Extra Credit Grammar Quizzes

Beginning in Fall 2009, I've added a big new component to the online classes: Extra Credit Grammar Quizzes. There are 20 of these quizzes, worth a total of 30 points (the equivalent of one complete week's worth of work). You can see what the questions are like by looking at the little "quizlets" that appear on every page of this wiki - here's a question chosen totally at random (reload the page to see another question):

Goals and focus. I hope that these quizzes will be a way for you to practice English spelling and punctuation, while also earning extra credit. For some of you, these quizzes will be very easy - but I hope they will be fun, too, since all the sentences in the quizzes are proverbs! If you are someone who struggles with writing in English, these quizzes might be very difficult, but I the Grammar Information pages at this wiki can help you to learn the skills that are being tested on the quizzes. Here are the topics:  Apostrophes - Its v. It's - Your v. You're - Who-Whom-Who's-Whose - Homonyms - Confusing Word Pairs - Commas - Run-On Sentences - Quoted Speech.

These quizzes are DIFFERENT from the Reading quizzes. There are several VERY important differences between these quizzes and the Reading quizzes for this class. Here are the differences you need to be aware of:

• No deadlines. The Grammar quizzes are available all semester long and do not have weekly deadlines. That means you can work on them at any time during the semester. If, however, you want to do all of the Grammar quizzes, I would urge you to get on a weekly schedule and do one or two quizzes per week. If you put them off until the end of the semester and try to do them all at once, your head might just explode! So, if you want to work on your writing skills by doing all the quizzes, pace yourself throughout the semester - don't try to do them all at once.
• Grading: unlimited attempts, highest score. Unlike the Reading quizzes in this class, which have a limited number of attempts and record your average score, for the Grammar Quizzes, you have an unlimited number of attempts, and your highest score will be recorded in the Gradebook. The reason I have set the quizzes up this way is so that you can safely use them as practice quizzes, too. So, take the quiz as often as you need to! There is no penalty for taking the quiz multiple times. As your performance improves, you will see your highest score recorded in the Gradebook.
• Mix and match. You can do the quizzes in any order you want, and you can mix-and-match, doing the quizzes that you want and skipping any quizzes that you are not interested in. Which quizzes you complete, and the order in which you complete them, is entirely up to you.
• You can see the answers. After you submit each quiz, you will see a screen which shows you all the questions with the answers, in addition to your final score (your score appears at the bottom of the screen). This will help you to read through the questions and confirm the answers. I do not show you which questions you got right or wrong, because if I did that, you would probably only review the questions you got wrong (even if you got some questions right just by guessing). So, as you take the quiz, you might want to jot down a note to yourself if you are guessing when you answer a question, because you will be able to see the answer to that question after you submit the quiz. That way, you'll be able to see if your guess was right or not.
• Huge question pool. In order to make it possible for you to take the quizzes over and over again, I've built a question pool with around 1000 questions. Luckily, I love working with proverbs, so I had a lot of fun building the question pool. Because the question pool is so big, you should get at least a few new questions every time you take a quiz, although you may also see some questions come up again that you have seen before - that's the unpredictable magic of randomness at work!

I NEED YOUR HELP. Because this is the first semester that I have offered these quizzes, I need your help and feedback! Please let me know what you think:

• Improving the wiki pages. Do these wiki pages give you the information you need to do well on the quizzes? If not, please let me know. It's fast and easy for me to update the wiki pages, so if I need to add more detail to any of the pages, I will be glad to do that. Just let me know which topic you are having trouble with, and exactly what I can add to the wiki page in order to make it more clear.
• Correcting errors in the quizzes. It is entirely possible that there are some errors in the quizzes. I could have made some typographical errors in setting up the quizzes, and there was also some trouble when I was creating the giant question pool in Desire2Learn (let's just say it strained Desire2Learn's limits). I've done my best to correct any errors - but it could be that you will indeed find some errors this semester in the quizzes. So, if you see a question-and-answer which looks wrong to you,  please let me know! If there is an actual error, I will correct it (and give you full credit, of course) - but if it turns out that this is just a difficult question, that will help me figure out how to do a better job of explaining the material here at the wiki.