2024 Grading Conference Session Descriptions

Acceptance of Alternative Grading

Thursday, 1:30

John Estes

Communicating Alternative Grading with Students, Colleagues, and Administrators
Many of us are enthusiastic about alternative grading methods and see them as a healthier and effective way to learn. However, not everybody catches the vision of alternate grading immediately. In this presentation, we review strategies on how to effectively spread the message of alternative grading to students, colleagues, and administrators.

Luvreet Sangha
Can Standards-Based Grading Exist in a Department with a Grade Distribution Policy?

My department has a grade distribution policy that requires instructors to give between 40-60% of students B's or better, on average. Since I started using standards-based grading in my math courses 2 years ago, my grades have gone above this "acceptable" range. This has raised eyebrows about whether standards-based grading reduces the level of courses. In this presentation, I share my experiences navigating this policy and discuss strategies to
(1) showcase how standards-based grading can raise the bar for students
(2) address colleagues' concerns
(3) compromise and make adjustments to courses
(4) increase the impact by getting colleagues to try it.

Anthony Lince
Effectively Introducing an Alternative Grading Framework to Students
Introducing an alternative grading framework to students can be a challenge. Instructors might encounter student resistance, confusion, and frustration. To better help students understand both why moving away from traditional grading practices is important and how the classroom's alternative assessment system functions, this presentation will provide instructors with effective strategies for implementing alternative grading practices. Specifically, instructors will be given suggestions for centering student dialogue, students’ histories with grades, and how to provide an overview of the classroom’s alternative grading practice during the first couple of weeks of class. This presentation is, also, in conversation with important and current calls for “honest and transparent assessment [practices] as a form of harm reduction” for students (Fernandes, et. al., 2023)

Strategies and Practices (Part 1)

Thursday, 1:30

Leigha H McReynolds

Ungrading as Course Design: Choosing Learning Over Coverage
Typically when I design a course, I begin with the requirement that there is some thing (or things) that my students need to learn in my class. When I sat down to design a humanities general education class for an honors program, I found myself with the opposite problem. There were no requirements for what my students learned, only that they did. While ultimately this was freeing, initially it gave me the course design equivalent of writer’s block: how did I start creating a course with no content requirements? In this presentation, I will discuss how I used the ungrading principle of student responsibility to create a class that focused on the act of learning, rather than on what is being learned. I will explain the innovations I made to the class structure that give students a range of control over the class content — for the second half of the semester my students are in charge of their own homework and class time — and suggest how this approach might apply even when a class has required content and learning objectives. This takes the ungrading approach beyond assessment and into the structure of the class itself.

Amy Parrott & Jason K. Belnap
The Practice of Grading Practices

In many disciplines, what is most valued are practices, subtle cultural norms and abilities that one must acquire to successfully participate in the work of that community. Frequently, however, our assessment focuses on the creation of cultural artifacts (the products of these practices) and not the practices themselves. Artifacts are tangible and visible, making their assessment straight-forward. This assessment sends our students the message that the artifacts ARE the most important aspects of the discipline. Thus, students tend to focus on recreating the artifacts, rather than developing the practices that would empower them to become independent contributors of the community.

Shifting student focus to practices requires making them a part of both formative and summative assessment. In this presentation, we describe a cycle of inquiry that organically developed from our attempts to assess and support our students’ acquisition of disciplinary practices. This cycle involved the following for a given practice: engaging students in the practice during assessment, examining student work to identify fine-grained pieces of the practice (micro-practices), implementing tasks and discussions that engage students in the micro-practices, and returning to assessment. We will present this in the context of mathematical proof, although the process is broadly applicable.

Disciplinary Applications (Part 1)

Thursday, 1:30

Ehsaan Hossain

Lessons Learned from The Archive of MAT257
In lieu of traditional assignments, my second year mathematical analysis course incorporated a class journal, called "The Archive of MAT257." Starting from axioms, students developed a mathematical theory from scratch: publishing their results in the Archive, engaging in peer review, and citing each other's papers as the theory progressed. This came with all the good and bad associated with an authentic research community: a true sense of ownership over ideas, but also impostor syndrome and many scrapped projects. In this presentation, I would like to share a "stop, start, continue" for this type of approach.

PJ Van Camp
Implementing a novel, alternative grading system for a flipped graduate coding class

Grading coding assignments is not a straightforward task as small errors or conceptual misunderstandings can lead to a completely broken application. Instead of creating complicated rubrics for a graduate level course by assigning points to the code itself, students were graded on growth, though still awarded a letter grade. This was accomplished by providing students with a list of expected application features, setting an intermediate deadline, reviewing the draft submission and providing constructive individual feedback. Students would then receive a grade based on how well their final submission reflected improvements based on the feedback. This was communicated through an easy to understand flow chart in the syllabus.

Data was collected from all assignments together with an optional survey polling students about their class experience and the novel grading system. According to preliminary results, this novel grading system encouraged students to focus on improving their own work rather than just meeting criteria. As their grade largely depended on responding to feedback, students took feedback more seriously and reported it as being more motivating and valuable to their learning compared to traditional grading.

This work could improve equitable grading of coding classes, or other courses which are traditionally hard to grade.

Introduction to Alternative Grading: The Four Pillars

Thursday, 1:30

Sharona Krinsky & Robert Bosley

New to Alternative Grading? This session will introduce the Four Pillars of Alternative Grading Framework as described by David Clark and Robert Talbert in their book, Grading for Growth. Participants will be introduced to each of the four pillars, have an opportunity to engage with the detail behind the pillar (what exactly does it mean to write a measurable learning outcome?) and see how the pillars interweave to create a sound foundation for grading. This session is designed to be a first introduction to the fundamental principles of alternative grading and is a great starting place for those who are new to this space. This talk is designed to be a foundation for the follow-up session "Designing the Grading Architecture for An Alternatively Graded Course".

Student Perspectives

Thursday, 3:00

Ashleigh Fox

Ungrading, Learning, and Motivation
According to DiSalvo and Ross (2022), the effectiveness of ungrading as a learning heuristic is usually measured one of two ways: anecdotal (educator blogs, social media posts, and trade publication articles) and systemic (qualitative and quantitative data published in academic journals). This session will compile both anecdotal and systemic research on the impact of ungrading upon motivation to learn. Student voices largely highlight that ungrading has a more positive impact upon motivation to learn than traditional grading; research studies attribute this impact to multiple causes, among them autonomy and growth mindset. This session will also review how students can navigate feedback from both instructors and peers as a route to increased intrinsic motivation and thus learning. Finally, some potential barriers to learning through the lens of motivation and ungrading will be presented. The session will conclude with specific recommendations for best practices in designing and structuring ungrading approaches to maximize student motivation to learn.

Daniel Guberman & Sabrina Hinojosa
Lessons from a Class on Grading in Higher Education: We Can Change Students' Perspectives

Much of the literature about alternative grading methods focuses on the experiences, perspectives, and values of instructors designing and implementing grading systems (e.g., Nilson, 2014; Blum, 2020; Clark & Talbert, 2023). Less has been shared about student experiences and perspectives (Hasinoff, et. al., 2024), and particularly absent has been insights into how alternative grading systems can change students perspectives, attitudes, and relationships with grades beyond a particular class setting. In this presentation I share experience leading a course on grading in higher education. Drawing on student reflections throughout the semester, I share insights regarding how perspectives on grades changed over time and how engaging directly in discussions about grading through a class has further influenced their outlook. As a result of this experience I propose that through engaging students in explicit discussions students can develop healthier relationships with grades, make informed decisions about their education and effort, and overcome setbacks and challenges in their educational journey. In addition to these broad takeaways, I will share class materials as well as invite others interested in developing similar classes and/or exploring these questions into ongoing collaboration.

Joel Davis, Heather Wilson-Ashworth, & Melissa Reeves
Gains in self-competence in classrooms using active learning and mastery-based grading
Two factors that potentially impact student motivation and success in general chemistry are self-competence and effort belief. Self-competence is the need to feel capable, while effort belief is the belief that hard work produces improved results. Student self-competence and effort belief were measured using validated survey tools for students enrolled in college general chemistry courses using either traditional lecture with conventional grading or active learning with mastery-based grading. Results show that effort belief scores started high and remained high for both courses. However, students with low self-competence scores showed a statistically significant increase in the active learning mastery-based grading course but not in the conventional grading course. It is possible that active learning, mastery-based grading, or some combination of factors create a learning environment that promotes growth for students with low self-competence.

Strategies and Practices (Part 2)

Thursday, 3:00

Jason Elsinger

Using Technology to Aid in Implementing Specifications Grading into College Mathematics Courses using a Points-Based System
In this talk I will describe a framework of specifications grading (specs) suitable for use in a variety of mathematics courses that relies on points to track the completion of course learning outcomes. I will share my experience implementing and adapting specs to various courses, ranging from precalculus to differential equations, and show how I have created several technological resources to help both students and instructors keep track of the progress made toward each letter grade. This includes using an excel grade book with a macro and using mail merge with Word and Outlook to send personalized email blasts. Many instructors considering specs may feel overwhelmed at what may be required in making the switch. This talk will demonstrate possible resources that are available, or that can be easily created, to provide the support needed in using specs. This work has been completed over six years while at Florida Southern, a small liberal arts college with class sizes ranging from 8 to 25.

Keri Cronin & Alisa Cunnington
Shifting the Focus: Harmonizing the Relational and the Technological in Specifications Grading

At a time when technology is pervasive in the pursuit of automation, simplification, and efficacy, teaching tasks such as grading can become reduced to a numerical exercise, one that at times forgets the relational part of the learning journey as feedback becomes mechanical. At the same time, there is a growing interest in assessment practices such as ungrading. These two paths are often in tension with one another, pedagogically and technologically. Resolving this tension at the course level requires a different way of looking at technological constraints in order to prioritize assessment practices that focus on equity and inclusivity. In this session we will explore specifications grading (a form of ungrading) as a way to privilege the relational aspect of the learner’s journey. We will do this by discussing how we enacted this assessment model in an undergraduate visual culture course through leveraging alternative ways to use LMS options.

Disciplinary Applications (Part 2)

Thursday, 3:00

Jennifer Moorhouse, Nina Vazquez, Lipika Deka, & Jeffrey Wand

Grading for Growth in the Calculus Sequence
The California Education Learning Lab (CELL) challenged colleges to smooth the Calculus pathway to STEM, and more particularly charged teams with increasing success rates of underrepresented students. In our prototype Grand challenge project “Grading for Growth in Calculus I,” supported by the CELL grant, we implemented SBG in multiple sections of Calculus I at California State University, Monterey Bay and at Hartnell College, along with an active learning model with a focus on growth mindset and metacognition. In our follow up grant, we are extending the model to precalculus at CSUMB and Hartnell. In addition, we plan to extend our model to the entire Calculus sequence at both institutions and disseminate our work to other colleges.

Maye Montoya
How can our assessment practices support the development of mathematical habits of mind in first-year students?

One of my core goals as a professor is to cultivate in students those wonderful mathematical habits of mind — creative thinking, independent problem-solving, confidence in tackling new (and challenging) problems, persistence, resilience, and effective collaboration skills — that will prepare them for their future careers. Acknowledging the limitations of traditional assessment practices in supporting these goals, I ventured into the world of alternative grading. In this talk, I will share insights learned one year into my journey.

Designing the Grading Architecture for An Alternatively Graded Course

Thursday, 3:00

Sharona Krinsky & Robert Bosley

The four pillars of Alternative Grading provide a solid foundation upon which an alternative grading system can be designed. In this presentation we will dive into the four decisions that faculty need to make to design the grading architecture of an alternative graded course. From finding evidence of learning and the use of proficiency scales to the various methods of wrapping up into a final grade, participants will get detailed information and options for beginning the course redesign process.

Round-table: Equitable Grading in the Post-Secondary Classroom

Thursday, 4:30

Shantha Smith & Nikole Joshi

Equitable grading, based on sound mathematics, motivation, and cultural-responsive pedagogy research--ensures that our grades are accurate, bias-resistant, and motivational. Based on Joe Feldman's book, Grading for Equity, these improved approaches to grading have become widely known in the K-12 context, and an increasing number of post-secondary faculty are applying equitable grading practices to the college and university classrooms. In this roundtable discussion, after brief remarks about the nationwide trends in equitable grading in college and university classrooms, share with colleagues the challenges and possibilities of improving grading and mediating the ideas of equitable grading within the post-secondary context: In what ways does this work address grade inflation? How does equitable grading affect students' motivation, their understanding of expectations, and their likelihood of success? How does it change teaching, classroom instruction and assessment and teacher-student interactions? Walk away with new strategies and a new network of colleagues engaged in this critically important work of equitable grading.

Education Research (Part 1)

Thursday, 4:30

Dennis L. Rudnick, Bridget Arend, Mark I. Koester, Phillip E. Bernhardt, and Mehpara Qadir

Faculty Perceptions on Grading and Assessment
The presentation will discuss initial findings from a research study investigating faculty perspectives on changing grading and assessment practices within higher education institutions. The study aims to explore the institutional and cultural factors that influence faculty members in modifying their grading and assessment approaches. Additionally, the research seeks to understand how faculty members' sociological understandings and personal beliefs contribute to their considerations of equity in grading and assessment practices. By addressing these research questions, the study aims to provide valuable insights into the dynamics and motivations behind faculty-led transformations in the realm of grading and assessment, with a focus on fostering more equitable educational environments.

Brandon J. Yik, Haleigh Machost, Adriana C. Steifer, Michael S. Palmer, Lisa Morkowchuk, & Marilyne Stains
Does specifications grading yield the expected student outcomes? Insights from large-enrollment chemistry courses

Specifications grading has been theorized to positively benefit both students and instructors and promote equity. Some of the expected student-related outcomes of specifications grading include motivating students to learn and excel, fostering students’ sense of responsibility for their grades, reflecting student learning outcomes, giving students feedback they will use, reducing student stress, making expectations clear, discouraging cheating, and minimizing conflict between faculty and students. However, these hypotheses are generally unverified and untested, and the impact of specifications grading has been largely unexplored. In this presentation, we discuss if specifications grading yields some of these expected student outcomes in many large-enrollment postsecondary chemistry courses across the United States. To accomplish this, we developed the Perceptions of Grading Schemes instrument. This instrument surveys students’ perceptions of specifications grading versus traditional grading for five factors: stressful, clear expectations, reflect student learning outcomes, useful feedback, and promotes intrinsic motivation. Quantitative findings surrounding these factors will be presented at the class-level and group-level analyses of student demographic variables such as gender, first generation status, and underrepresented minority status. Pairing together student perceptions and course grades, we will discuss if specifications grading yields the expected student outcomes and helps promote equity.

Workshop: Ungrading the Unessay: Alternative Grading with Alternative Assessments

Thursday, 4:30

Christopher Adamson & Isaiah F. A. Cohen

The alternative assessment movement and ongoing concerns with generative AI are disrupting tendencies in higher education to rely on conventional assessment methods within our respective disciplines. Since course design is iterative, educators often change one component each term. With the movement to adopt alternative forms of assessment and ungrading in particular, an instructor might keep the same assignment structure but implement grade-free zones, contract grading, or student assessments. To better meet the needs of diverse learners and integrate the UDL framework, we propose accompanying alternative grading strategies with alternative forms of assessment like the unessay. In this interactive workshop seminar, a sociology professor and an educational development director will present how they aligned their specific ungrading strategies with the unessay to empower students to take ownership of their education and scholarly output. We will begin by sharing the educational reasoning behind ungrading with the unessay in social science and humanities courses–utilizing examples of completed student work from each–and then lead participants in a course redesign workshop. Working within a personal ungrading development journal powered by H5P, participants will work through how best to empower students to meet learning outcomes with paired assessment and evaluation strategies.

Roundtable: Implementing Ungrading

Thursday, 4:30

Jeff Ford & Martin Lang

A chance for educators interested in implementations of ungrading to ask questions. Panelists will discuss their implementations, and answer common questions on getting started, getting students on board with the method, and pitfalls to avoid.

DEI and Alternative Grading

Friday, 1:00

Sarah Silverman

Lessons in Ungrading from Disability Studies
Those who practice ungrading (assessing students in ways that challenge the traditional practices of ranking and numerically scoring students) have many motivations: resistance to the competition between students that traditional grading encourages, skepticism that grades correlate to actual learning, concern about the mental health implications of punitive grading, etc. In this talk, I introduce and apply another motivation for ungrading that is derived from my experience researching and teaching disability studies. I draw a link between a key moment in the social construction of disability and contemporary grading: the concurrent emergence of statistics and eugenics in the late 19th century as sciences for measuring and ranking human beings, with the latter “science” dedicating to marking deviant individuals for removal. When I practice ungrading in my disability studies classes (and others) it is in a hope to respond to and reject the ways those impulses have made their way deep into our educational system. This talk offers an introduction to the history of eugenics, some hypothesized relationships with punitive grading and ranking used in education, and a tour through a critical disability studies syllabus in which I implement ungrading as part of a larger goal of questioning “normality” throughout the class.

Kris De Welde
Making the Case for Unmaking the Grade: Tracing Liberatory Pedagogies as a Framework for Ungrading

As alternative assessment and ungrading specifically gain prominence “ungraders” may find that they need to substantiate and justify their pedagogical choices to supervisors, university administrators, parents, and students. Educators who practice alternative assessment come to these approaches from differing conceptual frameworks, not all of which are explicitly articulated or evident, which can undermine commitments to ungrading as well as understandings of its criticality in liberation pedagogical contexts. For ungraders well-attuned to critical, feminist, engaged, or abolitionist pedagogies, the gradeless classroom (or university) extends almost seamlessly, even inevitably from their (our) praxis. Collectively, these pedagogies offer a robust – albeit politicized – framework from which to defend an ungrading orientation. This presentation will explore how ungrading can be linked to key tenets of critical, feminist, engaged, and abolitionist pedagogies. These conceptual frameworks offer a throughline to make a strong case for ungrading as a promising pedagogical approach that promotes equity and “education as the practice of freedom” (Paulo Freire 1971; bell hooks 1994), regardless of academic discipline. A brief resource of key readings will be provided.

Strategies and Practices (Part 3)

Friday, 1:00

Melanie Butler

Which type of alternative grading is right for your course?
In this presentation, I will discuss my experiences with standards-based grading, specifications grading, and cooperative grading. The presentation will give pros and cons for each method, practical tips, and lessons learned. There will be time for questions so that participants can help decide which alternative grading method might best meet their goals for their different courses.

Jill Dahlman & Piper Selden
15 Years Later: The Evolutionary Nature of Grading Conferences

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which discussed (in part) how science moves itself forward. He argued for a model identified as “episodic” rather than “cumulative progress,” or normal science that were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. We argue that this type of progression is not confined to the scientific field but also applies to the Humanities. For years, instructors have complained about student writing yet have done little to change the methodology of grading. In 2011, the speakers set out to change the model, but like scientific revolutions, have been met with resistance from the “we’ve always done it this way” group and from publishing companies that provide “solutions” to ensure the status quo is maintained. While this grading conference methodology may not work for all people, it is an alternative that may work well for some. We offer this presentation as a means to discuss how the grading conference was created and structured and how its evolution has both been refined and been met with resistance from the discipline. Within this discussion, we will explain methodology of not only the grading conference origins but also what it looks like in real time.

Disciplinary Applications (Part 3)

Friday, 1:00

Veronica Berns

Adapting Ungrading Principles to Large-Enrollment STEM Lab Courses
Ungrading – an umbrella term for reducing or eliminating grading by “points” – offers many benefits to students, including transparency, flexibility, and forgiveness in assessments. Most often, Ungrading approaches are seen in small seminar or writing-centric courses due to the high time cost in providing written feedback to students. In this interactive presentation, we will discuss how Ungrading ideas inspired a change in the assessment structure of general chemistry lab courses at Northwestern. You’ll hear how the presenter along with her co-lab director Katie Gesmundo adapted a Specifications Grading model to fit courses of 100-450 students that heavily rely on teaching assistants. You will also have an opportunity to identify which core ideas of Ungrading are compatible with your own course formats, and discuss actionable ways to incorporate them into your grading scheme.

Monica Bliss
Enhancing PSTs Conceptual Understanding

In my experience, preservice elementary school teachers (PSTs) struggle with the subject matter in mathematics content courses and are more concerned with getting a good (or passing) grade than they are with their level of understanding. I will share how changing the way I teach and grade has allowed PSTs to focus on their conceptual understanding and their growth throughout the semester by providing them with feedback and offering opportunities to revise their work.

Support and Reform

Friday, 2:30

Angela Muir

Towards Student-Centered Assessment: Learning from Brown University's Grading Policy Reform of 1969
In recent discourse surrounding ungrading and alternative assessment practices, there's a growing recognition of the need to extend these discussions beyond the confines of individual classrooms to institutional levels. In alignment with Mya Poe and Asao Inoue’s assertion in their collection, Writing Assessment, Social Justice, and the Advancement of Opportunity, this proposal seeks to explore the historical example of Brown University's groundbreaking Grading Policy reform of 1969 as a middle ground for implementing change toward student-centered assessment practices at programmatic and institutional levels. Drawing on archival research and policy analysis, this talk will delve into the transformative efforts led by students and faculty at Brown University, resulting in an approach to undergraduate education hailed by the New York Times as “the most flexible and progressive … to be found in any major American University” (Reinhold). Ultimately, by highlighting the successes and challenges of Brown’s Grading Policy reform, this presentation will offer insights for educators and administrators seeking to foster a more inclusive, equitable, and student-centered approach to assessment in higher education. Through collective action and a commitment to student empowerment, we can move towards assessment practices that better serve the needs of learners and uphold principles of social justice.

Eun Sandoval-Lee, Michelle Guittar, & Jennifer Keys
A University-Wide Practicum on Reimagining Assessment for Instructors: Collaborations and Constraints

In this presentation, we will review how we carried out a university-wide initiative to support learning and reflecting on assessment and grading practices, with an emphasis on equitable approaches and alternative methods. In the 2023-24 academic year, a group of faculty and staff, representing various units on campus and voices of expertise and experience on equitable assessment, collaborated and delivered the Reimagining Assessment Practicum for instructors at Northwestern University. Presenters will provide an overview, content approach, logistical considerations, highlights, and lessons learned for the intended audience of faculty, staff, and administrators interested in creating similar opportunities for educational development on these topics at their own institutions.

As the fourth online practicum in a series since 2020, this year’s practicum, intended for instructors of all levels, backgrounds, and teaching contexts, aimed to address questions about strategies that enable students to maximize learning and growth, such as: How can we make grading a more meaningful interaction with our students? Are we assessing what we think we’re assessing? The format of the practicum involved weaving together interactive synchronous sessions, asynchronous learning activities, individual consultations, and opportunities to learn with and from peers to create more inclusive learning and teaching environments.

Marney Pratt, Katie Mattaini, & Jayme Dyer
Building Support for Alternative Grading: Communities of Practice Beyond the Institution

Communities of practice can provide critical support for faculty trying new pedagogical approaches, including novel grading structures. A group of biology faculty have been meeting monthly on Zoom as a community of practice around alternative grading. This “Bio Grading for Growth” group consists of faculty in various teaching positions from a diversity of types of institutions. Members cite benefits such as connecting with biology faculty outside their institution who care about improving grading practices, having a supportive space to trade ideas and resources while also venting frustrations and challenges, and many others. We will present briefly on how we organize the meetings, how we communicate, how new members find the group, the diversity of people involved, and some of the benefits to the group. Then we will open up for a Q&A for our panel of Bio Grading for Growth members.

Strategies and Practices (Part 4)

Friday, 2:30

Lynne Lawson & Joseph Ribaudo

Streamlining Specifications Grading in a Multi-Section General Physics Course

When implementing a transition from traditional grading to specifications grading, the demands of the change can be overwhelming. Providing multiple versions of assessments, finding time to administer them, and keeping track of scores is daunting. However, alternative grading approaches such as specifications grading have been shown to promote equity in the classroom and can benefit students who were not successful in courses with traditional grading approaches. When institutional data for our department showed that underrepresented students were leaving our major at a greater rate than their white classmates, our department sought to make changes to address this. We decided to adopt specifications grading in our gateway course for our majors – General Physics. This course is also part of the curriculum of biology and chemistry majors. With multiple sections taught by several instructors, we pooled our efforts to make the task more manageable. We will share how we worked together to identify common learning objectives, created multiple versions of assessments for each objective, provided common reassessment times, and kept track of scores. Working cooperatively has allowed us to adopt this approach seamlessly, and collaboration along the way has allowed us to improve with each iteration. Teamwork does make the dream work.

Warren Shull

Taking the leap: How I transitioned to Grading for Growth in a semester

In this talk, I will discuss my transition into a Grading for Growth in two courses: Calculus 1 and College Algebra. I had taught both courses with more traditional grade structures before, though not at the same institution. While I was fortunate to have very supportive colleagues throughout my department, my implementation of this grade structure was largely independent (not coordinated across the entire department or the entire course). Also, while I had tried out a smaller version of a Grading for Growth structure in a different course in the past, this was the first time it applied to more than half (60%) of the students’ course grade.

Disciplinary Applications (Part 4)

Friday, 2:30

Jeremy Levine

Just Ask: Offering Students Five Choices of Grading Policy in Writing Courses
Writing teachers are at a flashpoint with grading. Because higher education privileges white, middle-class norms in writing, writing teachers are seeking ways of removing such biases from assessment. One popular proposal is to remove the teacher’s subjective judgment altogether and to grade students’ work on the amount of labor completed (Inoue), while critics contend that labor hours themselves are not an equally available resource across ability and class lines (Carillo). Each grading system privileges someone, and teachers who offer one grading system for a whole writing class have to arbitrarily choose who they will disadvantage. This presentation offers another path forward: offering multiple grading strategies for one class. I will begin by outlining the many different tensions created in the writing classroom by unilateral grading strategies. Then, I will discuss my class policy that allows students to individually choose from one of five grading strategies, as well as my strategies for scaffolding students’ decision-making process. The session will conclude by discussing methods of implementing this approach in participants’ local contexts, answering practical questions about fairness and instructor labor, and generating ideas for teacher research on the equity implications and pedagogical effects of this policy.

Elizabeth Parkins
Revolutionizing Marketing Education: Specs Grading and AI Integration

This presentation introduces a new approach to undergraduate marketing education, intertwining innovative specifications grading with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to enhance learning outcomes and student engagement.

Learning objectives are designed to cover:

• Introducing Specs Grading in Marketing Education: Unpack the novel application of specs grading in a business class setting, highlighting its potential to revolutionize student assessment by promoting autonomy and mastery.
• Leveraging AI for Dynamic Learning: Explore the integration of AI tools to personalize learning experiences, provide real-time feedback, and facilitate deeper understanding of marketing concepts.
• Fostering Student Autonomy and Trust: Delve into strategies for using specs grading and AI to create a transparent, trust-filled learning environment where students are empowered to make wise decisions.
• Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Education: Understand how the combination of specs grading and AI can address diverse learning needs, ensuring every student has the opportunity to excel.

The adoption of specs grading in a business class is a relatively new concept that aligns with the current digital transformation in education. This presentation is particularly significant for educators seeking to incorporate cutting-edge practices into their teaching, especially those interested in the benefits of AI in fostering a learner-centered environment.

Christopher Geissler & Morgan Rood
Student-directed learning through assignment choice in two linguistics courses

This talk presents two implementations of alternative grading in introductory sociolinguistics courses, both emphasizing students’ ability to choose their assignments from a range of options. We sought to address the wide range of interests and backgrounds among our students, from established majors to non-majors. As two similar courses taught in the same department, they provide a semi-controlled experiment for alternative grading strategies. In the first course, students received “points” for each assignment completed, with the final grade determined by the number of points accumulated. Many more “points” were available than required for the maximum grade, papers were assessed with specifications grading, and assignments could be submitted at any time. In the second course, students selected their writing assignments from a “menu” of paper genres, with few restrictions on how many of each genre could be selected. Unlike in the previous course, due dates were fixed and a simple rubric, informed by alternative-grading principles, was used. Both courses represent incremental steps into alternative grading, and retained “traditional” elements such as normatively-graded final papers. We discuss the choices students made, student evaluations, and our experience as instructors, and we contrast the results of the courses’ different grading and deadline policies.

Workshop: Alternative Grading as a Gateway to Effective Program Assessment

Friday, 4:00

Melissa E. Ko

Individual instructors implementing alternative grading in their courses often face pushback from both colleagues and students, especially if they are the only ones doing so. Increased buy-in and implementation across a department can make the switch easier for all instructors, but how do we convince the collective to buy in? Promoting a departmental practice of alternative grading has often been rightfully rooted in the goal to promote equity in student outcomes (e.g. grades, passing rates). However, alternative grading also presents an untapped opportunity for meaningful learning outcomes data to inform curricular planning. In this workshop, we discuss parallels between alternative grading strategies and effective learning assessment at the program or institutional level. Academic program review and/or institutional re-accreditation often present significant administrative burdens for departments. From a faculty development and assessment lens, we will identify how switching to alternative grading enables departments to “double dip” in their operations and generate disaggregated data that actually informs teaching and learning processes. Participants will explore concrete examples and language that describe how alternative grading actually streamlines assessment work at the department level.

Workshop: Active Assessment for Active Learning

Friday, 4:00

Simone Sisneros-Thiry

What does it mean for assessment to be aligned with the values of active learning? This workshop will focus on active assessment, a process that emerged as math instructors at CSU East Bay engaged with this question in a year-long Assessment Community of Practice. To collaboratively develop a working definition, instructors pulled ideas from discussions of active learning, formative assessment, and alternative assessment, and from reflections on our own practice. From the initial conversations, our discussion of active assessment has focused on emphasizing equity and students’ agency for doing and communicating mathematics. Subsequent conversations have become highly personally practical, focused on instructor implementation of an active assessment process in their own classes. The evidence-based workshop will include both a review of research that informed our discussions and instructor and student experiences with active assessment. The workshop is intended to invite participants to explore what the concept of active assessment may mean for them, as well as provide opportunities to consider how to incorporate active assessment in their own individual contexts.

Workshop: Grading Risks

Friday, 4:00

Alexis Teagarden, Josh Botvin, Will Higgins, & Amanda Rioux

One rationale for alternative grading is that it supports intellectual risks and failures, which in turn promotes deep learning (Inoue, 2019). Risk and failure scholarship, however, suggests alternative approaches are necessary but insufficient (Bartkevicius, 2023; Teagarden et al., 2018).

Consider Feigenbaum’s (2021) “Failure club” class, which used ungrading principles (Blum, 2020). Results somewhat disappointed, and he occasionally doubted his design, thinking “a course producing nearly all As cannot be intellectually rigorous” (p. 420). In response, Feigenbaum suggests teachers cultivate a willingness to experience “discomfort, ambivalence, and doubt” (p. 421), a form of intellectual risk-taking. This is necessary for students, Feigenbaum argues; his reflection demonstrates its importance to instructors, too. Our workshop addresses the entwined issues of grading and intellectual risk-taking. To help participants embrace risky-seeming grading approaches, we will lead them through four exercises and the conversations they inspire:
1. A question generation prompt to frame risk reflections (Rothstein & Santana, 2011)
2. A “risk rewarded” visualization to lower risk-aversion (Zaleskiewicz et al., 2020)
3. Our kaleidoscope revision to reframe grading policies
4. Our sea-change prompt to imagine new ways of grading
Participants leave with expanded assessment possibilities plus classroom-tailorable exercises for cultivating risk-taking in students.

Education Research (Part 2)

Saturday, 1:00

Margaret Chapman
Why We Grade

Despite a mounting body of evidence that traditional grading practices are an ineffective means of motivating students, do not accurately reflect learning, and reinforce systemic inequity, traditional grading persists in higher education. Why? How do faculty see grading as a meaningful pedagogical tool, and how might the use and purpose of grades be subjective and influenced by discipline? Between 2021 and 2023, and working with student researchers, I interviewed 22 faculty in various disciplines at a midsized private university to get to know how faculty understand grades and develop as graders, how our perceptions of grades are communicated to students, and what values are embedded in those perceptions. I discovered that faculty receive little direct instruction on the purpose, meaning, or practice of grading. I also found that in addition to disciplinary standards, faculty members' individual values, dispositions, and experiences as students greatly influence grading practices and the rationales underlying them. Faculty often develop grading practices by projecting their experiences onto students, and in doing so may in practice use grading more to communicate a set of intertwined disciplinary and personal values than as a means of effective assessment.

Louis Leblond

Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Experiences with Standards-Based Grading

Over the academic year of 2022-2023, seven Pennsylvania State University faculty from the departments of chemistry, math, physics, and statistics, have implemented Standards-Based Grading (SBG) in a dozen classes, ranging from introductory to upper division and small (<25 students) to large (~500 students). Most implementations used learning target quizzes with multiple retakes as the central assessment tools. We surveyed students (N = 96) in these courses, performed interviews (N= 13) and focus groups (N=3) to explore their experiences with SBG. While more than 65% of the students’ comments in the survey described positive experiences with SBG, we made sure to also interview students who described negative, unusual, or nuanced experiences. Each transcript was coded by two faculty and the themes were discussed as a group. Overall, we find that students perceive that the control and flexibility of standards-based grading increases motivation and reduces stress. We also have some students that report procrastination and test-reset behaviors and we will discuss strategies to help those students succeed.

Strategies and Practices (Part 5)

Saturday, 1:00

Elizabeth Kubek

Beyond Ungrading: Designing Writing Assignments for Self-Reflection, Belonging, and Engagement

The current “ungrading” movement is evolving towards a key goal: finding equilibrium between granting students agency over assessment (in order to improve engagement and emphasize process) and managing student anxiety about grading. The proposed workshop will provide writing instructors with an opportunity to share tools, strategies, and resources related to writing assignments that support student learning, belonging, and wellbeing by allowing them to set their own goals through pre-class writing and self-assessments, and then to address these goals recursively throughout the semester. This strategy supports anti-racist and inclusive pedagogies, allowing students to see their writing as purposeful; already competent in terms of what the NCTE calls “multiliteracies”; and relevant to their individual learning and future goals. At the same time, it seeks to provide sufficient structure and instructor input to mitigate anxiety. These assignments may also help students resist the mindset that leads to overreliance on AI and other “shortcuts” to the writing process. Note: the facilitator is certified by the Online Learning Consortium in Applying Quality Rubrics (focus on Accessibility).

Jenni Momsen & Elena Bray Speth

Exam wrappers: An instructional practice with promise (and some perils)

A core pillar of alternative grading systems is allowing students opportunities to “reattempt without penalty” (Clark and Talbert 2023), thereby acknowledging the importance of mistakes in the learning process. Managing retakes can be overwhelming, especially in large-enrollment introductory courses where students often have not developed strong self-regulated learning skills; in other words, students do not yet know how to learn from their mistakes.

Exam wrappers, popularized by Loveland (2013), are an instructional strategy designed to help students develop effective learning behaviors. These short surveys ask students to reflect on their study behaviors, including time spent studying and specific study strategies, whether those behaviors resulted in successful learning (i.e., a satisfactory assessment score), and how students would change their behaviors moving forward. To our knowledge, there has been little implementation or research on how exam wrappers might promote learning in an alternatively graded course in biology.

In this presentation, we will focus on how we adapted and extended exam wrappers to support our alternative grading system in Introductory Biology. We will share our wins and losses, and our students’ experiences and feedback. Ultimately, we hope to initiate a conversation about how pedagogical innovations like exam wrappers can support our alternative grading efforts.

Disciplinary Applications (Part 5)

Saturday, 1:00

Casey Haskins, Allison Quiroga, & Moses Olayemi

Grading Catalyst: Standards-based grading for a selective first-year engineering program

Students entering the Engineering Catalyst program are selected based on demonstration of motivation towards an engineering degree, commitment to investing time and energy in themselves, willingness to develop college success strategies, and placement into one of two pre-calculus courses. Through courses within the first year of the program, students are exposed to strategies for academic and career success, and engineering applications of their mathematics content. The goals of the program and courses within it do not align with traditional grading practices. In this talk, we will (1) outline the reasons we chose to use a standards-based grading scheme that the students do not see in most of their other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, including standards for both skill-based and efforts-based assessments; (2) our journey through grading for growth; and (3) our reflections as we continue teaching courses in the program. Other practitioners may find this talk useful and relevant if they are teaching STEM courses, particularly if they can commit the time and energy toward meaningful student relationships through their grading practices and extensive feedback. We will speak about the ways that students communicate conceptualizing the courses and their grading schemes, including pitfalls in our communication.

Jacquelyn Rische

Standards-based Grading in Calculus with Precalculus

In this talk, I will discuss the implementation of a standards-based grading system into Calculus with Precalculus (a two semester course that is equivalent to Calculus I). In the system, I determine the “skills” that I want my students to learn by the end of the semester. Each skill appears on three quizzes in a row, and a student needs to solve its quiz questions correctly two times. Once a skill stops appearing on the quizzes, students can still complete it by coming to my office for a “retake.” I will also discuss tips for making retakes manageable and keeping track of everyone’s scores on the skills. Given my students’ diverse backgrounds, the system works well for them. They appreciate being able to come in and get help on the skills they are struggling with and then retake those skills. In this way, they are able to keep going back to the topics that they did not understand.

Roundtable: Leveraging an Army of Peer Tutors for Test Corrections

Saturday, 2:30

Luvreet Sangha

One of the questions grading practitioners consider is ""what should students do between assessing something and taking a reassessment?"" One common approach is to ask students to complete corrections on problems they missed. However, this can add another layer of work on top of all the grading instructors do. In my courses, I have been partnering with Peer Educators (other undergrads who attend class and hold drop-in hours) and with our tutoring center to help with this. Students can get their corrections checked by me, a Peer Educator, or a peer tutor -- then they become eligible for a reassessment. This support allows us to offer significantly more drop-in hours each week which provides added flexibility for students and helps me manage my workload.  For students, this fosters a culture of peer-reviewing work and of leveraging campus resources to excel in their coursework. And for the army of peer tutors? Well, they hone their mentoring and teaching skills and become the unsung heroes of the class!

Strategies and Practices (Part 6)

Saturday, 2:30

Arielle C McKee

“It’s Dangerous to go Alone, Take This”: Gamified Grading and Progress-Tracker Maps

The motivational power of gamification has been well documented, used not just for classroom role-playing games, like Reacting to the Past, but also in productivity apps like Habitica and EpicWin. I started gamifying my rubrics a while ago, hoping to be more growth-focused and equitable by encouraging students to focus on life-long learning and “leveling up.” Then I learned about alternative grading and joined a learning community—hosted by Wake Forest’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching—working through David Clark and Robert Talbert’s Grading for Growth. With the community’s help, I gamified my alternative grading system, developing a questing structure for my classes. Students now get a physical map to update. Major assignments appear on the map as stops on the main quest, while practice and participation activities appear as side quests and/or standards-focused “levels” to attempt (and reattempt). While I am still refining, the quest map/grade tracker seems to have several benefits. First, it visualizes how major assessments fit together. Second, students appear to more readily grasp the alternative grading system. Third, we have a shared “gaming lexicon” to use when discussing class requirements; and, most importantly, it helps learners remember “not yet” doesn’t mean “not ever.”

Noël Ingram

Boosting Student Agency: Digital Badging as a Form of Alternative Assessment

This presentation explores the potential of digital badging in Canvas for alternative assessment, as applied in two distinct pedagogical contexts at Boston College: a face-to-face first-year writing seminar and a fully asynchronous design thinking course. The speaker will share how she redesigned her course around a series of digital badges, which students could earn according to their desired course grade. The presenter describes how she redesigned her course to facilitate student agency, flexibility, and individual differentiation. Additionally, the presentation references how her approach connects to and extends conversations in writing studies around alternative assessment, specifically work on queering writing assessment by Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole Caswell, and William Banks. Additionally, the presenter provides practical tips for implementation using the free version of Canvas credentials.

Roundtable: Change Leadership in Alternative Grading: How Do We Move the Needle?

Saturday, 2:30

Sharona Krinsky & Robert Bosley

For many of us working in the Alt Grading space, we are routinely frustrated at the barriers that arise when we try to do more than just change our own classrooms. Drawing on the experience of the presenters, this session will explore the various barriers we regularly encounter when attempting grading reform at a team, department, college, or institutional level as well as strategies to overcome those barriers. From course coordination and course redesign efforts to working with administrators and centers from effective teaching, participants will learn a variety of tools including: 1. Developing and utilizing Grading Purpose statements, 2. Speaking with Administrators about the role and purpose of Grading, 3. Developing and maintaining faculty learning communities to support faculty doing alternative grading.

Panelists: Robert Talbert - Grand Valley State University, Dave Kung - Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics, Don Smith - First Educational Resources

Education Research (Part 3)

Saturday, 4:00

Laura Cruz

Grading Differently: A Multi-Classroom, Multi-Disciplinary Study in Grading Culture

In this presentation, we will share the results of a multi-classroom, multi-disciplinary survey-based research study (n=341) focused on how alternative grading influences student academic goal orientation, sense of agentic learning, and beliefs about grades. Our findings suggest that the benefits and challenges of alternative grading schema are more likely to be differentiated by the strength of instructor-student relationships than demographic facts such as age, gender identity, or academic discipline.

The project emerged through a distinctive faculty development model, in which participants first integrated alternative grading into their instruction then, over the course of an academic year, worked together to design and implement a collaborative research project to assess the outcomes of those changes.

Tara Slominski & Jenni Momsen

Making space for meaningful learning: Retesting Standards in Introductory Biology

Traditional grading approaches typically penalize mistakes, giving students only one attempt to demonstrate their learning on exams. However, meaningful learning can happen by way of making mistakes (Metcalfe, 2017). Through this mixed-method, exploratory study, we investigate how retesting may promote learning while also mitigating the challenges nontraditional, working, and rural students experience in undergraduate biology classrooms. Our data comes from 84 students who completed an Introductory Biology course at a large, Midwestern R1 institution in Fall 2023 (RR = 0.76). This course used a form of standards-based grading (SBG), where final grades were primarily determined by student proficiency across 12 standards (over 85% of final grade). Typical of SBG, students were allowed to reattempt standards without penalty. We also obtained gradebook data to address the following research questions: Do nontraditional, working, or rural students experience different levels of initial success on standards quizzes compared to their traditional, nonworking, or nonrural peers? If differences in initial success exist across demographic groups, will those differences be mirrored in final course grade distribution? We also conducted a focus group with 5 students enrolled in our focal course to gain insight into students’ perceptions of and experiences with SBG.

Workshop: Taking a Holistic Look at Alternative Grading Strategies through the use of Student Personas and an Intersectional Lens

Saturday, 4:00

Lauren Singelmann & Neeko Bochkarev

As scholars and practitioners who are studying and implementing alternative grading strategies, it is imperative that we consider these strategies using an intersectional lens. Strategies and supports that were designed to help some students may actually hurt other students in the long run. Rather than throwing out these strategies and supports altogether, this workshop aims to create a space where participants can explore how an intersectional lens can help us create grading schemes and policies that support all students. During this workshop, participants will work in groups to explore various alternative grading strategies using student personas. Activities and discussion will center around how those student personas interact with policies that fall under the Four Pillars of Alternative Grading: clear standards, helpful feedback, marks that indicate progress, and reassessments without penalty. Participants will be given student personas that include identity diversity (e.g. gender and race), cognitive diversity (e.g. work and life experiences), and neurodiversity (e.g. ADHD and autism). They will then discuss how these personas might experience various alternative grading strategies and brainstorm what sorts of universal support structures could be implemented to support all students in a course.

Roundtable: Questioning the Status Quo: Alternative Grading Dynamics/Processes in Higher Education

Saturday, 4:00

Lexi Almy

bell hooks described how education is the practice of freedom—of liberatory practice where the classroom is the “most radical space of possibility in the academy”. The classroom is a space ideally designed disrupt and question the status quo of knowledge production and facilitate possibility while fostering social responsibility. By not working to ensure all students have equal access to an A or B in a course, inequities can flourish. Grades have been shown to reduce risk taking, reduce creativity, be a major stressor for students, and increase anxiety. Alternative grading in higher education may be one liberatory practice toward reducing inequities in the classroom. In interviews with 80 higher education teachers, the author determined prominent benefits of alternative grading and utilized responses from teacher interviews to build an online survey for students in alternatively graded courses. The student survey, which had 484 responses, asked questions pertaining to anxiety, feelings around alternative and traditional grading, and the benefits of alternative grading. Early findings indicate students do feel lower levels of anxiety, increased comfort to make mistakes, and increased agency. These findings suggest alternative grading could one way to partially address inequities in the classroom and positively impact student mental health.