Perusall Information

I use Perusall in all my classes. Perusall automatically grades students. I do not like the default grading scheme for various reasons. Here is how I modify Perusall. One caveat: this is what works for me in my current context at Ashoka. You may find different settings useful depending on how you use Perusall, what your students are like, what sorts of readings you assign, what your goals are, and so on.

I also give my students a guide to commenting on Perusall. You can find it here. Feel free to use it for your own classes.

My Perusall Grading Settings

In the "Scoring" section under "General":

• I set "Assignment score range" from 0 to 9.
• I set "Assignment score precision" to 2.
• I set "Threshold score for credit" to 4.

In the "Scoring" section under "Automatic Scoring":

• I set "Comment content" to 100% and everything else to 0%. Then I modify the "Comment content" scoring by clicking the "Options" arrow which opens up a new menu.
• I set "Students earn full credit on this metric by submitting X high-quality comments" to 7.
• I use "Quality-based scoring" and I've fiddled around with it inthe past but the default options seem as good as any.
• I set the thing about evenly distributed comments to 0%.

This accomplishes three main things.

1. First, a student's grade is predominantly determined by their annotations, although they can also get a bit of extra credit by writing annotations people respond to, annotations people "upvote," etc.
2. Second, students basically never get the highest score, since that requires 7 good annotations, which is more than I typically expect students to write.
3. Third, the highest score possible on an assignment is 9 points, but students only need 4 points to get full credit for that assignment. So, a student can earn less than a 50% on the assignment and still get full credit. In general it seems like students with 3 good annotations sometimes get full credit and sometimes don't, and students with 4+ good annotations always get full credit.