For some reason, your second footnote resonates with me and leaves me wondering. Instead of "Success" which is a noun as you point out, have you ever considered "Move on" ? Or "Advance", "Carry on", " Continue" or the likes ?
I think I come back to one of the Four Pillars that says "Marks That Indicate Progress". I llike the marks that I give to be a very brief thumbnail of how the student is doing in the feedback loop, and "Success" does that very economically. "Continue" makes it sound like the student needs to continue working on the assignment. If anything it's the "Retry" that I need to replace with a noun or adjective.
This is a great, well-explained post. So many math teachers are gripped by how essential the content is, that they lose sight of what is (in my opinion) most important: skills, especially of communication. This method puts the focus on the right aspects of learning, as exemplified by your conversation with the student advocating for his score.
I have been reading and writing in this area for over a decade and it's awesome to see more and more people engaging in it. I am a high school physics teacher, and I think we are exploring the same universe. Might I request that you look at some of my work? My new book, The Learning Progression Model, provides a road map for those of us trying to ungrade but stuck in a traditional grading system. I also have an active blog at reimaginedschools.com as well as a new Substack (@elisenaramore). I am not trying to sell you anything, but would love to engage in more wide-ranging conversation and debate. Thank you! Elise
If you're looking for true linguistic parallelism, you could do: Succeeded and Retry (both verbs). Or you could use "successful" as an adjective to describe the state they have achieved and "retry" because they have an action they still need to perform. and thus justify the different parts of speech. I doubt, however, that your students care about the linguistic mismatch!
Thanks for continuing to share how things change! It helps folks like me who are pretty new to alternative grading make really informed decisions. It is so much better than just trying things on our own, hearing *why* things change over time. So I'm so grateful for the continued and recorded blogs!
Here's a possible idea that I've been trying this semester for quizzes specifically: for those that are M and not E, students submit revisions as a take home assignment to bring the grade up to an E.
I've been marking problems as Success (no mistakes at all, submit as evidence of learning; quite rare), Close (revise/reflect and submit as evidence of learning), or Not Yet (revise/reflect for a chance to re-test in office hours; students don't have to do this if they wait for the standard to show up again later).
I still need to work on the reflection/revision part, but I really like it asks all students to bring their work up to the excellent level. I can be picky about notation (leaving off dx in an integral, for example) without penalizing students.
It's a good idea, especially if you want students to have the opportunity and an incentive to try for excellence when their work is "good enough", without penalizing them for being merely "good enough". Perhaps "good enough" is just fine in your classes, and it's OK if it is. But students tend to move in the direction of higher grades, even if it's not required, so having an "E" possibility (even if it's not required) is probably enough inducement to get them to do it.
That was the reasoning behind my adoption of the EMRF rubric back in the day, and I required a certain number of "E" grades for a course grade of A. But you could make the E grade available without requiring it if you wanted.
For some reason, your second footnote resonates with me and leaves me wondering. Instead of "Success" which is a noun as you point out, have you ever considered "Move on" ? Or "Advance", "Carry on", " Continue" or the likes ?
I think I come back to one of the Four Pillars that says "Marks That Indicate Progress". I llike the marks that I give to be a very brief thumbnail of how the student is doing in the feedback loop, and "Success" does that very economically. "Continue" makes it sound like the student needs to continue working on the assignment. If anything it's the "Retry" that I need to replace with a noun or adjective.
This is a great, well-explained post. So many math teachers are gripped by how essential the content is, that they lose sight of what is (in my opinion) most important: skills, especially of communication. This method puts the focus on the right aspects of learning, as exemplified by your conversation with the student advocating for his score.
I have been reading and writing in this area for over a decade and it's awesome to see more and more people engaging in it. I am a high school physics teacher, and I think we are exploring the same universe. Might I request that you look at some of my work? My new book, The Learning Progression Model, provides a road map for those of us trying to ungrade but stuck in a traditional grading system. I also have an active blog at reimaginedschools.com as well as a new Substack (@elisenaramore). I am not trying to sell you anything, but would love to engage in more wide-ranging conversation and debate. Thank you! Elise
How do you determine A, B, C grades with the Success/Retry system?
By counting accumulated successes. You can read how this works in my current class (which is similar to the ones I was writing about) here: https://github.com/RobertTalbert/discretecs/blob/master/MTH325-Fall2024/course-docs/MTH%20325%20Fall%202024%20syllabus.md#how-course-grades-are-determined
If you're looking for true linguistic parallelism, you could do: Succeeded and Retry (both verbs). Or you could use "successful" as an adjective to describe the state they have achieved and "retry" because they have an action they still need to perform. and thus justify the different parts of speech. I doubt, however, that your students care about the linguistic mismatch!
Thanks for continuing to share how things change! It helps folks like me who are pretty new to alternative grading make really informed decisions. It is so much better than just trying things on our own, hearing *why* things change over time. So I'm so grateful for the continued and recorded blogs!
Here's a possible idea that I've been trying this semester for quizzes specifically: for those that are M and not E, students submit revisions as a take home assignment to bring the grade up to an E.
I've been marking problems as Success (no mistakes at all, submit as evidence of learning; quite rare), Close (revise/reflect and submit as evidence of learning), or Not Yet (revise/reflect for a chance to re-test in office hours; students don't have to do this if they wait for the standard to show up again later).
I still need to work on the reflection/revision part, but I really like it asks all students to bring their work up to the excellent level. I can be picky about notation (leaving off dx in an integral, for example) without penalizing students.
It's a good idea, especially if you want students to have the opportunity and an incentive to try for excellence when their work is "good enough", without penalizing them for being merely "good enough". Perhaps "good enough" is just fine in your classes, and it's OK if it is. But students tend to move in the direction of higher grades, even if it's not required, so having an "E" possibility (even if it's not required) is probably enough inducement to get them to do it.
That was the reasoning behind my adoption of the EMRF rubric back in the day, and I required a certain number of "E" grades for a course grade of A. But you could make the E grade available without requiring it if you wanted.