Grading For Growth: A look back and a look ahead
The year that was 2024, and some upcoming items for 2025
Here at Grading For Growth, we — David and Robert — approach everything from the belief of the importance of change over time1: What really matters in life can’t be measured in a single moment but is best understood through the process of growth and change. We’ve seen a lot of change in higher education in 2024, not just around the conversation about grading but across the whole enterprise. We’ve been privileged to have a small outpost in that process of change here at the blog, and we’re honored that you’ve been along for the ride.
As we close the chapter on another year, and as we make plans for a new one, we wanted to take today to take a retrospective look at 2024, and to look ahead at what’s coming in 2025.
Grading For Growth in 2024
This past year was a big one for this blog. At the end of 2024, this blog had exactly 4000 subscribers. As of this writing, that number is 5650, a very healthy increase of about 41% this year. Speaking of change over time, here is the time series graph of subscribers going back to the very beginning:
What makes this blog such a worthwhile endeavor for us, and valuable for others, is you, the reader. We are incredibly grateful for, and humbled by, your giving a slice of your attention each week to what we publish here. Before we say anything else: Thank you.
Most of those new subscriptions (680 of them) came from clicking directly on a link to an article, probably shared by someone via email or social media. Most of the rest, came from another Substack publication, the Substack app, or a Google search. The takeaway is that the growth of this blog is based on other people sharing articles. So please keep doing that! All articles here are free (not the case for every Substack) and are designed to be shared widely and often.
Most of our subscribers access us from the United States, but there’s a small and (we think?) growing contingent of international readers out there as well:
International perspectives on grading are valuable and interesting, as we’ve learned through guest articles like this one on alt-grading communities of practice in Quebec and this one on specifications grading in the Netherlands. These resonate with us and with you, and we’re hoping to bring more international stories to the blog in 2025. (In fact, next week’s post will feature Robert with Susan Blum, discussing their recent visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to work with faculty on alternative grading.)
Readers are what drive this blog forward, but we get a big assist from other, like-minded Substack publications that help us by mentioning Grading For Growth from time to time, and including us in their “recommended” lists. Our top three partners in terms of traffic driven here, are:
We hope you’ll consider subscribing to these excellent Substacks if you haven’t already.
Top 3 Non-Guest Posts
As Robert wrote here, how Substack decides which posts are “top” is a little murky2. But given that metric, here are the top 3 posts from David or Robert this year:
Coming in at #3 is David’s practical guide to frequent questions about standards-based grading:
At #2, this article from Robert breaks down how his use of a two-level rubric evolved to a four-level rubric, then to three levels, then finally back to two:
Finally, at #1, it’s this one from David resonated with a lot of folks who teach using student presentations:
Top 3 Guest Posts
The real story at Grading For Growth this year has been the inclusion of lots and lots of guest posts. Back in March we posted an invitation for guest article contributions and were floored to get so many proposals that, even after accepting only around half of them, we had enough to run two guest articles a month, sometimes three, through September 2025. The guest posts this year have been incredibly diverse, but they all share a common commitment to alternative grading and student success.3
The top three (again, using Substack’s somewhat weird metric) are:
At #3, this article from a trio of faculty in the State University of New York system gave some fascinating insights on the critical subject of communities of practice, particularly when it involves a multiple-campus group:
Coming in at #2, this article from another trio of faculty goes deep on questions of equity in alternative grading:
And finally, our #1 guest post for 2024 was from Cara Bowman, on how sociology and alternative grading fit together as well as how she used alt-grading in her teaching of sociology:
Speaking of guest posts: A new call
Based on the success of guest posts in 2024, we’re committed to making this blog a home for those who want to write about alt-grading in a longer form. So today we are making a new call for guest posts and a new means for proposing guest posts that will make it easier for people to submit an idea.
First, we have set up a new form for submitting ideas for guest articles. Just click the big green button:
(Or click here.) You’ll be taken to a Google Form that asks you to give some basic info about yourself and a brief “pitch” for your guest post idea. As we’ve always done, we leave the scope of these articles fairly wide open. You might consider:
Giving a rundown of the grading system you are currently using, if it’s an “alternative” one. Readers really like other faculty going into detail on their classroom practices.
Or if that’s too much, then go into the details on some part of your system that is interesting.
Make a “how-to” tutorial on some practical aspect of alternative grading (like this guest post on doing alternative grading in Canvas, or this post from David on grade trackers). In particular, we continue to get requests about “how to do X on Canvas”, so if you’re a Canvas user, please give this some thought.
Sharing a failure narrative – something you tried that didn’t work, and what you learned from it and what you might do differently next time. Not enough people write about their failures, in our view.
Giving perspective on alternative grading from your particular point of view, especially if you are in an unusual position – for example, if you teach a large class, or you’re team teaching, or you’re a department chair. As mentioned earlier, we are especially interested in perspectives from outside the USA on alternative grading, or just on grading in general for that matter.
Something new: We’ll consider guest post proposals on a rolling basis with no deadline. So whenever you get an idea for a guest article, just fill out the form and we’ll have a look at it, and get back with you shortly4.
A few items are worth mentioning about guest posts:
If you want more information about what’s involved and what we’re looking for, we now have a Grading For Growth author’s guide that has all the details. (It’s also linked on the submission form.)
The current queue for guest posts still runs through September 2025. Please go ahead and submit an idea and we will look at these as we receive them; but be aware that it might be a few months before we can run anything new.
We do not publish every article idea we receive. This is a blog, not an exclusive academic journal, and we try to say “yes” to proposals when it makes sense. But sometimes an article just isn’t a good fit for the blog, or it duplicates an article that just recently appeared, or for some other reason we think the article would work better elsewhere. We’ll let you know clearly, promptly, and professionally if that applies to something you propose.
Conclusion
We really enjoyed writing and publishing for you in 2024, and 2025 should be no different. We will continue to highlight ideas and practices about grading from across the entire higher education spectrum this coming year, and modeling just what we expect from our students: engagement with a feedback loop that leads to growth. Thank you again for being the crucial part of that feedback loop.
Maybe it’s because we’ve both taught Calculus so many times.
Here’s the footnote that Robert left on that linked post, only because it describes the surprisingly tricky problem of how to track stats on a Substack article: “There’s more here and it’s kind of interesting. For example, if you are a subscriber and you forward your email with an article in it to four other people, and they all click on the link to open the article, it only counts as one user but five opens (assuming you open the article as well). And, Substack detects an “open” by tracking the loading of images. If you have your email client set to block images, as my Outlook does, then it will not detect an email open if you click the link. Bottom line: We don’t monetize this site and never will, so do what you want, but we encourage subscriptions and reading articles via the Substack app or email rather than simply visiting the gradingforgrowth.com site in a browser, because this way your engagement will be part of our stats.”
Incidentally, you’re hearing from us — David and Robert — just as often as you did in previous years. Guest posts have helped us keep publishing every single Monday. They are why you haven’t seen as many “best of” and “we’re taking a break” posts in the past year.
We’re making this shift to a “rolling” submission process because we've both had several experiences this past year where we have talked to people about alt-grading, and the other person has what seems like a great idea for a guest post, and we didn’t like telling that person “The next time we put out a call for articles, you should submit one!” Why make them wait? From now on, you don’t need to wait for us to ask you for submissions — just do it!
Congratulations and thanks for maintaining this space for all the altGrading folks, fellow travelers, lurkers, and the curious. Happy 2025!