Applying for faculty jobs as an alternative grader
Dos, don'ts, and advice from those who've been there
Today’s guest post is written by Katie Mattaini, a Lecturer in Biology at Tufts University. Since uttering the fateful question “What kind of monster doesn’t give partial credit?!” in January 2020, she has enthusiastically adopted alternative grading approaches in her courses, and is a co-organizer of The Grading Conference. She also founded the Bio Grading for Growth community of practice and collects pedagogy books. In her spare time, she enjoys completing subversive cross stitch projects.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this blog to hear that it’s tough out there on the faculty job market. There is huge pressure to stand out amongst the piles of hundreds of applicants for many jobs. Depending on the job, innovative pedagogy can be one way to stand out, including the use of alternative grading or ungrading methods. But not everyone reading an application package may see alternative grading as a positive. Especially with the ongoing, if often uninformed, discourse in higher ed about grade inflation, it can be hard to predict whether this particular innovation will be viewed as a pro or a con.
I faced this question myself two years ago when I was on the job market. I had been teaching for five years as lecturer in biology at a private liberal arts college in New England and hoped to make a lateral move to a similar position at a new institution. I was in the enviable position of being somewhat choosy about where I was willing to go (somewhere in Massachusetts or Rhode Island) and could wait through multiple cycles if necessary to find the right fit. Through my involvement with the Grading Conference and Bio Grading For Growth, I heard frequently that not everyone’s departments or institutions were as receptive to progressive grading philosophies as mine were. Therefore, I knew that discussing my grading strategies in applications might be a double-edged sword. If I were going back to rewrite my materials, there are a few things I would do differently, but thankfully my search was still successful!
Despite being deeply involved in the alt grading community, I have rarely heard this topic discussed and thought it would be useful to compile some perspectives and advice on applying for faculty jobs as an alt grader. To write this post, I reached out to my professional networks to get additional perspectives,1 but I can’t say that’s an unbiased sample!
When considering whether and how to include information on alt grading in faculty applications, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Everyone I interviewed readily acknowledged how their particular context contributed to their decision. From these discussions and my own experience, several common factors emerged that influenced how we decided to write about alt grading in our application materials.
Personal convictions
Kylea Garces, a postdoc and fungal community ecologist, said, “I think coming in as a young person with a loud personality, I’m always in the mindset of being authentic and if they don’t like it, that’s not the place for me.” Strongly held principles around grading is one of the strengths of the growing alt grading community. So many practitioners are passionate about serving their students well, and they’ve come to realize that traditional grading really doesn’t do that. Each applicant will need to decide how to be strategic with their materials while still being true to their personal convictions. For instance, an application package is not the most prudent venue for your burn-it-all-down manifesto, even if I personally love those (see, for example, cross stitch project below). Garces acknowledged that now that she’s thinking about applying to R1 institutions, she’s “a little more wary about being so strong on the topic.”
Need for a job
As mentioned above, in my most recent job search, I could afford to be fairly choosy. However, alt grading is also all over my CV now, so there was no real question that it would be a major focus in my application materials. Tara Slominski, a discipline-based education researcher in biology, studies alt grading and faces a similar situation. Even so, Slominski is at the tail end of her second postdoc and searching for a faculty position. She is “100% worried” about how to write about alt grading in her application package. In our interview, she described feeling a guilty tension between the “I could never go back” attitude that she and many alt grading converts share and the pressure of having kids to feed. Due to the negative reception and pushback that some alt graders get from their departments or universities, she worries that writing about grading in the “wrong” way could negatively impact her chances of getting a faculty job.
Positionality
Unfortunately, any of the multiple dimensions of our identities (racial, gender, socioeconomic, etc.) can and often do play a major role in how our pedagogical decisions are perceived, especially unorthodox ones. In a post like this, it is critical to acknowledge the role of positionality in academic job searches for two reasons. Most directly and significantly, not acknowledging the role of positionality would harm those with minoritized identities; it would also hurt all of us, as racism, sexism, and all forms of discrimination are detrimental to society as a whole and to each of us as individuals. In Laila McCloud’s article “Keeping Receipts: Thoughts on Ungrading from a Black Woman Professor,” she writes, “Black faculty are often celebrated for our innovative pedagogical skills; however, the implementation of these skills come with a cost that cannot be overlooked or misunderstood.” Faculty with any minoritized identity, and especially those with multiple such identities, face much higher and more numerous barriers to obtaining faculty positions, and so face a different calculation about if and how to discuss their use of alt grading.
Knowledge of the department/program (and their knowledge of you!)
Steve Politzer-Ahles, Associate Teaching Professor of Linguistics, told me that he “relied on bragging about [alt grading] to show that I was doing ‘innovative’ stuff in teaching.” He was also sure to include the caveat that this was an application to the department where he obtained his PhD 10 years before, and “everyone on the committee already knew me.” He also mentioned that although there were no ungraders (like he was) in the department, there was a small community at the university, with a regular reading group, and consistent if few presentations about ungrading at the institution’s annual Celebration of Teaching. So he knew that his application wouldn’t be the first time the readers heard the term “ungrading.” Although not everyone will have that level of familiarity with the department or program they're applying to, when doing your research, it’s worthwhile to see if anyone in the department/program is presenting about alt grading at conferences, posting about it on social media, etc. An institution’s Center for Teaching & Learning (or equivalent) is often a good source on whether there is any dialogue about grading going on there.
Ways to discuss alt grading - Do/Don’t/Maybe
The whole premise of this post is that writing materials for a faculty application is impacted by so many individualized factors that no one’s calculation will be exactly the same as someone else’s. Below are some of the best pieces of advice I gathered for being true to your beliefs about alt grading while maximizing your prospects on the job market.
Do appeal to ideas your reader is already familiar with
Even if you don’t want to risk scaring or confusing anyone by using technical names for different kinds of grading systems, there are some core principles of alt grading that will resonate with most teachers and scholars. For instance, nearly any researcher understands the idea of “revise and resubmit,” since it is a common response to the submission of a journal article. Instead of saying “I use specs grading in my courses,” you can say “My classes rely on clearly defined benchmarks of proficiency for each assignment, and I ask students to revise and resubmit when those benchmarks are not initially met.”
Do connect alt grading to school/department mission statements, DEIJ efforts, etc.
Ashleigh Fox, Associate Professor of English, thought of talking about her use of labor-based grading as “something to distinguish myself” in a very large applicant pool. “I remember discussing it in the context of a question about how Diversity, Equity & Inclusion were reflected in my pedagogy… which I then connected as aligned to the College’s Five Commitments/mission statement.” If you embrace alt grading (at least in part) as a way to break down oppressive structures, lean into that!
Do support your discussion of grading methods with citations
The search committee reading your application will be made mostly or entirely of academics, and if there’s one thing we know academics love, it’s sources to support your statements. While the area of alt grading is currently under-researched in terms of controlled studies, there is still a lot of material you can reference to show you are not the only one with this “wacky” idea of alternative grading. Peer reviewed papers and books are the highest form of evidence to many academics; you can also reference presentations (like from the Grading Conference!), teaching blogs and podcasts, and other sources.
Don’t say things that could make the reader feel called out
While we “converts” to alt grading hold our beliefs strongly, re-read your materials once from the mindset of a traditional grader. If anything makes you feel attacked, consider softening the wording of that section. While we know that the U.S. grading system harms students, it’s best in an application to focus on what you are doing and how much it helps students. This is a great place to include evidence: changes in grade equity across groups, results of student surveys, comments or stats from teaching evaluations, etc. If you feel strongly about calling out all traditional graders in your application, more power to you, but don’t expect to get as many interview invitations as you otherwise would.
Maybe use alt grading terminology
When writing any application materials, just like any piece of writing, consider your audience. If you happen to know that a particular department is full of people who use alt grading, then it’s reasonable to use some terms common to our community. However, if you don’t have a lot of insight into the search committee’s familiarity with alt grading, it’s best to avoid jargon. Just like in a research statement, if you have to use an unfamiliar term, be sure to explain it in a way a non-expert would understand.
Special care should be given to the decision about whether to use the term “ungrading.” Even within the ungrading community, the word means different things to different people. Furthermore, many who hear the word for the first time might understandably think, as some on the search committee for my current position did, that it means “having no standards for learning” despite the explanation in my materials. In theory, explaining what you do should correct this misconception, but the word and idea can be so shocking and off-putting to some that they just can’t take in the contradictory information you’re providing. I almost learned the hard way, especially given the context of Tufts’ ongoing institutional discussion of grade inflation. So, consider whether it’s sufficient to provide a description of what you do and how your grading contributes to your effectiveness as an instructor, or whether you need to give it a particular name in your application materials.
Conclusion
If you saw the title of this post and came for me to tell you exactly what to do, I’m sorry to disappoint. But we all know that a good teacher turns a question back to their students, or in this case, their readers, with some additional direction or points to ponder!
During my discussion with Tara Slominski, she astutely suggested it might be useful to close with some thoughts for readers on the other side of this problem: the faculty writing job ads. If you are hiring into a department/program that welcomes alt graders, how might you signal that in the ad? I’ve never seen alt grading specifically called out in a job ad; however, if the ad alluded to welcoming interventions to increase equity or non-traditional teaching practices, I would certainly be more comfortable writing about alt grading in my materials. Unfortunately, “teaching innovation” is less of an invitation, in my opinion, as many departments and programs say they want innovators, but some of them mean only if those innovations don’t rock the boat. Thankfully, every year more instructors in higher ed are at least exposed to alt grading practices. My hope is that in 5-10 years time, this dilemma of whether or how to talk about alt grading in an application package will no longer exist.
Have you applied to a faculty job and written about alt grading in your materials? What influenced your decision?
The views and opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of David Clark, Robert Talbert, or this publication.
Everyone I quote here was interviewed with the explicit context that I was looking for alternative viewpoints for this post.
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I find this really helpful! A grad student who practiced ungrading once asked me if they should say so explicitly in their job applications. I suggested talking rather about student-centered pedagogy and focus on multiple forms of feedback, including students' own reflections. I would have sent this piece, if it had been written!