Communicating Effectively with Students about Alternative Grading

Helping students track their grade and understand its meaning

Photo by WWCC, used with permission

Halley McCormick is a professor in the mathematics department at Walla Walla Community College (WWCC), a rural two-year college in eastern Washington State. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics from Western Washington University. Her professional interests include alternative grading (obviously!), statistics pedagogy, and active learning. When she’s not thinking about teaching and learning, she’s knitting or trying to keep her garden alive.

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The challenges of communicating with students about alternative grading

Implementing alternative grading poses challenges, partly because such grading systems can be a significant departure from what students are used to. Getting student buy-in and understanding of an alternative grading system requires intention in setting the tone for a course’s learning community and in providing opportunities for students to practice using the grading system. This post will share some of the strategies I use to ensure that students are informed about and empowered by their course’s grading system.

Walla Walla Community College (WWCC) is a small rural two-year college located in eastern Washington State. Our college has four campuses, and our student body is split approximately equally between workforce education and transfer education.¹ The math department, however, mainly serves students seeking to transfer to a four-year college after graduating from WWCC. We teach courses from the first two years of college mathematics. The courses in which I’ve implemented alternative grading include Math in Society (aimed at students who need a general math course for graduation), Introduction to Statistics, and the precalculus and calculus sequences.

Math classes are typically capped at 28 students. Within any given class, we encounter a wide range of ages and educational backgrounds. Two students sitting next to each other in class may have had wildly different experiences with math and with academia. While I do teach some asynchronous online classes, I have only implemented all four pillars of alternative grading in synchronous settings – mostly in face-to-face classes, but also in synchronous online classes.

In considering the challenges of getting students to buy into alternative grading, I’ve come to split those challenges into two categories: getting students to understand the motivation for alt-grading (the “why”) and getting them to understand the mechanics of alt-grading (the “how”). The more familiar students can be with those two aspects, the more comfortable they seem to be with the grading system.

Communicating the motivation for alt-grading

To help students understand the “why” of my courses’ grading systems, I’ve tried the following strategies:

Talking about my own experiences as a student. On the first day of class, to set the stage for motivating the alternative grading system, I talk about my time as a college student: in particular, I share frustrations I had with being graded traditionally and positive experiences I had when provided with meaningful revision opportunities. For example, I talk about a recurring assignment I had in a course during my first year of graduate school. Each week, my classmates and I were tasked with writing a short mathematical proof; our instructor’s feedback consisted of suggestions for improvement and a mark indicating either success or revision. Now, with my own students, I talk about how this reduced my stress, encouraged me to return to difficult tasks, and made clear the connection between my work and my grade – all outcomes I hope to support by grading alternatively. Of course, other instructors will have their own anecdotes to share. My anecdotes correspond to choices I’ve made in how I grade, and I try to convey that I am not trying to make their lives harder by grading in this way; instead, I’m trying to fix problems I’ve perceived in my own education.

Discussing students’ personal experiences of getting good at something. Within the first week of the term, I set aside class time for students to talk about what they’re good at and how they got good at it (this is an implementation of Robert’s least-hated icebreaker). I am then able to connect their response to the four pillars of alternative grading, and the discussion provides a touchstone for the rest of the term.

Relating the grading system to the science of learning. Within the first two weeks of the term, once students have gotten used to the flow of the course, I set aside class time to formalize some key ideas in cognitive neuroscience about effective learning: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, and metacognition. I have two goals: to give students a framework for how to learn, and to link how they learn to how they are graded. To address the first goal, we brainstorm independent study strategies that support each of the cognitive practices listed and how to implement them in the context of the course. To address the second goal, I am able to point toward the fact that the four pillars of alternative grading turn out to be great ways to reinforce those valuable cognitive practices. I’ve found that reassessment without penalty supports retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving, and that all four pillars support metacognition. When discussing these ideas with students, I don’t talk about the four pillars by name, but I do talk about specific aspects of our course structure.

Students seem to have the least trouble identifying the cognitive value of reassessment without penalty – students readily note that reattempting assignments both allows and forces them to revisit difficult ideas at different points in time. They might not always like having to “redo” assignments, but they can see how the exercise is connected to learning. Marks that indicate progress are a tougher sell – students are used to numerical grades, and switching frameworks is demanding. I lean on the notion that getting information about their progress not only helps students think about their thinking but also helps them plan exactly how to improve.

Communicating the mechanics of alt-grading

To help students understand the “how” of my courses’ grading systems, I’ve tried the following strategies:

Distributing a “punch card”-style grade tracker on the first day of class. This is probably the most important tool I have for communicating clearly with students. I credit Grading for Growth, both the book and the blog, for providing many useful models of grade trackers that informed my choices. My grade tracker has two pages (printable on one sheet). The first page describes what students accomplish over the course of the term; the second page has them transfer what they’ve done to how much they’ve done to get them to each grade band. In particular, a past student coined the useful analogy that my grading system operates like a “punch card” – you have to meet all the criteria for a grade in order to earn it. I print the grade tracker on brightly colored paper and pass it out on the first day of class. Students keep it handy for the rest of the term. (In synchronous online classes, students print their own copies.)

Asking students what grade they want and how they can get that grade. This is another exercise I’ve lifted from Robert – a beginning-of-term assignment where students report their goal grade and the way to earn that grade. This requires them to think through the grading system and gives me an opportunity to catch some misconceptions.

Frequently updating grade trackers using the “student view” of our LMS. Before the first major assessment and after subsequent major assessments, students update their grade trackers during class. They have a chance to ask me and each other questions about how to track their progress. An important aspect of this involves me sharing the “student view” of our LMS gradebook so that students know (from their perspective) how to interpret the gradebook results in terms of the grade tracker.

Having students submit their grade trackers. Two or three times throughout the quarter, students submit a scan or photo of their grade tracker via an assignment in the LMS. This is also an opportunity for them to ask questions if they have them. In my feedback to the assignment, I answer questions but make it clear that I haven’t checked their grade tracker for accuracy.

Relating students’ current standing to action steps. Whenever the topic of grades comes up, I emphasize that knowing one’s current standing in the course is most useful for planning future action. After addressing the question of “What’s my grade?”, I follow up with a question of my own: “What do you have left to do?” The transparency of alternative grading lends itself to a clear itemization of next steps.

Reflection and ideas for the future

Over the last few terms, I’ve polled students about the challenges and benefits they see in alternative grading systems. Those with positive reactions tend to point to satisfaction with both the “why” and the “how” of the grading system, saying things like they appreciate the ability to focus on effective learning because of retakes (the “why”) and that once they got the hang of it, the grading system was understandable and satisfying (the “how”). A remarkable number of students comment on how fun it is to check off different requirements on the grade tracker!

Students also discuss persistent challenges with the grading system, including lingering confusion about what their current grade is, discomfort with its unfamiliarity, difficulty translating the information from the LMS gradebook into a course grade, and frustration that one “bad” category can tank their grade for the course since assignment scores are not averaged.

I will continue adjusting my grading practices to improve students’ understanding of what their grade is and what it means. Based on my experiences with communicating the motivation and mechanics of my alternative grading system, here are a few possibilities I’m considering implementing in the future.

• Meet with students to discuss their progress. I often meet with students at the beginning of the term to get to know them, but I’d like to add an opportunity to meet during the middle of the term, both as a general check-in and as a chance to explicitly discuss their standing in the course.

• Make videos on how to use the LMS to track progress. In class, I regularly show students how to use the LMS gradebook to track their progress, but making videos would afford students more autonomy and independence. It would also provide reference material that I could easily point to when students have questions about their grades.

• Brainstorm expansion to asynchronous online classes. Dependable two-way communication with students is harder in asynchronous settings; how can I adapt my strategies for such an environment? (Some inspiration: a Grading for Growth guest post on using the LMS to convey marks in an asynchronous alt-graded course.)

• “Do less, better.”² This is another way of thinking about the Grading for Growth mantra to “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I will be reminding myself to look for places where I can remove complexity³ to improve how I communicate with students.

Alternative grading can focus student attention on important ideas rather than on the accumulation of points for a grade. I hope that clarifying alternative grading for students will free up time and energy to do the fun stuff (math!).

1. Broadly speaking, workforce education refers to programs that serve students going into the workforce (or to job-specific training) after completing their two-year degree. Transfer education serves students seeking to transfer to a four-year college.

2. While I first heard this phrase from the director of WWCC’s Center for Teaching and Learning, I learned that its origins are attributable to design guru Dieter Rams.

3. Some psychology studies indicate that humans seem more inclined to solve problems by adding, even when subtracting would be advantageous.