A goal of the participation credit is to reward and incentivize contributions that help to build a constructive learning community for the course. Another justification is that learning to communicate in a variety of ways about the material (and about statistics and data science in general) is itself a goal of the course.
The piazza site is the main venue for participation in class discussions. If this site does not currently contain the discussion topics you need, then start them. The instructors will also introduce discussion topics that you may like to respond to.
Anonymous contributions generally build community less well than signed ones, so more credit will be given to non-anonymous contributions unless for some reason the topic requires anonymity.
All questions and comments in class are also appreciated forms of participation. If I don’t call you by name, please start your question by giving your name, and be patient with my attempts to learn your names!
Questions in office hours, or by email, or after class, are appreciated but usually do less to help build community compared to questions asked publicly.
Participation will be documented in a brief report, in response to a Canvas assignment. At least one contribution is expected over each reporting interval.
The principle of academic scholarship that is emphasized in homework assignments also applies to participation assignments. This is particularly relevant on piazza posts, where you can use outside sources when posting a question or responding to another student’s question, but proper attribution should be given to outside sources when used. If it is determined that the participation report is based on comments from outside sources that were not properly cited, you may lose some, or all, of points for a particular participation assignment. ChatGPT—or other natural language models—may be used to answer piazza posts, but the student must indicate that such software was used. Furthermore, in order to recieve full participation points, the student must demonstrate how they went beyond simply entering a question on an existing piazza post as input into ChatGPT and posting the given output, or posting the first result obtained from a google search of the given question. This can be as simple as giving evidence of what they searched in order to get a correct solution, or summarizing what they found utilizing the termonology and language that is used in our class.
[5 points] Participation that makes an on-target substantive contribution to a course discussion (in class or on Piazza). Anonymous contributions will only count for full points if there is some evident reason why the topic demands anonymity. If outside sources are used, full credit will only be awarded if relevant sources are cited and effort is made to explain how the student went beyond performing a simple search or ChatGPT query that could be performed by the person who asked the original question.
[4 points] Participation that builds class community without satisfying (5). Examples may include: asking or answering an administrative question, or simply copying and pasting the output of ChatGPT without further demonstrating a meaningful contribution.
[3 points] A contribution which does not quite meet expectations. For example, a small comment which turns out not to be helpful for starting or answering a class discussion. Probably in the least-well-constructed 25% of all class contributions.
[0 points] No contribution.