Grading

Clinic grades differ from those in other academic courses in two important ways:

1. How you do the work (your conduct during the year) matters, not just the final results.

2. Work is not over just because a date has passed; major deliverables are not complete until they are Advisor-approved and sponsor-ready. 

Clinic is a team activity, but you are also graded individually. If your team produced substandard output, you can still get a high grade if you consistently worked professionally, took initiative, and made substantial contributions. Conversely, you can get a low grade on a project with a "successful" outcome if your contributions were minimal or you were an unreliable team member.

Individual Contributions

Clinic grades reflect patterns across the semester, not isolated incidents. Projects, roles, and opportunities differ, so advisors interpret these expectations in context. Advisors consider whether you:

• Produce strong work. Complete work that is correct, careful, complete, and fit for its purpose.

• Contribute useful work. Do a substantial amount of work that the project needs.

• Participate constructively. Take part in meetings and other discussions: contribute useful ideas and questions, respond to others, and avoid either sitting out or taking over.

• Follow through. Keep your commitments and warn people early when a commitment is at risk.

• Take initiative. Notice and advance needed work without waiting for repeated instructions, while checking with others before changing shared plans.

• Communicate clearly. Explain ideas, decisions, and results so the intended audience can understand them.

• Keep people informed. Share status, blockers, decisions, and changes with the right people while the information can still help. (For Team Leads, this includes maintaining timely two-way communication among the team, Liaison(s), and Faculty Advisor.)

• Make your work usable by others. Document and explain your work so other people can understand, use, maintain, or continue it.

If you serve as Team Lead, advisors also consider whether you:

• Lead meetings effectively. Prepare and run meetings that support appropriate participation and produce clear decisions and action items.

• Track work and follow up. Maintain visibility into team-wide tasks, commitments, milestones, and risks, and follow up or involve the Faculty Advisor when needed.

You do not have to be strong in every area above, but ongoing problems in any of them can lower your grade if they burden teammates or put the project at risk.

Shared Team Products

Advisors also evaluate the major products that your team creates together, including the Statement of Work, oral presentations, executive summaries, and the Projects Day poster, and project-specific deliverables. They consider whether it is complete, appropriate for its purpose and audience, and becomes sponsor-ready after a normal amount of advisor feedback and revision.

For written documents, normal advisor review often includes one to three rounds of progressively narrower feedback. An initial round may address major issues of purpose, structure, or content; a later round may target remaining problems; and a final round may focus on wording, formatting, and small corrections. What matters is that the scope of the feedback narrows as the product improves. 

If the advisor must repeatedly address the same fundamental problems, supply major structure or content, or perform a last-minute rescue, the product has required more than normal review. A product becomes a concern if it still has important deficiencies or becomes acceptable only through this heavier intervention.

Each joint product receives one assessment that applies equally to all team members. Some products may also provide evidence about individual performance. For example, a student’s part of a presentation may indicate how clearly they communicate.

Course Participation and Ongoing Responsibilities

Clinic also includes recurring course responsibilities: attending and participating in required class sessions, submitting regular status reports to document progress and time spent, and taking meeting minutes when your turn comes up. These responsibilities are time-sensitive: many class topics or class activities arise only once, and a late status report loses value as a contemporaneous record.

Advisors look at the pattern across the semester. An isolated lapse may be compatible with otherwise strong performance, but significant absences or missing, late, or minimally useful work can lower the final grade.

Additional Requirements for Passing Clinic

Normal grades are based on the evidence described above, but students must also meet minimum requirements to pass Clinic. A student can fail Clinic by putting in significantly less effort than expected, repeatedly missing major team events without an excuse, or behaving in ways that harm the team or project more than their contributions help.

Students cannot pass if their team does not either produce the required Advisor-approved, sponsor-ready deliverables for the semester or obtain approval to revise the requirements.