What about me?

Alternative grading benefits instructors too

Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

We spend a lot of time talking about the benefits of alternative grading for students. But there are many benefits for instructors too. Today we’ll take a look at those benefits, based on dozens of interviews that I completed for our book, discussions with alternative graders, my own experience, and ideas from last week’s open discussion thread.

Giving feedback

Alternative grading aligns grading practices with how humans learn: through feedback loops. This means that giving helpful feedback is the core of what instructors do in alternative grading. Feedback comes first; assigning a simple mark that indicates progress comes second.

From personal experience, I can say that focusing on helpful feedback is so much more satisfying than focusing on the grades themselves. With alternative grading, I don’t have to worry about justifying the exact number of points to deduct (or add, or assign) for a solution – or even what the total number of points should be. Instead, I can write feedback that’s useful, beneficial to students, and puts the emphasis on growth and learning, where it matters.

It’s also satisfying to watch students actually use the feedback, since they have the chance to put it to good use in a reassessment.

I’ve heard similar things from many alternative graders I’ve interviewed. Kay C Dee, who uses Specifications Grading in her Biomedical Engineering class, likes how she has time to “give richer feedback” to students. In her book Specifications Grading, Linda Nilson describes how “With feedback and evaluation decoupled, the instructor’s role shifts from an evaluative foe to a coach.”

Few people get into teaching because they like adding up points. Giving feedback is much better aligned with what many of us love about teaching. Alternative grading helps shift our work away from antagonistic and transactional student relationships and toward the direction of supportive and encouraging relationships. Giving helpful feedback is central to that shift.

Improving office hours

Many new alternative graders discover that previously sleepy office hours take on a whole new life.

Alternative grading changes incentives and encourages students to use office hours to improve their learning. Reassessments without penalty send a clear message that it’s important for students to learn from previous mistakes, take feedback into account, and improve their understanding. Office hours are the perfect time to do that.¹

The result is that many more students start using office hours. The conversations that happen during office hours improve too. Arguments about “getting back points” disappear, because there are no points. Those are replaced with more focused, learning-driven conversations. Even when students bring up a grade, it’s necessarily in the context of understanding how they didn’t meet a specific standard. Josh Veazey, who I interviewed about his use of standards-based grading in a physics class, told me that in office hours “Conversations are richer and deeper. They are focused on understanding and growth…”

I’ve found that clear standards help improve office hours in another way: they give students useful language to talk about their concerns. If a student earned “not yet” on the standard “I can factor a quadratic”, then they can naturally use that to frame an office-hour question: “I’m having trouble factoring quadratics, can we talk about how to do that?” Clear standards help focus office hour conversations in productive, learning-driven directions.

There’s another more literal way that alternative grading can make office hours busier. If you offer students the chance to make a reassessment attempt during office hours, be ready for a line out the door (some instructors move reassessment office hours to an open classroom for exactly this reason).

It can take some time for this to happen. Students are used to the incentives of traditional grades, so they may need some encouragement to seek out office hours. Once they do, they’ll understand why office hours are useful, and they’ll let their friends know – be ready!

Focusing on what matters

One thing I hear frequently from new alternative graders is how the process of creating clearly defined standards forces them to think really hard about what matters in their classes. Writing clear standards means that you must put down, in black and white, exactly what you want students to learn – and do – in a class.

This process means that you’re deciding what matters. Each standard is a commitment to teach and assess that topic; everything left out of your standards is a commitment not to assess it. This can involve difficult decisions, a lot of careful intellectual consideration, and even soul-searching.

The result is worth it though. My classes have clearer, more streamlined, and more focused assessments because of the thought I’ve put into my clearly defined standards (which, as a reminder, include things like specifications or other narrative criteria – there are many different ways to communicate what matters).

I remember the first time I converted a class that I’d previously graded traditionally to use standards-based grading. Early on, I took an exam from a previous, traditionally-graded, version of the class and tried to align it to my (new) list of standards. I was mortified at how out-of-alignment it was. Too much of this, none of that, my favorite topics overrepresented, questions that had no clear focus except for being “fun”… the standards revealed that I wasn’t really assessing what I thought I was assessing. Once I started to focus on the standards I’d written, my assessments made more sense and were better balanced with the most important course content.

Writing clear standards also clarifies and improves your thinking about what you’re teaching, not just assessing. Writing clear standards involves clarifying and sharpening your own values and beliefs about your course’s content, which may bring up assumptions or expectations that you didn’t consciously know you had.

A classic example of this is writing style: Do you expect students to write in a certain formal style (especially “academic English”)? If it’s that important, it should be spelled out in detail (probably via specifications), with chances to practice and get feedback. If not, then it’s something to avoid assessing.² Realizing this, in either direction, helps ensure that you aren’t assessing students on hidden and inequitably distributed background knowledge.

Clear standards can have other, sometimes unexpected, benefits for instructors. For our book, I interviewed Joshua Bowman at Pepperdine University in southern California. He talked in detail about how alternative grading helped him have more flexibility in “extreme circumstances”. When wildfires threatened the campus and forced an unexpected move to online teaching, his list of clear standards helped him identify the most critical topics in his classes – and anything else could be eliminated. Many other instructors mentioned the same thing, in the context of the “great Covid pivot” of March 2020.

Setting higher standards

Many instructors cite the ability to set high standards, and to help students actually meet them, as a huge advantage of alternative grading.

In alternative grading, the fundamental choice when assigning a grade to a student’s work is fairly straightforward: Either the work meets the clearly defined standards, or it doesn’t (yet!).

As a result, we can literally hold students to high standards by writing standards that set a high bar. This removes any worry about a student “getting by” on partial credit – and partial understanding.

Many instructors report how they’ve observed students succeeding at higher levels of work than in traditionally graded classes. Personally, I’m always impressed at what my students can do when I set high standards and support them in their quest to meet them. They consistently do even better than what I thought was possible.

But be careful: Setting high standards doesn’t just mean writing really hard assessments and hoping students rise to the occasion. A key part of alternative grading is helping students meet high standards through helpful feedback and opportunities to reassess without penalty. 

This is such a big deal that Linda Nilson even put “restoring rigor” in the subtitle of her book on Specifications Grading. While I have reservations about the word “rigor”, I think that in this case the idea is apt: grading based on clear standards means that we don’t simply accept partial understanding and move on.

A few important caveats. First, “high standards” are always relative to the context of the class. What’s appropriate for a senior capstone is probably not appropriate for a freshman seminar, even if they are looking at related topics. Those standards must also be defined in a clear and context-appropriate way for our students, so that the meaning and level of “success” is clear to everyone. Finally, high standards are not the same as perfection. Perfection is really the opposite of a high standard, because it makes every error, no matter how minor or irrelevant, into a critical one that causes a student to fail. This doesn’t communicate what matters, instead it confuses students and possibly encourages them to give up.

An intangible benefit

There’s one more benefit I want to bring up, one that is intangible and hard to convey. But I’ll try, because it’s probably the most common benefit that I see: Instructors who try alternative grading rarely return to traditional grading.

Alternative graders keep coming back because they experience what it’s like to teach a class that is more authentically focused on learning, where grades are more honest and meaningful, and where the student-instructor relationship is less antagonistic and more productive.

For many, alternative grading just feels better. It strips away the weird incentives and traps that are built into our “traditional” system, things that we’ve gotten so used to that it feels like they are part of the air we breathe. The result can be a breath of fresh air that you didn’t know you needed.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that alternative grading isn’t all skittles and beer, and I’m not pretending that it is. It can be hard work to revamp an existing assessment system, to create clear standards, to give helpful feedback, and to manage the demands of reassessments without penalties. It requires empathy, deep thought about what students need, and careful planning. We’ve had lots to say about this elsewhere on the blog and in our book. 

But it is absolutely worth it, and for me the benefits far outweigh the costs.

What benefits have you experienced from alternative grading, as an instructor? Do these agree with your experience? Leave us a comment!

1. Of course, we wish students would always do this – but traditional grading disincentivizes learning from previous mistakes, since those grades are permanently averaged into a grade and can’t be improved. So really, alternative grading just removes that artificial block to the natural human urge to learn.

2. To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s wrong to assess students on writing style. Learning about a discipline-specific writing style can be an important focus of a course. I do exactly that in one of my favorite classes, an introduction to proof writing. In that class, we have clear writing-style specifications and lots of chances to practice with them before being assessed, just like any other topic that we learn.