Thoughts for the new year

Bite-sized ideas on alternative grading in 2026

Photo by Danil Aksenov on Unsplash

Welcome to the first Grading for Growth post of 2026 (our 5th year!). I’ve had a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head over our semester break, but none of them were long enough to be a whole post on their own. So today I bring you a bunch of bite-sized thoughts about alternative grading in the new year.

Try Revisable

Revisable is quickly becoming my favorite mark that indicates progress. This mark is used when students have multiple opportunities to meet standards through new attempts, such as quizzes, exams, or problem sets. Revisable gives students a chance at a “mini-reassessment” rather than insisting that they make a wholly new attempt.

When one of my students earns Revisable, they can come to an office hour, explain the mistake in their work, and then give a full and correct solution. If they do this, the Revisable becomes Successful for free, no new attempt required.

The biggest advantage of Revisable is that it recognizes that sometimes students make small, important, yet easily fixable mistakes. The standard example I use to tell students about Revisable is a simple error that a student can quickly fix once they notice it, for example messing up a negative sign, or slightly misreading a problem. It can be disheartening to need to make a fully new attempt in such a situation, so Revisable gives students a quick way out of that. It can scratch the itch for “partial credit” while maintaining the high bar of meeting a clearly defined standard.

I was originally going to write an entire article about this, but then I realized that I’d almost done that already.

Take notes!

It’s the start of a new semester for many of us, so now is the time to start taking reflective notes about your new classes.

This really applies to all teaching, not just alternative grading. If you’re like me, you likely think that you’ll remember how well a class worked and what changes large or small you’d want to make in it. Also if you’re like me, you absolutely will not be able to remember all of those details a few weeks later, much less a semester or a year in the future.

This is why I always take notes about any class I’m teaching, while I’m teaching it, usually in a document called “Notes for next time”. Some notes are purely mechanical: on-the-ground edits to make to worksheets, changes to topic orders, and so on. But I also leave more reflective thoughts at the end of the semester, often addressed to “future Dave”.¹ I leave notes during the semester, and also take a few minutes to summarize my overall observations at the end of the semester. Then I use those notes to make changes next time I’m teaching a class (and I try very hard to trust past Dave, who definitely knows what he’s talking about).

This reflection and iteration is immensely powerful. It’s helped me significantly improve my own teaching. Most immediately, the notes are a record of which changes are really needed, which is easy to forget a semester or a year later. The reflective practice also helps me see trends in my teaching and in my students, which helps me react to shifts rather than keeping my classes static and unchanging.

All human learning happens through a feedback loop, and that includes our learning and growth as teachers. It’s worth building that loop into your own practice.

Do what you can

Recently, I’ve had several conversations with people in extremely restrictive teaching circumstances. These include heavily coordinated classes, administrators requiring specific final grade averages or distributions, and more. These faculty asked “how can I use alternative grading when I’m so limited?”

Of course, it’s worth fighting against unnecessary constraints. But in the meantime, even little things can make a big difference. Both Robert and I have written about “small starts” for alternative grading – small things that work within existing contexts. Those are good places to start. But even some of those small starts are too big when there are extreme limitations.

In those cases, I think that the best things to do are those that make a connection with your students, to show them a bit of humanity in a difficult situation. Perhaps use tokens in whatever way is possible – allowing deadline extensions, permitting a revision (if you can do that), and so on. Find new ways to give helpful feedback, like using a video or audio tool, that might be more meaningful to students. Create clearly defined standards for yourself, but also share them with students. Use them to organize class time and exams (even if you aren’t able to grade based on them). The structure, clarity, and flexibility provided by these items can help students focus on learning even if your grading system is fixed in place.

We’re hoping to have some more guest posts about these kinds of situations soon. If you’re in such a situation and have found ways to use alternative grading, let us know!

Keep simplifying

I know, we talk about simplifying a lot on this blog, so much so that we call it the “Prime Directive” of alternative grading. What amazes me is that every time I think I’ve got a grading system as simplified and streamlined as I want, I always end up discovering more ways to improve it.

Next semester, I’m teaching Calculus 2 again – this is a class that I taught a year ago, for the first time in 6 years. A few weeks ago, when I pulled out last year’s syllabus and read it with fresh eyes, I found even more ways to remove and simplify standards, streamline the homework system, and generally make things simpler and easier for students while keeping the core elements of assessment in place.²

The same happened when I was taking notes about the Communicating in Mathematics class that I taught last semester (and which I wrote about over the summer). After teaching the class, which I’ve constantly revised and improved over many years, I was yet again able to identify a few places to simplify. In this case, I identified a few standards that were left over from a previous approach to assessment. They don’t lend themselves to good quiz questions in my current approach, which is why I decided to remove them. They had hung around for several semesters beyond their “best by” date. Next time, they’ll be gone.

So, there’s always more you can do! Even if your grading system works well for you, it’s also likely that your students are changing in ways big and small. Trying new approaches is an important way to meet your students where they’re at. Speaking of which…

Share what you’ve tried

If you’ve tried alternative grading in any form, big or small, please share! Have you found something that works particularly well in a certain class, with certain students, in a certain context? Colleagues will benefit from your ideas, your syllabus, your successes and even your failures.

You might think that what you tried was very small, or maybe it didn’t work. Even so, I guarantee that those ideas will be helpful to others. Some ways to share what you’ve done include:

• Talk directly with colleagues.

• Create a reading or discussion group through your teaching and learning center.

• Contribute your syllabus to a repository (find a list on the Center for Grading Reform’s Resources page).

• Present in a session at the Grading Conference.

• Propose a guest post for this blog! (We love all kinds of posts about alternative grading, including “what went wrong and what I’ll try next time” reflections.)

• Write an article for a disciplinary journal that’s focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

There are lots more ideas in my recent post on ways to find and build community.

Be kind to each other

Finally: Alternative grading is an extremely broad umbrella. It covers everything from small changes in one pillar, up to wholesale reimagining of what grading can look like. Alternative graders have a huge variety of motivations and beliefs, from an itch to improve their own classes in small ways, through big-picture philosophical desire to burn it all down. Alternative graders teach in a wide range of contexts, classes, disciplines, students, and more, all of which impose limits and create opportunities.

On this blog, we intentionally feature the widest range of voices we can, so that we can showcase this big umbrella. This breadth in our community is a strength: It guarantees that we are constantly generating new ideas, critically examining old ones, and combining them in new and innovative ways.

It can also create friction as we meet people in different contexts and with different motivations, especially those that don’t seem to match our own.

So as we go into a new year, I encourage all of us to be kind to each other. Welcome new people into the community. Write, speak, and act from a place of genuine curiosity and care. Understand that those in different contexts have different priorities, and what works for you might not work for them. Remember that we are a big and ever-growing community. Let’s meet each other where we are and have fun talking about it.

Thanks for reading. Next week we’ll be back with a new guest post about how to communicate effectively with students about alternative grading.

1. “Consider having two revisions per week. Be careful with this, it could make a lot of work for YOU, future Dave.”

2. This is sort of the flip side of “Take notes!” in that sometimes, in the midst of teaching a class, it’s hard to see what needs to be changed. Distance can add perspective.