How alternative grading helps me write better letters of recommendation
Telling organizations what they want to hear, truthfully
Seven years ago, I spent a year on sabbatical with Steelcase, Inc., a global design company based here in the Grand Rapids area. My main “job” there was to conduct research on active learning classrooms, work with academic customers, and help out on several big design projects. But when I wasn’t doing that, I was talking to everyone I could find, at every level of the organizational chart, about what big, innovative companies like Steelcase are looking for in the people they hire.
Not a single person I spoke to, mentioned “good grades” as a priority. Most didn’t even mention mastery of content knowledge. Instead, one statement that a high-level VP in the company made has been ringing in my brain ever since: The only thing that separates us from our competition, is that we learn faster than they do.
The more I interface with our friends in the corporate world, the more I think that most of them, as well as most graduate and professional schools, are all looking for the same thing: Evidence that the person they hire can be trusted to learn what they need to learn, without consuming more than they produce. Every hire is risky, because even a candidate who looks great on paper might turn out to need huge sink of time and energy from the company or school to get them to learn things. So these folks want to know whether a candidate is a good risk.
Letters of recommendation that we faculty write for students can be a prime source of trustworthy evidence in this vein. And I’ve found that having alternative grading installed in my classes gives me a great platform for speaking clearly about my students’ capabilities. Today, I want to expand on just a few things that alternative grading allows me to say.
The student’s work is high-quality and real
Back when I graded traditionally, my letters of recommendation amounted to explanations of what the student’s grade meant. And often the “why” boiled down to “they scored enough points on tests to get into the A- band in the syllabus”. This does not constitute evidence for the recipient of the letter that the student is going to be a good risk for the company or graduate school. It’s just circular reasoning – the student got an A- because the student met the definition of an A-.
But in an alternatively graded class, I can explain to the reader: The student’s grade is not a fluke of statistics, but comes from work that is of demonstrably high quality and backed by specific artifacts. The student’s work was evaluated on its merits, specifically whether it met quality standards or not – just like their work in the company will be. And the standards were quite high, and students are asked to provide real evidence that they have met those standards – again, just like it will be in the company. Student work that doesn’t meet the standards results in feedback and a reattempt, in a loop until the standard is met1.
Giving specific examples of student work is probably not a good idea unless the student has given permission or they have work in a public portfolio, like a GitHub repo2. But I can describe in general terms what the student’s work was like. Instead of Alice earned enough points on tests to get an A- I can say: Alice knows how to communicate complex arguments in a clear and simple way, as evidenced by the six different mathematical proofs about abstract graph theory concepts that Alice completed during the course. And I can explain that each proof required careful understanding of the concepts, a sound grasp of the logic of the argument, and a report that was clear to an average reader and formatted professionally.
I can also tell the reader that our grading system wasn’t like some others, where deficiencies in one area can be masked by competence in others due to averaging. We hold high standards of excellence across the board – just like you do, at Company X – and students have to show consistent, concrete evidence of excellence in all those areas. Again, the goal for me is to reduce the risk incurred by hiring my student.
The student knows how to receive and use feedback
At Steelcase, there was a sign on the wall in the area where I worked that said: Feedback is a gift. Companies and other organizations generally understand what we preach here at Grading For Growth that all significant learning happens through feedback loops. So an interest in learning is really an interest in feedback and how to give and receive it. And it’s quite a big interest indeed, as evidenced by the sheer number of articles on this subject in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy; The Key to Giving and Receiving Negative Feedback; Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback; How to Give Feedback to People Who Cry, Yell, or Get Defensive; How to Give (and Receive) Critical Feedback and many others.
There’s a real concern that a person who looks good on paper might be terrible at receiving feedback, particularly negative feedback, and knowing what to do with it. In fact, I’ve seen instances where students with high GPAs are passed over by companies because the company assumes that having near-perfect grades means the student has never had to deal with, or even has never received, negative feedback3. So any concrete information I can provide to a company about a student’s ability to receive feedback and then use it to learn, is music to the company’s ears.
It’s easy to talk concretely about students’ feedback skills in an alternatively graded course because the entire course is literally nothing but feedback loops. Again, you can’t necessarily describe a specific instance of a student using feedback to improve because of privacy issues4. Speaking in generalities is probably enough: The student was tasked with a difficult assignment and the first submission did not meet our high quality standards. But because students are given feedback and allowed reattempts, after 2-3 rounds of revision and feedback the student was eventually able to turn in work that was truly excellent.
And I can say more generally that the student proved to me, without a doubt, that they know how to receive feedback, including negative feedback, on their work; how to treat it as data and not take it personally; and how to make sense of the feedback and turn it into real improvements and ultimately resulted in an outstanding product. In fact this student did this over and over again for an entire semester.
The student knows how to persist toward a goal
Maybe the most important aspect of alternative grading for a student’s future success, in a company or grad school or just in life, is that it gives students training on persistence. When you turn something in for evaluation, and you worked really hard on it but it just doesn’t meet the standards of acceptable work, you are expected to try again. But anyone who has been in this situation knows this isn’t easy. When you get the feedback and realize that a revision and reattempt is needed, your inner critic says: You suck. You failed. You don’t belong here.
The older I get and the more I try hard things (playing music, learning data science, writing a book, etc.), and the older my three kids get and do the same, the more I realize how visceral this feeling is. And, the more I think one of the most important things we can do is to help ourselves and others silence the inner critic and just keep on trying. Persistence can be terribly hard. But it’s necessary, if we want to get as much as we can out of life.
The students I have, having come through Covid, have lots of practice in persistence when applied to life in general. But, many have never been asked to persist toward an academic goal like editing and rewriting an essay until it’s as clear and compelling as possible, or practicing algebra until mistakes are few and far between. I’m not interested in blaming the right person or system for this fact. But I would say that traditional grading hasn’t helped, being based not on persistence but through masking over difficulties in one area by overachieving in another and then praying to the gods of averages.
On the other hand, in my alternatively graded courses, I can go into great depth about students’ stories with persistence. My favorite one, which I shared in a letter of recommendation with the student’s permission, was a student who had struggled in prior math courses before enrolling in my upper-level computer science course that involved writing mathematical proofs. There was a proof they did that was, frankly, pretty bad at first, but after seven attempts involving responding to feedback they finally got it, and it was a really good proof. The individual proof was inconsequential; probably the company didn’t even know what a “proof” was. What matters was that the student knew what they wanted and kept on working until they had produced something excellent. I was able to say: This student will give a great effort on any task you give them, but more than this, if the results need reworking, you can trust this person to keep after it until the job is done.
Writing letters of recommendation is never effortless. But alternative grading has made it a lot easier, even enjoyable, for me because all I have to do is talk about the things the student did in the class, and explicitly tag those descriptions with what I know the company is looking for. The entire class experience becomes a giant collection of concrete instances of the company’s core values, and I don’t have to make up stories or engage in sketchy corporate-speak to do this.
I find this fact helps with getting buy-in from students on our grading system as well. At the beginning of the semester, and at intervals during the term, I’ll just casually mention all the things I said here in this article to students, and there are always a few light bulbs that switch on in students’ minds that alternative grading is giving them a significant advantage on securing the jobs or program placements that they want when moving on to the next stages of their lives.
Notice I leave out jargon like “ungrading” or “specifications grading” — this isn’t necessary and companies don’t care about this.
I highly encourage all students to do this. Some universities are even moving toward having all students having e-portfolios, in some cases to replace their transcripts. I’m in favor.
One of those instances was me, back in college attending an internship fair. A company took one look at my transcript, saw my 4.0 GPA and immediately told me I wasn’t suited for the job.
Though again, this is great stuff for an e-portfolio, and if you’re a student reading this, be sure to include some work that didn’t start off great but eventually met your class’ standard through your engagement in a feedback loop, and make a big deal out of this to your hiring committee.