Alternative Grading Is a Marathon

Why the starting line is exciting, the middle miles are hard, and the finish is worth it

Photo by Mārtiņš Zemlickis on Unsplash

Today’s post comes to you by our friend and collaborator Kate Owens, who officially joins the Grading for Growth editorial team today. Kate is a Senior Instructor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the College of Charleston, and she has a long history of leadership in alternative grading. As Robert mentioned in his recent post, Kate will support our guest posters as well as contribute occasional articles on the blog. Welcome, Kate – we’re glad to have you here! (signed, David and Robert)

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The Starting Line: Why We Show Up

Every race begins with a reason.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve completed over 50 races in the past six years. My running journey began in the fall of 2019 when I laced up my shoes to train for my very first 5K. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with showing up at the starting line in front of a crowd of excited strangers, ready for our individual adventures done collectively. In those early miles, it’s easy to feel invincible. The morning air is crisp, the crowd is cheering you on, and your body is running on pure, unadulterated adrenaline.

Sustaining a practice in alternative grading is a lot like training for a long-distance race: the struggle is entirely real, some miles are notoriously tougher than others, but the view at the finish line changes who you are as an educator.

Just like the diverse crowd at a race’s starting line, educators arrive at alternative grading from completely different directions. We all entered this space through different doors, and there is no single “correct” reason that gets you here. My journey in alternative grading began in 2013 when I was preparing to teach Calculus II for the first time. I was deeply frustrated by the glaring informational void of traditional points-based grading. When a student came to my office seeking advice, my gradebook would show “78%” for their first exam, making it nearly impossible to pin down exactly where their understanding had broken down. I wanted grades to communicate real information: a clear pathway showing exactly what a student had accomplished and where they still needed to grow. I also wanted a system that allowed grades to rise alongside student’s understanding, so early mistakes wouldn’t cap their ultimate success. Standards-based grading felt like a perfect fit.

When I look at my closest collaborators, their paths into alternative grading look very different from mine. Robert’s spark came from a place of profound student heartbreak. He grew deeply disillusioned by the transactional nature of the point-accumulation game after watching a brilliant student get mathematically crushed by the unforgiving, compounding loss of partial credit on timed exams. David, on the other hand, approached the line through a sharp, logical analysis: He looked at his final grade book and realized that traditional point-averages were merely a snapshot of a student’s performance on a specific Tuesday, rather than a true measure of what they actually knew by the end of the semester.

But the beauty of the alternative grading community is that it is a big tent. It doesn’t matter what specific frustration, epiphany, or goal brings you to the starting line. Any reason that gets you to lace up your shoes and commit to the work ahead is completely valid. There is room for every story.

The Middle Miles: The Friction of Growth

The hard miles are where growth happens.

When I threw out traditional grading and committed to alternative grading, I was running on the race day start-line kind of high. I felt the thrill of the pivot and the excitement about the unknown. If only that feeling could last forever! The starting line is where possibility feels limitless. The middle miles are where commitment gets tested. It is one thing to believe a new approach can improve teaching and learning; it is another thing to keep believing when the inevitable challenges begin to pile up. And anyone who has ever run longer distances knows that this is exactly when the race really begins. Eventually, the adrenaline fades, the crowd grows quiet, and you have to face the actual work of the middle miles.

By mile seven or eight of a half marathon¹, the reality of the distance sets in. Your legs start to grow heavy, a sudden headwind hits you, or maybe the weather takes an ugly turn. In teaching, this is the mid-semester wall. The initial excitement of trying something new fades. Suddenly you find yourself staring at a mountain of reassessments waiting to be graded, with a line of students out your office door needing help. You haven’t even begun the work for the committees and projects you put aside again. It is the moment when the tasks ahead feel completely overwhelming, and you hit an internal wall of wondering why you ever signed up for this race when you could be at home, still comfortably asleep.

But if there is one thing that running has taught me, it’s this: The struggle in the middle doesn’t mean you’re failing. It just means you are in the race.

Growth requires friction. There are some training runs where everything feels like it is working against you: your body is sluggish, the humidity is suffocating, and everyone else is passing you like they’re floating. In those moments, you have to remind yourself that just putting one foot in front of the other is still progress. A bad mile doesn’t ruin the race. When the conditions change, you don’t quit and turn back toward the start line. You change your pace, adjust your stride, and keep moving forward.

The same is true in the classroom. When a specific course setup feels clunky, or the administrative overhead of managing retakes gets too heavy, it isn’t a sign that alternative grading doesn’t work. It’s just a hill you have to climb. You take the data, adjust your stride, and keep moving.

It was exactly this kind of mid-race friction that eventually led me to create “Reassessment Carnivals”. These are one-day events that take place near the end of the semester, giving students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding and improve their grades within a single class period. As a bonus, they serve as the perfect catalyst, prompting students to dive into their final exam studying much earlier than they normally would. While this activity wasn’t part of my original blueprint, I realized early on that students needed a clear, classroom-based push toward final exam success. And, honestly, I needed a definitive way to anchor the ultimate deadline of the semester.

That is how we grow: We iterate on our syllabi for the next semester, exactly how a runner adjusts their strategy for the next steep incline. You don’t demand a perfect, painless run; you just commit to staying on the course and pushing momentum forward.

The Run Team & Power of Community

You can run alone, but we go further together.

When I first started running in 2019, I relied heavily on a “5K Runner” app to help me get started. I hated almost every training run, and at the finish line I told my friends who talked me into running the race that I would never, ever run again. The app gave me a badge for one more “recovery” run after the race, so I did that one. Magic happened, and it was the first time I ever felt fantastic on a run. For the next few years, my training was largely a solo endeavor, guided by pre-programmed plans created by my smartwatch. But this year, I realized I wanted to go further. I joined Without Limits (a local run team), hired a run coach, and committed to showing up for pre-dawn group training practices as much as I could.

That shift from solo runner to team member transformed my relationship with the sport. On the mornings when my motivation is low or a workout feels incredibly daunting, looking around and seeing my teammates pushing through the exact same intervals changes everything. We cheer each other on, celebrate personal records, and lift each other up when conditions fall short of expectations. Having that group around me is a constant reminder that we can do hard things, push ourselves to be better, and continue to grow.

My evolution in alternative grading followed a parallel track. In the early days, I was the solo runner looking at a screen for guidance. I didn’t discover standards-based grading in a professional development seminar; I found it through organic conversations on Twitter and by poring over blogs written by early adopters like Joshua Bowman. I used those online spaces to do my own writing, using the writing process to shake out my thoughts and figure out how all of this was actually going to work in practice.

The truth is, I never would have found the bravery to take the massive leap into alternative grading without the reassurance of an online community. I needed to see what worked well for others, what to do when things went sideways, and I needed at least a skeleton of a plan to follow.

Just like joining a real-world running team raised my ceiling as an athlete, embedding myself in the broader alternative grading community -- collaborating on the Grading for Growth blog, organizing the first Grading Conference, and serving on the Board of Directors for the Center for Grading Reform -- has sustained me as an educator. Innovation in higher education can often feel like a lonely, uphill sprint against rigid institutional norms. But swapping tips with other practitioners, reading about classroom success stories, and knowing there is a crew of passionate educators cheering you on from the sidelines is what keeps you showing up week after week.

The Finish Line: The View is Worth It

Perfection isn’t the goal; progress is.

At the end of any race, whether it’s a 5K or a marathon, everyone crosses the same finish line. We might have started that morning for completely different reasons, but at the finish, we share a collective bond, an unspoken agreement that we are willing to push ourselves, step out of our comfort zone, and choose growth over complacency.

That is exactly what the alternative grading journey feels like at the end of a long semester.

Some miles of this pedagogical race are pure bliss. There’s nothing quite like the magic of watching a student who struggled in week 3 finally demonstrate a deep understanding by week 15, or seeing a classroom of students who each know what they’ve accomplished and what they still need to learn. Other miles are incredibly hard work, filled with the fatigue of reassessments or the behind-the-scenes effort required to help students adapt to grading systems that may feel unfamiliar at first.

But every single step is worth it.

If you are standing at your own starting line right now, or if you are currently grinding through a particularly brutal middle mile, remember this: Your training doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It is entirely okay to change the direction of your training, adjust your pace, or rewrite your syllabus as you discover what works for your classroom and your students. Perfection isn’t the goal; progress is.

And if you are ever gripped by the fear of making the leap, just remember the golden rule of racing: You will always beat the people who didn’t show up to the race. Lacing up your shoes and choosing to try a better way of assessment already puts you miles ahead.

1. A half marathon is a road-running race covering 13.1 miles (21.1 kilometers), exactly half the distance of a standard marathon.