SOCIAL MEDIA MAKES THE GRADE: While the debate around K-12 assessments and standards rages onward, one guy in the higher ed space is using a decidedly non-standard metric for evaluating his students. Todd Bacile, instructor for the Electronic Marketing/Social Media course at Florida State determines 10% of his students' final grade by their Klout score. The social media influence ranking app is a hotbed for determining the who's who in the social media sphere.
How accurate is Klout? At the time of this writing, a certain EdSurgent's Klout score, which started in the low 60s, has slid 10 points during a three-month period, even as he's been writing up a storm. (Seems like he'd be better off doing the optional research paper instead!) Bacile says he came up with the idea after realizing that "firms are sizing up college student’s Klout scores as a quantitative metric to use for job applicant screening." For what it's worth, in the two classes where Bacile has folded Klout scores into the grades, students' Klout scores have risen at about 20 points over the course of the semester. Maybe that attention will give Bacile's students an upper hand? Of course, this grading scheme is not without controversy: check out these comments and Bacile's responses on InsideHigherEd.
