What to do next

Next steps after your first (or any!) time using alternative grading

Photo by Tim Johnson on Unsplash

If you started using alternative grading for the first time this semester, now is the perfect time to think about what to do next.

Alternative grading is expanding rapidly, with new people learning about it and trying it in their own classes every semester. As a result, we often write about how to get started. But that’s not the end of the story. For me, alternative grading is fundamentally based on a desire to improve my teaching. If you’re anything like me, that desire only grows after you’ve tried something new – I want to keep improving and refining my approach. So whether you’ve used alternative grading for the first time or the nth time, there’s always more to think about.

This week, I’ll walk you through two big things to do once you’re finished teaching an alternatively graded class: First take notes and reflect on how things went, then look for ways to upgrade your alternative grading.

Take notes and reflect

I’m sitting at the end of one semester with just 3 weeks until the next semester – which I haven’t planned at all. So I definitely understand the urge to bowl forward, start preparing for next semester, and leave this one behind.

But, don’t! Take some time to sit down and reflect on each of your classes, especially ones where you made big changes like using alternative grading. Think about what worked, what didn’t, what you’d like to change, and how the class as a whole worked for you. Then write down the most important points so that future-you will remember them. Taking time to do this now will make life much easier when you come back to teach the class again in the future.

For each class I teach, I create a document called “Notes for next time” and store it with other class materials. Throughout the semester, whenever I notice something that needs to be changed in future semesters, I add it to that document. These are usually detail-oriented technical comments.

Here’s an example from one of my documents, for Calculus 2:

• Offer only 2 attempts on each standard during the semester, then 1 on the final. Offer an extra attempt only if everyone’s really struggling. This will make the quizzes smaller and could encourage students to take the attempts a bit more seriously.

• Standard I.2 seems irrelevant - it’s already baked into standards A.1–A.3 and was hard to assess separately. Remove.

• Standard T.3 includes too much. Convergence is a separate question from using Taylor series. Probably just delete convergence; it’s OK to cover in class without assessing.

These notes should also give you a sense of what I care about, in particular: Simplifying.

At the end of the semester, I set aside a little time (usually no more than 15 minutes) to read through end-of-semester student surveys and try to distill any useful wisdom from them. That also goes into the document. Next, I sit back and think for a few minutes about how things went overall, and take notes on that. I write everything to my future self, which sometimes means writing things like “Seriously, future Dave, don’t offer unlimited retakes ever again.”

Then I pack the document away with course notes and materials. Next time I teach the class, it’s the first thing I look at: A reminder of how past-me thought about the class, right as I was teaching it. I try hard to believe past-me, because he knew what he was talking about! (In all seriousness, I suffer from rose-colored-glasses when thinking about past classes. It’s easy to forget the tough parts and end up re-making mistakes over and over.)

This type of reflection isn’t specific to alternative grading, and I often take notes about class structure, organization of topics, individual activities, etc. But it’s particularly useful for alternative grading. Here are a few questions I usually consider: Was the number of standards appropriate? Are there any that I should remove, split, merge, or add? Did assessments address the standards well? Did final grade policies seem to produce reasonable results, and if not, why? Was the reassessment system reasonable? Was the grading load OK, or does it need to be reduced?

As much as you might want to just be done with a long semester, it’s worth taking just a few minutes to do some serious reflection, write down notes, and then close up shop knowing that future-you will thank past-you for it.

Upgrade your alternative grading

If you’re looking ahead to next semester, there’s another step you can take: Think about how to upgrade your alternative grading system.

When advising first-time alternative graders, my mantra is to keep it simple. That’s important for any alternative grading system, no matter how new or old. There are ways to upgrade and extend an alternative grading system that make it work better for you, without adding significant complexity. In many cases, the best upgrades are simplifications!

Here are a few upgrades that you could consider after an initial implementation of alternative grading.

Focus your marks. The goal of marks that indicate progress is to, well, indicate progress towards meeting specific goals. The goals are your standards, specifications, learning targets, whatever you may call them.

Do the marks you’re using communicate the types of progress that you most care about? There’s nothing wrong with a simple Successful/Not Yet system of marks. In fact, that’s a great default. But sometimes you want to communicate more to students about the quality of their progress. Here are examples of other marks that might be helpful.

Revisable: When using quizzes or exams, students who don’t earn Successful usually need to make a new attempt on a future quiz or exam. Sometimes a student makes a small enough mistake, or showcases a minor misconception, that a full redo feels like overkill. But at the same time, that error might be big enough that you’re not willing to simply call the work Successful. In that case, I use a third mark: Revisable, which allows a student to come to an office hour, explain what went wrong, and tell me how they would fix it. If they convince me that they actually have thorough understanding (perhaps after some additional questioning), the mark upgrades to Successful. If not, the conversation easily pivots to helping them understand, the mark reverts to Not Yet, and they can try again later. The Revisable mark has lots of benefits: Students who genuinely made a “silly” mistake can fix it without having to fully redo a problem, it saves grading time for the instructor, and it gives students a sense of progress that can be missing from a Not Yet.

Excellent: Sometimes in addition to giving credit to students who do correct (but maybe not great) work, you also want to acknowledge those whose work really shines. For this, an Excellent mark can help. In this case, there are essentially two levels of “passing”: Both Successful and Excellent indicate that a student has fully understood the material, but Excellent counts in some additional way. For example, in classes where part of the goal is to learn about communication and writing, I use Excellent to indicate writing that is exceptionally clear or concise. In these cases, my final grade requirements for an A include earning Excellent on several writing assignments. Because regular Satisfactory marks are enough for a B or C, students can still pass class without having to be excellent communicators, but they must push into higher-quality communication to reach the highest grade. In introductory classes or ones where I truly am only looking for evidence of understanding, I don’t use Excellent. You could use Excellent to mean something else; whatever it may be, communicate that to students as part of your clearly defined standards.

This advice can cut the other way too: If you started out using a multi-level rubric like EMRN, you might have realized that some of those marks don’t fit your goals. In that case, you could simplify your rubric by removing marks. As Robert wrote, he’s removed marks to simplify his grading system while still communicating much of the same information.

Remove grades where they don’t matter. Alternative grading tends to focus on, well, grading. But not everything needs to be graded. Take a look at your assignments: Do you need to assign a mark on all of them? In many cases, you probably don’t. Students can be interested and engaged in learning without the need for grade-based motivation.

Examples of assignments where I don’t assign anything like a “grade” include: pre-class preparation (aka “daily prep”, a common part of flipped classes), presentations, attendance, participation, and in-class work. These are things that I want students to do, generally as a way to practice and improve, but I don’t want to evaluate students as they practice.

For some of these types of assignments or activities, I just record whether the student has completed them (usually with a minimum level of effort, but not necessarily correctness). Then I use that data to intervene if I notice a student showing a downhill trend. Taking this a step farther, I sometimes use an “engagement credit” system: Students can collect “engagement credits” for completing these types of assignments, with the total number of credits serving as one of the final grade requirements. In this case, there are two essential features: First, students have many possible ways to earn these credits so that they aren’t being coerced into completing irrelevant work, and second, the points represent only completion, not quality. But most often, I just don’t grade these items at all. Removing grade pressure from irrelevant items simplifies your system and lets students focus more on learning than on playing the game.

Eliminate assessments you don’t need. This takes the previous idea even farther. Step back and look at your assessments. The goal of an assessment is to give students a chance to demonstrate their learning (and often, in the process of doing so, learn more). Do all of your assessments do that?

I’m willing to bet that you have at least one assessment in any given class that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it’s a quiz on a topic that isn’t a big deal, but you included it out of a sense of obligation. Why not cut that quiz (and the corresponding standard)? Maybe it’s an essay with a topic that students don’t seem to care about. Why not eliminate it or replace it with a more interesting assignment? Perhaps you assign two major projects. Could students show as much learning through just one carefully chosen project, perhaps one in which they have flexibility to choose a topic or a format of their own?

You’re not obligated to keep using assessments that don’t achieve their goals.¹ Eliminating those assessments gives you more space to teach, and students more space to learn.

Ask students. Asking students to self-assess can – in some situations – give you insight into things that might be completely invisible to you. This is especially true when it comes to engagement and participation. Consider asking students how they’ve engaged with the course, and then trust their responses. You might be surprised at what they’ve done! One excellent way to do this (which we discuss in our book) is to ask students for examples of ways they can demonstrate participation, collate their responses, and then use that as an outline for them to self-assess in the future.

Self-assessment isn’t always the right choice. Students are by definition not experts when learning a new topic, as is typically the case during a class. As such, it’s hard for them to accurately self-assess content knowledge. But if you’re seeking insight into how students think, what they do, and so on, don’t guess – ask them!

Make contingency plans. The second time you use alternative grading, you’ll have a much better sense of the pinch points and rough edges in your system. This lets you plan for potential difficulties ahead of time. This is especially true for addressing ways that students engage with your system. For example, with a new grading system, you might need new ways to identify struggling students. With one semester under your belt, you can build in ways to identify them and intervene sooner. If you found that students seemed surprised by final grade categories, that suggests creating multiple – and earlier – chances for students to engage with grades and ask questions. Wherever you felt friction, you have a chance to avoid being in reaction mode next time.

Keep iterating

This whole post could be summed up in one word: Iterate. Keep thinking about your classes, your goals, and your approaches. Engage in your own feedback loop by reflecting, revising, and improving. Small, thoughtful changes, compounded over semesters, can lead you to a grading system that’s tailored to you, your students, and your situation. I know that I’m constantly tweaking and editing as my teaching and my students evolve. Keep at it!

1. Unless you are required to offer certain assessments in a coordinated course or by department requirements – but that’s a different issue, and one that is now in my queue for a future blog post!