No exam, no textbook: the grading scheme
◈ 5 cardsThe components and weights of the AFM 111 grade, and which of them are marked objectively versus against a rubric.
A course with no final
Most first-term courses have a shape you already know: lectures, a textbook, a midterm, a final. AFM 111 has none of those. There is no final examination on content, and there is no textbook to fall behind on. What there is instead is a grading scheme made of small, frequent pieces, most of them marked against a rubric by a teaching assistant. If you treat the course like a content course — read later, cram at the end — the marks are gone before you notice they were being awarded.
The weights below are the Fall 2022 scheme as it was indexed in public search results (the syllabus itself is not public, and at time of writing, September 2026, no current outline could be confirmed). Treat them as the shape of the course and check the exact numbers against the current LEARN outline in week one.
The components, sorted by how they are marked
| Component | Weight | How it is marked |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly engagement checks | 20 % | done / not done, on evidence |
| Kritik peer-review cycles (two) | 10 % | your grading accuracy + the feedback you give |
| Ethics / integrity MCQ | 10 % | objectively — one right option |
| Group PSP case | 10 % | rubric, stage by stage |
| Email assessment | 10 % | rubric, line by line |
| Memo assessment | 20 % | rubric, line by line |
| Remainder (goal / reflection pieces) | ~20 % | unconfirmed — rubric, most likely |
Sort those into two piles. Objectively marked: the ethics MCQ, and the done/not-done engagement checks. Rubric marked: the case, the email, the memo, the Kritik feedback, and almost certainly the remainder. That second pile is around 70 % of the grade, and it is the pile students say is "hard to read" — the rubric criteria are applied by a TA and the student sees a number. This course exists to make that pile legible: every rubric-marked genre gets an explicit rubric here and a model answer that would earn full marks against it.
Worked example — three deliverables, sorted
Suppose it is week six and you have three things due: a pre-seminar quiz on the week's reading, a 300-word professional email to a fictional client, and a Kritik evaluation of two classmates' emails.
- The quiz is an engagement check. It is marked on whether you did it with evidence of preparation, not on polish. Weight: part of the 20 %.
- The email is a genre assessment. It is marked line by line against the email rubric — subject line, ask in sentence one, closing with a deadline, signature block. Weight: 10 %, on its own.
- The Kritik evaluation is marked on two things: how close your scores are to the scores the rubric would give, and how useful your written feedback is to the writer. Weight: part of the 10 %.
The pattern to notice is that the heaviest single component is the memo at 20 %, and it is rubric marked. Nothing you can cram for is worth more than 10 %. The course rewards process — showing up prepared every week and writing to a rubric — far more than it rewards recall.
What this means for how you study
Three consequences follow. First, weekly work is not optional preparation for the real thing; it is the real thing, one fifth of the grade. Second, every piece of writing should be drafted with the rubric open beside it. Third, the one test-like component, the ethics MCQ, has a small, finite canon — the six values, Policy 71, the CPA Code's principles — which modules 2 and 3 enumerate exactly.