Building Community as a Catalyst
Advancing Alternative Grading in Speech-Language Pathology from the Ground Up
Kerry Mandulak is Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, where she has taught in the undergraduate and graduate speech-language pathology program for 14 years. Her research agenda has focused on holistic review for graduate admissions in CSD, and through that work, has developed deep interest in inclusive and accessible teaching practices. She is currently completing a sabbatical in the Spring semester of 2026 focused on investigating alternative grading practices in CSD. In her free time, she serves as a lacrosse training partner for her older son, a supporter of her younger son’s pursuit of many hyper-focused interests, a novice birder, and an expert college gymnastics fan! You can reach her at mandulak@pacificu.edu.
In the field of speech-language pathology, admissions processes act as the ultimate gatekeeper into the profession, but likely don’t tell the full story of the skills and abilities that our students and future clinicians possess. Below, I share my journey of how researching admissions practices in our field led me to advocating for alternative grading. I’ll describe how co-creating a national faculty learning community centered on grading for growth has helped facilitate change in our profession.
I teach at Pacific University, just outside of the Portland metro area in Oregon. The university has a unique identity in the Pacific Northwest as a small, private, undergraduate liberal arts university with a robust offering of graduate programs, notably in the health professions. I teach in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (CSD) that will soon reside within the graduate health professions college. CSD as a field collectively refers to the two professions of speech-language pathology (SLP) and audiology. I am a speech-language pathologist by training, and teach in our undergraduate minor program, which provides the pre-requisite coursework to prepare students for graduate work in SLP.
A master’s degree is required to become an SLP practitioner, and historically, entrance into SLP programs has been highly competitive. What we know from the analysis of national admissions data is that GPA is the #1 predictor of admissions offers, and therefore, the advice for “how to get into graduate school” was always simply … focus on your grades. I was the recipient of that advice 30 years ago when I was applying to programs – a 4.0 in my SLP coursework was my only goal (not necessarily what I was learning to get that GPA and prepare for graduate work). As I moved into a faculty position, the advice I received became the advice I gave: grades were most important, focus on your grades.
As I continued in my faculty role, my interest in the intersection between the emphasis on traditional grading, our admissions processes, and what GPA actually predicts about student success in our programs and as future clinicians continued to grow. I developed this interest through serving on admission committees, both within my program and at the national level.
About 10 years ago, I encountered a significant “disorienting dilemma” as I chaired the Graduate Admissions committee within our program. As the faculty began the work of making decisions about admissions offers, one applicant had a history of a “low” undergraduate GPA in an unrelated major, explained by a period of trauma that was followed by a period of growth and resilience. This student’s more recent performance in CSD coursework was stellar. We also viewed this applicant’s lived experiences as being deeply connected to becoming a competent and compassionate future clinician, above and beyond what a specific GPA could determine. We advocated for this applicant fiercely, but from the top-down levels of administration, ultimately, a denial was issued, strictly based on those undergraduate grades. As a committee, we could recognize the importance of academic performance, but did it have to be the ultimate and absolute deciding factor above all else?
The process of finding a solution to this issue served as a lightning bolt moment that ultimately prompted me to shift and change my entire research agenda to studying holistic review for graduate admissions (more recently named Mission-Aligned Selection). The field of medicine initially championed these methods as a way to simultaneously consider a student’s experiences, personal attributes, and context in which their experiences occurred, while still taking academic metrics (GPA) into account. Similar to medicine, in SLP, admissions serves as the gatekeeper for graduate work and therefore the future workforce. If SLP remained tethered to the belief that GPA was the only proxy for success, we were likely excluding many capable and qualified students, with important and relevant lived experiences, skills, and abilities from becoming speech-language pathologists. As a helping profession that requires both intelligence and compassion to work with patients experiencing communication challenges, it’s important that our clinical workforce has both the knowledge and skills to serve our patient populations. Adopting holistic review processes as a discipline, for me, seemed like a logical solution.
Since that original disorienting dilemma, I’ve worked to challenge longstanding beliefs about what merits admission in our field, and promote the implementation of holistic review. Seeing it become more accepted and widely adopted across graduate programs in SLP has been gratifying; however, that led me to another crucial question - why are we not examining how we are grading students if GPA is the most influential factor that merits graduate school admission? I hypothesized that traditional grading practices might not be representing what our students were learning, and was concerned that grades alone might not capture the important skills and abilities we were also looking for in graduate program applications.
Changing ingrained practices can be difficult and slow. As a field, could we build on the momentum of changing admissions and channel it into conversations and discussions about shifting grading practices? In order to start to do this work, I was hoping other faculty members would be willing to connect and collaborate to explore alternative grading - together.
As I began to imagine what would be needed to do this work, I began to see and hear from other faculty members in our field that they were similarly interested. When opportunities arose to collaborate with others, I paid attention and took advantage of those possibilities, and found a community of like minded folks! I am hoping that sharing the journey of finding that community, and what worked for us to build it together, might inspire others to create their own.
Collaboration instead of mentorship
During the pandemic, our national organization hosted a virtual Teaching Symposium on Foundational CSD Science Courses, followed by follow-up webinars on various teaching methods. In those webinars, I shared my thoughts and early experiments with alternative grading, and it caught the attention of a fellow attendee. She reached out afterward seeking mentorship on how to conduct research on alternative grading, and I countered with a different proposal – “How about we collaborate?” That shift from hierarchy to partnership led to a research study conducted across our two programs, and a presentation at our annual national conference to disseminate the results. We were delighted to have a surprisingly full room, and felt we had tapped into an area of interest for many people. How could we keep this conversation going?
Find your people: They’re at your presentations!
At that presentation, we used a QR code with a link to Padlet in order to provide our slides, our contact information, and other resources. In addition, we included a place for attendees to include their contact information if people were interested in this work. Post-conference, we followed up with an email about forming a faculty learning community, focused on reading and discussing Grading for Growth together. The final community that resulted was an eclectic group of eight faculty members that spanned the country with varied roles, responsibilities, and years of experience in higher education. While some of us had already begun experimenting with alternative grading in our course design, others had never implemented it and were looking for ways to get started.
What’s the common thread? Lean into it.
While a learning community focused on alternative grading can certainly be successful with varied disciplines present, having the discipline-specific familiarity of SLP and all of the areas we were teaching, across undergraduate and graduate coursework, also had its benefits. All of us as speech-language pathologists had a general understanding of the content and context for all of the courses we were redesigning. Having that shared knowledge and awareness of what might work for a Phonetics class versus Language Development at the undergraduate level, for example, and Stuttering versus Alternative and Augmentative Communication at the graduate level, allowed us to work from shared experiences and also shared curiosity.
It doesn’t have to be formal, but it is important to be organized.
There are formal methods and guidelines for implementing faculty learning communities, often with the support of a teaching and learning center on campus. We chose to adopt the “book club” format, and began meeting biweekly in March 2024. Every other week, one of the eight of us led the discussion focused on two chapters of Grading for Growth. We used Padlet as a collaborative working space to populate discussion questions for each meeting, share examples of our work, post links and resources, and have a “parking lot” for ideas that we didn’t want to lose. We finished that Spring semester with a “virtual retreat”: in order to bridge three time zones and do the deep work of redesigning grading in our courses, we scheduled two-hour work blocks with several check-ins within the day. This dedicated retreat time during the summer gave us some space for the work that is hard to carve out during a busy semester.
Get your work out there - start talking about it!
Midway through spring semester, the deadline for our annual conference proposals came due. We submitted a proposal to our national conference not just on alternative grading, but on the power of the community itself. It was selected as a “Visionary Session”—one of only 150 chosen from 3,300 submissions, so we were encouraged that these ideas were of interest. We followed up six months later with a proposal for our annual academic programs conference, with a “workshop” format, where we did a series of short presentations on the four pillars of Grading for Growth, and then allowed attendees to work in small groups on a concept or idea after it was presented. What we were gathering from the feedback and this feeling of momentum was that alternative grading was needed in our profession, faculty members were interested and ready to implement these methods, and a community built from the ground up was a way to drive this shift to implementing alternative grading.
Keep curiosity at the core
As a community, we have felt fortunate that the overall “vibe” of our learning community has been one of sharing, collaboration, and most importantly curiosity, without judgment. We have felt the freedom of sharing ideas, allowing a space for critique and comment, knowing that we have the best intentions for each other and for our students’ success, and having the support of other members who are willing to be your thought-partner about your ideas. We also acknowledge the privilege that comes from having our own “home” programs consisting of colleagues that are not resistant to the work of modifying grading practices. While we all believe we are student-centered and also center kindness in our teaching, we also needed a space to air grievances when we encountered student resistance to the work. We kept each other in check but also helped focus on solutions for moments of maybe taking on too much, or making it too complex. We took the work seriously, but didn’t always take ourselves seriously, which allowed for some levity when it felt like the negative feedback from students became tough to bear, even when it’s expected with new or innovative teaching methods. At the core of this work was a spirit of curiosity - about each other’s courses, our programs, and our students, and how we could facilitate their success in our classrooms.
Support others in doing the good work
There are always opportunities, beyond your own informal or formal learning community, to involve others in the work. I’ve used the social capital that comes with seniority in my field to reach out to conference organizers and ask for other faculty members to be invited to present with me. Within our community, I’ve been able to serve as a mentor and collaborator on projects and opportunities that have arisen during our work together, and get to support and facilitate the success of pre-tenure faculty members. The opportunities for connection, collaboration, and the strong working relationships that result are inherent rewards for working in community.
Conclusion
At its core, SLP is a profession that uses evidence-based practice to make informed decisions about the assessment and treatment of patients with communication challenges. Within our teaching, we also have to embrace evidence-based education for best teaching practices. Our community started as a way to learn from each other and to strive toward collaboration in order to build that evidence base around alternative grading in our field. We are looking forward to continuing to work together to design research studies to explore and examine the feasibility and outcomes of alternative grading for more widespread dissemination.
Acknowledgements to my original collaborator, Jen Essig (Program Director, Indiana University - South Bend), and our GFG faculty learning community → Laura Chapman (University of Scranton), Trish Geels (Indiana University - South Bend), Heather Isaacson (Northern Michigan University), AnnMarie Knight (Oklahoma Baptist University), Alli Sauerwein (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Sam Scripture (Worcester State University).
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