Dance class - how do they grade you

College Majors Dance Major
1

<p>I am going to UCI in fall and I am wondering how do you get grades for dance. Form dancing is something that I love and I would like to perfect it but how can you "measure" effort and knowledge</p>

2

<p>Good question! I’ll be interested in hearing how other people answer. My d is at Bennington where they don’t give letter grades. I’ve read a couple of her evaluations though, and her professors typically discuss what she’s accomplished that semester, things she needs to work on, and things she excelled at. It does seem very subjective though. I have the same question about art classes. It seems to me that if you show up and do the work, you should get an A. Who’s to say if your art is “good” or “bad”.</p>

3

<p>My DD is at PPU and is graded in all three dance areas. I will say that she came out of a arts school, so has been graded in dance since she was 10 so it was not unusual to here. Although I haven’t seen a specific list of grade criteria, I know these things factor in:

  1. written assignments (I believe 2 in each class; 4-5 page papers)
  2. A presentation about one of the papers, or maybe instead
  3. Attendance (she can miss 5 days a semester and still get an A)
  4. Effort - which I believe is measured in growth over the semester, as an example she is a modern major but came from a Horton based program and freshman modern was Graham based and she really struggled with the transition, but by the end of the quarter was comfortable moving between the 2 forms.</p>

<p>There maybe other criteria that I don’t know also. Getting an A in her dance classes was not guaranteed. She was VERY happy with an A- in her Jazz class and was one of only 3 students in her class who got over a B+ in jazz.</p>