screw up an assignment so bad that we get a 0.1, that's still 61 points.
 
But a 0.0 is zero points. At a 0.1, we're closer to a 4.0 than a 0.0.
 
Again, that's to emphasize that missing your deadline is simply not an option in the media biz. We always need to hit our deadlines. Every single time.
 
Beyond that, none of us can afford to miss a single assignment because we need the practice! You'll soon be working on out-of-class stories (which are our biggest projects that most impact your final grade), and the best way to make sure you're writing it in a proper journalistic manner is to have opportunities with these practice stories to try our best, review our work, keep applying good habits and learn how to fix our bad ones.
 
We can't do that if we don't do that.

 Again, the more you tell me you are unreliable as a journalist by skipping assignments and not showing up without a valid excuse, the more I will recognize that in your final grade. I can work with you if you give me an assignment that's not up to snuff -- and so can an editor in a real-world setting -- but I can't work with nothing, and I can't work with you if you're not here. Neither can your future bosses.

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At this point, for some of you we've missed so much work that I fear we're past the point of no return. If you've missed a bunch of work this summer, don't be surprised by the grade you'll get. I'm afraid we have people trending toward flunking this class: a very rare thing in my six years of teaching JRN 200.

But I can't grade what you never turn in.

If you want to talk about where you're at and what (little) we can do with the (little) time that's left, then let's talk. I'm out of the office Friday but I'll be in all of next week. Email is omars@msu.edu, phone is 517-432-3009, office is 435 E. Grand River Ave..