A working session for one assignment you are already giving. About twenty minutes, done by hand. Nothing here is generated, nothing is saved, nothing is sent anywhere. When you are finished, copy your work out of the box at the bottom before you close this tab.
This week two groups of mathematicians fought in public over a claimed proof of a ninety year old problem. Neither of them asked the other for a detector. They asked for three things instead: an artifact a machine could check, a dated record of how the work was made, and a plain statement of what the author was not claiming. This session puts those same three things into one of your assignments.
SEED. The assignment.
Pick the assignment you are least confident about. Not one you suspect somebody of. The one where, if a colleague asked how you know the student did the thinking, your honest answer is that you are going on the writing.
SPROUT. The step you take on trust.
Every assignment has one. It is the place where you accept something because the student says so, or because the writing looks like it. Mark the ones that are true of the assignment you just named.
0 of 8 marked
GROW. The three additions.
Write these as you would say them to the class. Short is better than complete.
1. The artifact. What object will you require that somebody else could check without you in the room?
Not a longer essay. A different kind of object. The three sources with the one sentence each is actually supporting. The query that produced the table. The counterargument named and answered. Whatever a colleague could pick up cold.
2. The record. What will you ask them to write down about how the work was made?
Dates, order, and what changed. This is the cheapest of the three and it does the most work.
3. The limits. What will you ask them to say they are not claiming?
A student who has to write down which parts they cannot vouch for has to know which parts those are. That is the entire skill.
HARVEST. What you will say, and what you will do.
The last two fields are the ones that make it real. The first is what you say when you hand it out. The second is what happens when the record is missing, decided now rather than at midnight in week ten.
That is one assignment.
You just did this by hand and it took about twenty minutes. It works. It will keep working every time you do it.
Now count. How many assignments do you give in a term, across how many sections? The method does not get harder at scale. It gets longer, and it gets inconsistent, because the version you write in week twelve will not match the version you wrote today.
When you want the checkable step built into the assignment rather than bolted onto it afterward, that is what the Assessment Builder does. It writes assignments, rubrics, and tagged question banks against your own Course Record, so every section gets the same three additions in your own words.
Your finished work
Copy this out before you close the tab. Nothing here is saved.