Your final assignment for the course is a bit different from previous assignments. I’d like you to write a ~1200-word reflection covering the entire course, with two main components (and maybe a third depending on whether you’re satisfied with your current grade). You can do these sections separately, or they can be totally integrated. I don’t care much about the form as long as you’re addressing the issues suggested below.
Using specific examples from the readings AND connecting themes across the course (as the overview videos should help with), tell me what you learned in the course. In addition to history of diet particulars, don’t forget big picture questions (like the Course Goals!), such as:
Describe your learning experience in the course. This is obviously totally subjective and there’s no right answer. Some questions to consider:
Allow me to emphasize that you should not simply summarize course topics and themes as stated on the syllabus. You should use specific examples from the course readings to illustrate your points. Otherwise, I can only assume that you didn’t put in very much effort into the course.
This isn’t a writing class so you’re not getting evaluated on elegant prose. So, use AI to help smooth your writing as long as the ideas are your own. AI or not, your writing must be clear enough that I can follow your argument and your survey of course themes. Your final reflection should be well thought out and carefully written, not a stream of consciousness off-the-cuff here’s-what-I-remember type thing.
The optional third component is to make a brief argument for what letter grade you should get for the course. It’s maybe a weird request for a final, but there is a specific reason: your effort to learn, and what you actually did learn, might not be represented in your final point tally. This assignment gives you a chance to argue that you’ve put more work in or learned more than your numbers indicate.
To be clear, you aren’t necessarily going to get whatever grade you ask for. However, if you have gotten some lower scores, but write a very smart final that uses lots of examples from the readings as evidence for your familiarity with them and connects reading material as done in the overview vidfeos, you will likely get a higher grade than your raw point total equates to.
Before you start writing, invest some time to REVISIT THE READINGS. This does not mean re-reading them, but just reminding yourself what you’ve read, or maybe reading a little more of something you could only skim before. Course videos can be tedious, but they try to pull together broader themes and explain how different weeks and topics fit together, which the readings often don’t do at all. Seeing some of the first readings after having done the course is a very different experience than when you first read them.
Specificity and clarity (in thinking and organization) is what separates excellent from mediocre work. To say that “I learned to think more critically about fad diets” will sound unconvincing unless you provide several SPECIFIC examples of the issues that you think are important to think critically about and WHY. If you just make a vague statement that you learned about a topic on the syllabus and you don’t provide any examples from the readings, or don’t connect different readings together, I can only assume it’s because you don’t know them very well.
I hope you will use your final reflection to CONNECT DIFFERENT TOPICS AND THEMES AND READINGS for the course. The more you can tie themes together and speak about the course as a whole (while giving specific examples from the readings [yes, I’m going to keep repeating it]), the better you’ll do. Essays that speak very generally about one topic after the other in the order of the syllabus will suggest that you haven’t really made any connections. When I see those connections in your final, I know you’re putting in the work to make them.
I know everyone is fried at this point, and it’s therefore tempting to just bulldoze through the assignment to be done with the course. I GET IT! (and I’ve done it, too.) But taking some time to think back through the course makes a big difference in what you take away from it. I wouldn’t bother with this assignment if I didn’t think it makes a significant impact.
This is a ballpark scale just to give you an idea of how I see the difference between points/grades for this kind of assignment.