Labor Day break
And a retrospective of the summer now ending
Labor Day, the US holiday that commemorates the accomplishments of American workers, marks the end of summer and the beginning of the new academic year. And we get the first Monday of September off every year to celebrate. For all these reasons, we’re taking a break this week and will return with new content next Monday.
This time last year, we also took a break, not only because it was a holiday but because we’d just submitted the manuscript for the Grading For Growth book:
It hardly seems possible this was a year ago. The book is out now, and we’ve received many kind words and reports from the field about its impact. We’d love to hear from you about it, if you’re reading or using it.
Since it’s the end of the summer and you need something to read about grading to tide you over to next week, here are the top five articles from the blog from Summer 2023 (which I will define as May 1 through August 31).
Coming in at #5 is
’s guest post on how students view alternative grading:
At #4, David gave us this article about how flexibility can be built in to a grading structure using tokens, deadline extensions, and more:
At #3 was the official announcement of the publication of the Grading for Growth book:
At #2 was my look back/look ahead at what I’ve learned from Winter semester’s edition of specifications grading in my classes and how I’ll incorporate changes into Fall semester:
And at #1, another guest post! This was from
of Vanier College in Montreal, Québec and describes his use of ungrading in philosophy and humanities courses:
The fact that two of the top 5 posts of the last few months are guest posts is very exciting. We’ll be featuring at least one, sometimes more than one guest post every month from here on out in an effort to make this blog more of a microphone for those of you out there who are doing cool things with grading in your classes and want your voice to be heard. If you have an idea, share it with us!
Thanks again as always for reading. See you next week.