Although attending departmental seminars is a common requirement in graduate education, the goals of this requirement are seldom explicitly stated, and its success at achieving these goals has not been studied. We developed a model for a graded colloquium course that encourages students to reflect on the effectiveness of the presentations, since the faculty in our department stated that one of their main goals for the students was to help them learn to give high quality presentations. An informal survey of students finds that this goal was partially achieved and also suggests improvements to the assignments and topics for future study.
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