Knee-jerk reactions

Strong, sudden opinions about alternative grading

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Some people have a strong reaction to alternative grading within roughly 0.1 seconds of hearing about it. Sometimes these reactions are excitement or a sense of finding something they’ve been looking for without realizing it. But other times, they are a knee-jerk negative reaction or an off-the-cuff dismissal.¹

Today I’m going to list some of the most common negative gut reactions I’ve heard, along with possible replies to them. As much as I sometimes want to be snarky in response, I mean for these to be helpful replies that might actually clarify the issues involved.

“Students have to learn how the real world works”

or

“That doesn’t prepare students for the real world.”

I once got this reaction from an Accounting faculty member during a Q&A session (although this reaction is far from unique to that discipline). Their concern had to do with flexible due date policies: Those don’t exist in the real world, so why train students to rely on them?

With a quick search in the background, I found the perfect reply: IRS form 4868 would like to have a word!

Form 4868 is titled “Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return”. It is literally a form that any private taxpayer in the US can file to get an automatic no-questions-asked 6 month extension to their tax deadline. There are similar forms for many other situations. It’s a nice example of structured flexibility that can inform our own classes.

There are lots of other good examples of how “alternative” grading is the standard in the real world:

• Academics know all about reattempts without penalty: That’s the revise and resubmit process for academic journals. That process also involves helpful feedback from reviewers and editors.

• Likewise the tenure-and-promotion and contract renewal processes in academia are (ideally, and usually) based on meeting clearly defined standards, not on accumulating points or getting partial credit.

• Maybe academics don’t really believe we live in the real world? Then the yearly performance evaluation process for business employees is another good example. Those evaluations typically involve evaluation against clear criteria, and if an employee isn’t meeting them, they’re given a chance to reattempt improve with helpful feedback. “Rank-and-yank” is out of favor in much of the business world and has been for decades.

Even if all of the counterexamples above didn’t exist, I don’t actually believe that preparing my students for the real world means I must make my course into some sort of real-world mock-up. Instead, I prepare students for the “real world” – which comes in almost unlimited variety – by building scaffolded practice with meaningful ideas, in a supportive environment where they can make mistakes and learn from them. That helps build the skills and resilience that students will need to deal with whatever the “real world” might throw at them.

“There are no redos in the real world”

aka

“I don’t want to drive over a bridge built by an engineer who had to try 20 times to do it right!”

aka

“Do you want your heart surgery done by a doctor who always got a second chance?”

Er, YES! Give me a doctor any day who’s learned to do the surgery correctly, rather than getting it 70% right and deciding that’s good enough.² Let me always drive over bridges built by somebody who had chances to practice and used them to learn to do it right, rather than messing up and never returning to it.

We’re teachers. The purpose of teaching is to help students learn. Of course students make mistakes. After all, they are novices who need practice. That’s built right into the assumptions of the entire profession. The only question is whether we give students built-in chances to reflect and improve (and indeed build the life-long skill of learning from mistakes), or just hope that it happens on its own. School is an excellent time to make mistakes and learn from them.

So another possible reaction to these statements is: Given that people will make mistakes, would you rather have them make mistakes while learning, or put them off until the stakes are higher?³

There’s a dangerous implicit assumption underlying many of these concerns: That only a first attempt is worthwhile. Only students who can perform well on the first try are “good enough.” That makes it our job to filter out the talented few who can be immediately perfect and discard the rest.

I suspect most people making these kinds of statements aren’t consciously thinking this way. They just have a gut feeling that it’s bad to count a reattempt fully, to give full credit when a student had to try again. But, if we’re only willing to accept students who can meet our expectations right out of the gate, then we’re giving a huge leg up to those who already have the knowledge or skills that we’re teaching. That kind of prior knowledge and experience is often available due to the student’s family background, wealth, where they grew up, and which schools they went to.

The consequence of “we can’t count reattempts” in an educational setting is that those who already have many advantages get another one.

Benjamin Bloom had a lot to say about this over 50 years ago, and I agree with him: “it is the task of instruction to find the means which will enable our students to master the subject under consideration.” Not to filter and accept only those who already know it.

“This is just lowering standards”

This one is closely related to the previous example. In my experience the “hook” for this reaction is – again – concern about reattempts without penalty. By giving students chances to resubmit work, this concern goes, we’re lowering standards and making classes too easy.

My reply is also easy: Alternative grading holds students to a very high standard. That’s because students can’t succeed without fully meeting clearly defined standards. There is no partial credit, no averaging, and no getting by with partial understanding. (For more on this, see “What does it mean to meet a standard?”) Indeed, a student who earns a high grade in an alternatively graded class has fully met a specific and clear list of requirements. Both the student and the instructor know exactly what they’ve achieved, and there is no averaging or partial credit blurring that data.

In exchange, because this is such a high standard, and because humans are human, we give students multiple opportunities to learn from their mistakes. But ultimately, they must meet those high standards, no ifs, ands, or buts.

Not to mention that those standards are chosen by the instructor, who can choose the appropriate level of “rigor” for their standards.

There’s a related reaction that goes like this: “Won’t your student just turn in half-baked work, since they can always try again?” (Although usually the phrase isn’t half-baked…) A smart-aleck response is “Your students never turn in half-baked work?” But seriously, this does highlight something important: We really do mean reattempts without penalty, and that’s not the same as reattempts without limits. Unlimited reassessments – which some alternative graders do try at first – mean that students don’t see a downside to turning in half-baked work.

It’s important to include some “good friction” in reattempts – such as reflections, evidence of engaging in practice, etc. – to help students slow down and learn through the revision or reassessment process. The result is more fully-baked work. This can reduce the danger of students throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks.

“It might work for your students, but not mine”

I’m always amused at this one, because I’ve heard it for every possible value of “my students”. That is, people who tend to teach introductory classes seem to think alternative grading can only work in upper-level courses. Those who mostly teach upper-level courses think it only makes sense in introductory courses. Wash, rinse, repeat with any other population you can imagine.

I think that this reaction is often rooted in the specific type of alternative grading that the speaker first encountered, and that can illuminate productive ways to reply. If they’ve just learned about something like standards-based grading (“my class can’t be divided up into mechanical skills”), well, that does tend to work better in introductory classes that are more skill-based. Maybe it would help to bring up specifications grading, which is more effective in upper-level classes that focus on integration and synthesis. People who react negatively to collaborative grading (“that would take way too much time”) might be teaching classes where standards-based testing would work better.

I get it: It’s easy to think that one example represents the whole universe of alternative grading. So, I usually address this statement with a concrete example to illustrate that alternative grading really is possible in their context. But more than once, before I could answer, one of the questioner’s own colleagues has pre-empted the question with a ready-made example of alternative grading from their own institution, discipline, and even department.

And luckily, we wrote an entire book about how to make alternative grading work in almost any higher education setting! (And we’ve followed it up with dozens more concrete examples on this blog, too.)

“Well it worked for me”

aka

“I had to suffer through it, so should they”

I don’t often hear this one in these exact words, but this is the spirit of a lot of reactions to alternative grading. That is: For many academics, we came through a traditional system and it worked for us. And clearly, we’re all perfectly fine.⁴ So why change anything?

This can be a hard one to reply to, because it depends a lot on the speaker’s experiences and philosophy. Here are a variety of approaches that I might take in different situations:

One option is to highlight how the “traditional” grading system doesn’t actually do what it sets out to do. This could involve showing how traditional grades short-circuit the natural learning process, or how numerical grades can be mathematically invalid. Thus the outcomes of a traditional grading system don’t necessarily represent what we would like them to.

Another option is to (kindly) point out that this is an example of survivorship bias. Those of us who teach in higher ed are the result of a long winnowing and filtering process that eliminated an awful lot of people. Imagine what all of those others could be doing!

I say kindly because — in all of these cases — attacking a person themselves (as being a representative of a system that does this unfair filtering, for example) is a poor choice. It will do nothing helpful, and it’s likely to shut them down and turn them away. Instead, I aim to try to get the speaker to listen to their better angels, to think about how the system we came through could support both them and many others as well.

We have the power to change at least some of the things that cause students to drop out of school, give up on a major, or change their career goals. One of those things is how we grade. We don’t have to enforce a normal curve. We don’t need to insist on perfection the first time. We don’t have to permanently average in a student’s early struggles. Those systems developed out of a long process that was, by and large, developed to rank and sort students, not to support them.

We can’t control everything, but we can control some things. We can decide that what matters is improving, learning, and ultimately understanding. We can design classes and assessment systems that reflect how humans actually learn, rather than working directly against it. Just because we survived it, doesn’t mean we need to make others suffer through it too.

What else?

I’m sure I’ve missed some. What are other knee-jerk reactions you’ve heard to alternative grading? I especially mean the kind of comment that seems to emerge fully formed within seconds of learning about alternative grading. Leave a comment, and we can workshop a reply!

Thanks to the folks on BlueSky for helping me generate some ideas for this post.

One more thing: The Alternative Grading Institute

Something I’m excited about, and you might be too:

The Alternative Grading Institute is a 2-day intensive, hands-on, online experience where faculty will learn core concepts of alternative grading and build a course-ready grading scheme. It’s led by a team of experienced educational developers and faculty who bring broad and deep expertise in alternative grading and strong grounding in higher education. This is a great opportunity for anybody in higher education who wants to implement alternative grading.

The Institute is December 17-18, 2025. Registration is now open, and is due by October 15 ($200 with a pay-what-you-can option).

The Institute is run by the Center for Grading Reform, which also organizes the annual Grading Conference (incidentally, Robert and I are on its board of directors — we have no financial interest in the Institute). Check it out!

1. See also “Oh, you teach math?”

2. In the process of editing, Robert — who underwent rather unexpected heart surgery a few years ago — left this comment, which he graciously let me quote in full:

Knowing a few things about heart surgery myself...

1. Heart surgeons in training absolutely get second chances on their procedures while they’re learning. They use simulations and these days VR to practice, it’s not like they’re working on live patients from day 1.

2. On real patients there are no do-overs, but mistakes still happen and these are corrected in real time, often with helpful feedback from the attending physician if the surgeon in training is a resident. The doc who performed my valve replacement in 2019 was, I think, a resident who got to work on me because I was an easy case (otherwise healthy adult) and my main surgeon was there in the room with her giving guidance and feedback. I have no idea what mistakes, if any, she made but I’m sitting here typing this so it couldn’t have been that bad.

3. It’s not like heart surgeons study from a textbook and then take a test and voila, they are now fully competent heart surgeons (even if they earned 100% on the test). There’s obviously a ton of book learning and testing involved in med school but you’re not allowed to be a doctor until you can consistently meet “clearly defined standards” of competence that go way beyond simple objective testing.

3. This is of course a false dichotomy: People continue to make mistakes even after they’ve practiced and mastered an idea. The learning process can help them recognize and fix or even avoid those mistakes on the fly.

4. No comment.