Each Thursday during the first 10 weeks of the semester, you will take a timed exam called a “WOD” to assess how well you learned that week’s material. The goal of the WOD is to help you assess whether or not you have learned the material from the previous week, and to help you determine if you need to improve your study habits for future weeks.
If you do poorly on a WOD, there are a number of things you can change to improve your performance on future WODs:
If you are not putting in consistent time on 314 (i.e. 2 hours a day, 5 days a week), you should start doing that.
If you are not working on 314 during your high quality periods of the day, you should start doing that.
If you are not studying the readings and taking notes on the screencasts, you should start doing that.
If you are not doing (and/or repeating) the practice WODs, you should start doing (and repeating) them.
If you are not attending the Branden WOD, you should start attending it.
If you are not asking (smart) questions when you have problems, you should start asking them earlier and more often.
WODs are graded in an all-or-nothing format, and there are time constraints. This creates pressure to really study the material for that week. End-of-semester evaluations indicate that, on average, over 80% of students come to recognize that this pressure, while initially uncomfortable, does incentivize them to work hard to learn the material.
It is also my experience that in every semester, every student passed at least one WOD, and there was at least one WOD in which every student passed.
Beyond the grade, a bigger reason to learn how to learn effectively and thus pass the WOD is because the final portion of the course involves a team project where you need to know all of the material covered in the WODs in order to be an effective team member. If you don’t know this material, you will not be an effective contributor and your grade on the final project will also suffer.
Many students who go on to receive an A in the course fail at least one, and sometimes several WODs. This is extremely important to understand: Failing one or more WODs only negatively impacts your grade if you fail to use this feedback to improve your learning process! The project portion of the course results in many additional points, which can offset several failing WOD experiences. We have designed the grading scheme for this course so that, by the end of the course, failure on a few WODs does not prevent you from getting an A in the course. But, if you cheat, and do not learn how to learn, then it is far more likely that you will end up with a poor grade (as well as having not learned the material, which is far worse in the long run).