Three takeaways from the 2024 Grading Conference

Thoughts from the organizers on what they learned

Photo by Halima Bouchouicha on Unsplash

Before there was a Grading For Growth book or the Grading for Growth Substack you’re currently reading, there was The Grading Conference. David and I hatched the idea for a small, regional STEM-focused conference on grading reform in 2019 in one of the hallway conversations that eventually led to our book. We then started doing the legwork to prepare for an in-person conference to be held in Grand Rapids in summer 2020. We also quickly realized that we needed help, so we enlisted Sharona Krinsky and Kate Owens to partner with us. But the universe had other plans for that year. We ended up moving the conference online on extremely short notice.

That first conference in summer 2020 felt like continuous improvisation for two days, pushing Zoom (which at the time was not designed for large-scale conference hosting) to its limits and doing a lot of Slack backchannel in real time, as hundreds of people from around the world tuned in to participate in what might have been the first intentional global conversation about grading reform. It was a great success in terms of academic collaboration. Maybe more importantly, it identified and satisfied a deep need — disrupted by the pandemic — for connection, both intellectual and personal.

The conference became an annual event, and the fifth edition was held just a few days ago. David and I have handed over our part of the organizational work to a terrific team of organizers who have made the conference bigger, better, and more impactful than ever. We’re grateful for the work of that team and for all those who participated this year.

For this week’s post, we asked the organizing team to reflect on their experiences with the conference both as organizers and as participants, and share: What’s the biggest lesson you learned at the Grading Conference this year? Here are the responses from three members of the team.

Ashleigh Fox: Gratitude and community

Ashleigh Fox (Community College of Allegheny County) is the author of this guest post on learning from failure in ungrading, published back in November.

In the last session I attended during The Grading Conference, the presenter invited us to marinate on the following question: “What are you most grateful for right now?” Within moments, the chat was flooded with variations of the word “community”: overwhelmingly, attendees indicated that they were filled with gratitude for the myriad ways in which the alternative grading community supported each other with generosity, candor, and optimism. Given another resounding theme from the conference—Change is both difficult and slow—remaining in community with our fellow grading reformists is more crucial than ever. Teaching can feel isolating, even on our best days, so the clear reminder that we are richly supported by others entrenched in this work gave me the energy I will need to revisit and reconsider my grading practices for the upcoming academic year.

Additionally, the opportunity to function as both a leader and a learner was deeply valuable. This was my first year participating in the conference as a member of the organizing committee, and I could not have been more impressed by the level of care and compassion with which the conference functioned. I look forward to continued partnership with this vibrant and inspirational community!

Sharona Krinsky: Reflection and (also) community

Sharona Krinsky (California State University - Los Angeles) has authored two guest posts for us in the past: this one on normed grading and another on the importance of handing back assessments.

How did I get here? As I sit here in my chair at the conclusion of the 2024 Grading Conference, I am staring at a blank page, wondering how to answer the question “What were the 1-2 biggest things I learned at this year’s Grading Conference?” Do I talk about the incredible keynote speakers from widely different fields? Do I talk about the STEM examples and non-STEM examples that I heard about in individual talks? Do I share what it was like to participate in a panel about change leadership? But rather than settling on one of those questions to answer, my mind keeps circling around to the question of “how did I get here?”

Many of you have heard my origin stories, I won’t recount them now. But as I sit struggling to reflect on the conference, I am realizing that my biggest takeaway from the conference this year is the importance of reflection itself in the doing of this work. Reflection is really the through-line for me of the work of grading reform. It shows up in our classrooms, in the form of the reflection we have our students do (and often have to train them to do). It shows up in ourselves as we reflect each term on what is working and what is not in our grading practices. It shows up in our community as we come together and selflessly share our successes and our failures, what we have learned and what we do not yet know. It shows up in our research, when our results are both the expected ones and the unexpected ones. It shows up in our conversations as we grapple with what it truly means to learn, and to teach. 

What I also learned (or rather, learned again) is that you can never predict what the future will hold. When we had the first conference in June 2020, we didn’t know who would come, whether it would work (to have a virtual conference on this new-fangled technology called Zoom) and whether it would be worth it. It was worth it. This year’s conference, with over 950 registered participants and over 50 presentations, had so many presenters who got their start by attending the conference in 2020 or 2021 and came back this year to share what they tried. They came because they wanted to reflect on their experience, their learning. They wanted to share it with this incredible community, because this community let them start their own journeys. To everyone in this community, whether you attended the conference or not, thank you. Thank you for reflecting on the important work we all do.

Emily Pitts-Donohoe: Diverse perspectives

Emily Pitts-Donohoe (University of Mississippi) has somehow never written a guest post for us, but that’s OK because she has her very own Substack on ungrading and other aspects of alternative grading, which you should subscribe to (in addition to Grading For Growth).

One of my biggest takeaways from The Grading Conference was the benefit of having so many diverse instructor perspectives in the room for conversations about grading. This year the conference, formerly geared toward STEM educators, opened its doors to all disciplines (and added members from other disciplines, like me, to the organizing committee). As a result, registration for the conference nearly doubled from last year.

While there were some discipline-specific presentations, the audiences for most sessions were coming from many different disciplinary backgrounds, teaching contexts, and alternative-grading experience-levels. Our keynote speakers, too, approached their grading work, and their keynote addresses, in a variety of ways. Laila McCloud and Susan D. Blum took a broad view of the grading landscape, discussing, respectively, how our positionality affects our practices and how conversations in the rapidly expanding ungrading community have developed over the years. Jeff Schinske shared thoughts on how the aim of content coverage can present a barrier to grading innovation, zeroing in on the traditional A&P [anatomy and physiology] course as an example. The speakers also represent a wide range of institutional types (from a private religious research university to a public community college) and disciplines (higher education leadership, biology, and anthropology).

This kind of diversity, especially in disciplinary approaches, is not something we often see in higher ed conferences given how siloed we are within departments. But I think it generated a number of rich conversations. As a writing instructor, I learn so much from my STEM colleagues, even (or especially) when I’m resistant to their approaches. I hope they feel the same. I’m also struck by the similarity of the challenges we face and the common ways we’ve found to address those challenges despite our differing contexts. Reflecting on the ways we converge and diverge in our work has been illuminating. Let’s keep building these collaborative, cross-disciplinary communities.

---

My understanding is that planning has already begun for the 2025 Grading Conference, which will be online next June. Check back later this year at this link for details. And thank you again, to all those who participated and especially to the full organizing team for their tireless work in putting together what I believe to be the best conference, period, in academia.