Alternative grading with friends
A conversation about our journey from individual practice to a supportive and widespread community at the University of Portland
Note from David: Last summer, while teaching at a summer camp at the University of Portland, I shared several pleasant hours drinking coffee and chatting with Tamar More, Chris Hallstrom, and their colleagues. During this time, I learned the fascinating history of alternative grading at UP. I encouraged them to write their experiences and lessons down in a guest post. Here is the result.
Tamar More is an associate professor of physics at the University of Portland, with feet in both the experimental condensed matter and the physics education sides of physics research. She has been using alternative grading since 2015, and most recently has been playing with ungrading and coordinating university wide support of alternative grading with the center for teaching and learning and the HHMI IE3 project. She enjoys biking, climbing, and baking.
Chris Hallstrom is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Portland with interests in applied math broadly imagined and active learning pedagogy. He has been actively using alternative grading methods since 2018. He enjoys cooperative games, cooking with fire, and wine making.
We (Chris and Tamar) want to share what happens when you start developing a critical mass and culture within departments and across the institution of using and supporting alternative grading. At the University of Portland this has translated to not only acceptance but support of the practice by administration, which seems somewhat unusual, as well as the spread both within and across departments. These two aspects are not independent! We sat down for a conversation about how we’ve gone from isolated cases of individual faculty adopting alternative grading to what seems like an institutional shift.
For context, UP is a comprehensive university with four professional schools (business, nursing, engineering, and education) and a liberal arts college and enrollment of around 3500 and around 240 full time faculty. We generally have small classes, with a maximum of about 40: In the 2022-2023 academic year, only four courses had over 40 students and most others had 10–39 students. Teaching is a high priority at UP.
Our conversation below has been condensed and edited for clarity. We’re using terms like alternative grading intentionally without definition in recognition that different instructors are doing different things.
T: So Chris… how did you get started, and what has happened since?
C: I had been tinkering with my grading practices for years, but the breakthrough came in 2018 when I heard about what I would call standards based grading (SBG) at a conference. That made a big impression and helped me to articulate many of the issues I had with traditional grading practices. I only had a few weeks before the start of the semester, but I implemented SBG in a sophomore level Differential Equations class that fall followed by a Calculus class the next semester. Since then, I’ve implemented SBG and other alternative grading practices in all my classes. Although nowadays I tend to call it “proficiency grading” since the focus for my students is demonstrating proficiency on a set of learning objectives.
As I started talking with colleagues about what I was doing, I found that several others were either thinking about trying something similar or else had actively begun to introduce alternative grading practices into their classes as well. One of those colleagues was our Calculus coordinator and as we began to emerge from COVID, we started thinking about implementing SBG across all of our Calculus sections starting Fall 2022. Knowing that some sections would be taught by faculty new to the concept of SBG, we wanted a relatively simple syllabus that would make it as easy as possible to implement. Plugging into the larger alternative grading community, including sessions at MathFest as well as the Grading Conference was very helpful in getting materials and examples of syllabus design. Over the last several semesters, it’s definitely gotten easier as we’ve been able to share ideas and materials.
T: How has this impacted your own practice (and that of your math colleagues)?
C: For me, one thing it means is that I now have other instructors helping to create a pool of problems for reassessments. One of the features of our SBG implementation is that students can make multiple re-attempts on our weekly quizzes until they get it right. By re-attempt I mean the same topic but different problems. But that means I need to have a large collection of problems for each topic that I can hand to students when they come to do a retake. With multiple instructors sharing the labor of creating these problems, it’s much less work than when it was me alone.
For all of us, just having someone across the hall that we can share ideas with about how to improve our practice each semester is huge. If I’m thinking about some adjustment to my syllabus, I have multiple colleagues that can help me think through it. One other thing I’ve seen is when my students see students from other sections also engaged with alternative grading practices it really helps create buy in.
How about you? What’s your story, Tamar?
T: For me it was around 2015. I was feeling a deep dissatisfaction with the traditional emphasis on points, so I started making a list of topics I cared about and began shifting points from problems to these topics (proficiencies). Then I realized that the points didn’t make sense, what mattered were the topics.
C: You re-invented proficiency grading!
T: I guess I did, which is not the most efficient way to get there. I was unaware it was a thing until I discovered in 2020 physics colleagues at other institutions did something similar. I learned a lot from talking with them about their practice. Around the same time I also learned about and attended the Grading Conference. Informed by what I learned, I tweaked my system and started talking about it with my physics colleagues. Several of them were intrigued and started using it as well, one of them implementing it in all their courses. This, in turn, prompted further conversations, tweaking syllabi, sharing materials and ideas, and moral support. The subject is slowly making its way into more formal department discussions. We just hired a new lab coordinator and we’re taking the opportunity to formalize proficiency grading in the labs as we restructure them. This will be the first time to coordinate alternative grading for us in physics. I don’t think we’ll ever adopt it quite as uniformly as the math department has, but it is definitely gaining traction.
C: Something you and I have talked about is how helpful it is to have students in your classes that are familiar with these practices.
T: Absolutely! By the time students get to me, most have seen alternative grading, which is really helpful. They know how it works and have bought in. Not all the physics faculty use alternative grading, but some do and even if not everyone in the class has had it, just having some students who have experience with alternative grading helps. And of course those students have also had Calc I and/or Calc II. So it’s already old hat to them. I definitely found that since physics and math have started using alternative grading, I have far fewer students who are completely baffled by it, or ask me what their score on an exam is. And they use a lot of the language - I can tell because they’ll talk about objectives and they’ll come in with their little charts in which they track their progress. Sometimes those charts are copies of the proficiency lists in the syllabus with my assessments added as notes, but often it seems like they are importing tracking methods from other courses.
C: I’ve seen this too. The first few semesters it was a challenge to help students keep track of their proficiencies. I didn’t want to use our LMS for this (for many reasons - that’s a whole other conversation). But now I’m finding that many of my students already know how to keep track on their own.
T: It feels like in the beginning there were all these isolated efforts but now there seems to be a community of alternative grading practices developing across campus, not just our departments. What were other departments doing, and how did this community come into being?
C: I remember giving a short presentation about my SBG practices at a faculty development workshop several years ago and it was just a few of us in the room sharing things we were doing in our individual classes.
T: I remember that too. And I knew about what you were doing, but what surprised me was finding out that others across campus were also doing alternative grading things. I think it was that realization by a number of faculty that sparked new ideas for developing the alternative grading community.
C: Then last Spring, there was that faculty development session on Ungrading. Two of our colleagues shared their experiences implementing ungrading strategies in their courses. It was standing room only and I recall there were lots of questions from instructors interested in adopting similar practices in their own classes. That day really underscored for me that something is happening across campus; we’ve reached a kind of critical mass of folks across disciplines practicing and sharing these ideas.
T: And there’s a big push now in writing with labor based grading.
C: Right - we’ve been focused on SBG, but there are all these other things folks are talking about. There are all these different conversations.
T: I’m just learning about these. Last semester, after hearing about ungrading as a legitimate option and realizing it was (once again) similar to something I had tried before with mixed success, I used an ungrading portfolio in one of my courses. Learning how others implement it helped me design a better approach. It was great having conversations with students about “how are you doing” and what would it mean to feel good about getting this grade or that grade. We were all uncertain about how it would work, but it did, and now I can share that experience with other faculty or students doing it in other classes, which can help them.
T: It seems like alternative grading at UP has gone beyond just more and more faculty and departments adopting new practices, we’re also seeing increased support through various administrative efforts. How did we get to this point?
What has been impactful for me has been the growing university-wide effort. UP is part of the HHMI inclusive excellence project and I am on the UP leadership team, as is my all-alternative-grading-all-the-time physics colleague. We brought up alternative grading as an inclusive practice, and this has been adopted by the team as one of our main projects, with workshops, lunch conversations, and participation in the grading conference.
C: I know that inclusion and equity considerations definitely factored into the math department’s adoption of SBG in our calculus classes.
T: Yes, Covid brought to focus the idea that we need to address the needs of students better; what we did in the past wasn’t working. The institution was on the lookout for this. The Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) committee has been actively involved in spreading the word.
As a result of the interest, we’ve formed a community to support discussions and coordinate the alternative grading efforts, organize and advertise events, and collect resources. We are tying in to existing projects such as a workshop series on inclusive teaching in STEM and the HHMI project. This made it easier to have the conversations and reach a wider audience. For example, HHMI funded a large number of faculty to attend the last Grading Conference, including many first time attendees.
C: I think we had something like 20 participants from UP at the Grading Conference?
T: Yes! And then that led to a series of informal lunch discussions throughout the year.
C: And our Center for Teaching and Learning organized a faculty workshop prior to the start of this semester and is planning another one for the end of the semester.
T: So connecting alternative grading practices to university wide DEIJ efforts has been effective at UP. It seems like a way that faculty at other institutions can find support for their own alternative grading practices. I’m wondering if framing alternative grading in the context of innovative or scholarly teaching might also build institutional support?
C: At UP we have our Center for Teaching and Learning that encourages and supports innovative teaching, but I know that even prior to having the CTL, we had a culture here of scholarly teaching. I’m encouraged that the new committee on effective teaching is very interested in including practices like alternative grading in their policy work.
T: That committee is an important point - alternative grading might get official recognition in policy, and in considerations of promotion and tenure, as a good practice and a scholarly endeavor.
C: Departments generally supported trying new pedagogies, as long as it was accompanied by reflection. But how do you create that culture?
T: I think there are ways individual instructors can find that support. Talk to colleagues, find out who’s doing interesting things. Set up an inclusive teaching book club. Find a supportive dean to buy you lunch. And even if you can’t easily find community in your institution, you can find community elsewhere, the Grading Conference for example.
C: Nursing at UP is an interesting example of how local conversation and efforts spill over into other units in the university.
T: We could do a whole case study on them! Nursing really is remarkable and informative both for their collective enthusiasm and for the struggle that echoes some of what we hear in conversations at other schools. The program is strongly constrained due to their accreditation and standard testing requirements. Many of the faculty really wanted to include alternative grading but were a bit at a loss as to how to do that within those constraints.
C: Not just accreditation - also maybe a bit of a culture within the discipline? But many of them are looking for innovative ideas for supporting their students.
T: I asked a few of the nursing faculty about that. Here is a direct quote from one of them:
Interest in alternative grading began brewing out of our “decolonizing the syllabus” work and professional development addressing DEIJ within our curriculum and teaching practices (began in the past couple of years). Part of our struggle has been addressing faculty understanding of rigor and how that relates to preparing students to obtain their nursing license (via passing NCLEX1). I am confident that we can prepare excellent nurses while grading differently, I think we need to find (or discover) evidence of the efficacy of alternative grading.
Another elaborated:
While summative tests sample the quality of student knowledge, they don’t do much to extend that knowledge… A few tensions exist: student learning vs. student performance, holding students accountable vs. meeting students where they’re at, summative assessment vs. formative assessment, and teacher feedback vs. teacher workload. AG [Alternative Grading] promises to help resolve many of these tensions, as long as we can pull it off without sacrificing academic rigor, seeing our NCLEX pass rates drop, watching our community reputation erode, or burning through instructors. For all of its faults, summative assessment works and we are familiar with it, which creates some stasis. I believe AG will be embraced if and when we can demonstrate its success without asking instructors for 100-hour work weeks.
I learned that there was widespread interest in alternative grading (one of the nursing faculty that has been active in both our university-wide and the school of nursing AG communities is doing her EdD dissertation on the topic!) and that nursing faculty have been working within their program and seeking outside resources. Last summer, six of them attended the grading conference, and a group of them also met with Dr. Asao Inoue at Arizona State University to learn about and explore labor based grading in specific nursing courses. Since then, nursing faculty have participated in workshops, both as leaders and as participants, informal AG lunches, and an inclusive teaching book club. They are currently collecting data on the outcomes. So plugging into the larger community helped them feel encouraged, come up with innovations that can work in their context, and respond to push back about “rigor”. Now they are sharing their experiences with the rest of the university as well as working together.
Reflection and conclusions
UP has a culture of supporting innovative teaching and a scholarly approach to teaching, so the ground was already fertile for alternative grading, but individuals and departments can work together at any scale and within systems, and reap the benefits of those efforts. We’ve identified specific features of alternative grading as a community practice and ways to grow and support the culture.
Collaboration and coordination within a multi-section course or in a department helps to build, sustain and support a community of practice.
Cross pollination across disciplines and mutual support exposes students to alternative grading in multiple contexts and offers additional examples for faculty developing their alternative grading strategies.
Support of practice through workshops and conversations lowers the barriers to entry for colleagues getting started.
Recognition as a good practice in matters of promotion and evaluation bakes alternative grading into the institutional culture.
We have also noted some challenges. External pressures, for example from accrediting bodies, may place constraints on grading methods. Institutional culture may also be slow to move and push back on untraditional approaches to teaching. Individual faculty may also be concerned about impacts on work load and implementation. Other blog posts in this series have addressed some of these challenges.2 We hope we have shown that it is worth the effort to go beyond individual efforts, that there are many ways to do so, and that growing your local community can help address the challenges.
For example, check out Finding Middle Ground or Reasonable Reassessments.
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