When students get stuck at “Not Yet”

How to help students through a tough spot

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

Here’s a situation that can happen in alternative grading: A student completes an assessment and doesn’t meet the standards or specifications. They earn a mark that indicates progress of “not yet”. They take advantage of a reassessment without penalty – a revision, a new attempt, whatever. Maybe they make some progress, but it’s not enough, and they earn another “not yet”. They keep trying and keep earning not yet, over and over.

Even if they are improving and learning, the student can come to see this as repeated failure, like earning an endless string of zeroes. They start to despair and feel frustrated with this total lack of progress, each “not yet” feeling like it’s dropping their grade (and even their self-worth) even farther.

In traditional grading, even when students do poorly on an assignment, they generally receive partial credit. That partial credit can sometimes soften their disappointment. This expectation of partial credit can lead to a big shock in an alternative grading system, where partial credit simply isn’t a thing.

Even if a student is making progress, the fundamentally binary nature of alternative grades – meeting the standards or not – can give the wrong impression. I’ve talked with more than one student who feels horrible after a long string of “not yet”s, convinced that they are utterly failing (even when I can see that they’re making progress). It’s a real issue, and something we need to think about carefully.

Today, let’s talk about some ways to address this feeling of hopelessness or being stuck, both in the moment, and with long-term changes to your class’s structure.

In the moment

If you notice a student who seems to be despairing of ever making progress, there are a number of things you can do right away. The best choice depends on the situation.

One possibility is that the student genuinely isn’t making progress. Perhaps they’re just trying the same thing over and over, making no changes, hoping to get lucky.¹ This requires a fairly serious conversation with the student about studying, revising, and how to make them effective. I wrote more about how to use a grade tracker and list of standards to make a reassessment plan in How alternative grading helps me support struggling students.

Also make sure you’re giving helpful feedback – and that should include positive elements. The first part is simplest: Helpful feedback is an essential part of learning through feedback loops. Don’t let the only thing a student sees be “not yet” with no clue why. But even if you’re giving lots of feedback, it can be easy to jump directly into a litany of errors. If a student is doing some things well, tell them about it! Be genuine – don’t make things up or over-emphasize small details. For example, in a longer-form assignment: “You have the core of a solid proof here, and you’ve organized it well. Your diagrams are really helpful too. There is one big thing you’ll need to work on…” Highlight or point out a particularly good part of their solution, something that’s genuinely done well. If there are a lot of corrections to address, pick and choose which ones you mention, focusing on the most important items (I sometimes encourage students to ask for “level 2 feedback” on the items I left out). Robert has more to say about this in The care and feeding of Helpful Feedback.

Then, celebrate each victory. When a struggling student does meet a standard or specifications, tell them (in person) that you’re proud of their work. Let them know that you noticed. Give them a high five, or whatever fits your style. Celebrate their real progress! Be genuine and encouraging.

Finally, remember that perfection should never be the goal. Meeting a standard or specifications is not the same thing as having “perfect” work. If a student keeps earning “not yet” due to small details, are those details actually important, or have they showed a fundamental understanding? Look at the big picture of what they’ve demonstrated, and ask if their work really requires a full reassessment. Are the errors central to the standard or specifications? If not, perhaps a comment is enough. This may force you to think very carefully about what you actually care about in an assessment, but it’s well worth doing. Perfection makes it impossible for students to engage in a successful feedback loop, since all errors, no matter how unimportant, make the difference between success and failure. For much more on this, see What does it mean to meet a standard?

Longer-term changes

There are some bigger-picture changes that can make your class feel a bit friendlier and avoid the “not yet despair”. I’m not saying that you need to make your assessments easier. But there are some good ways to adjust how you structure your grading system to help students see it as helpful, rather than oppressive.

Revisable marks

When I teach a class where I mostly use new attempts for reassessments (as opposed to revisions of previous work), I often add a third mark to my grading scale. In addition to Successful (full credit!) and New Attempt Needed (try again on the next quiz or exam), I have another one: Revisable.

The purpose of a Revisable mark is to give students a chance to clarify their understanding without having to make a new attempt from scratch. I only use this when I think they might actually understand a standard, but haven’t shown that clearly – often through an error that is hard to interpret. A student who earns a “Revisable” mark can come to an office hour and do two things: First, explain clearly what went wrong (or was missing, unclear, etc.). Then, give a fully correct solution that fixes the issue. They can do this verbally, on a whiteboard, or even in writing – but in each case I want to be able to talk with them about their corrections. If they convince me that they have indeed reached the bar for “Successful”, then I replace their Revisable mark with Successful, no new attempt required. If not, it reverts to New Attempt Needed (and at that point, I can seamlessly pivot to a conversation about the standard and help them understand it better).

The Revisable mark can help students show their understanding and break out of a tunnel of “not yet”s. It makes progress feel that much more achievable, and I’ve found that it’s genuinely useful.

Another big advantage to the Revisable mark is that I can readily adjust it. If I really want to make sure I talk with a student about their understanding of a standard, I might be more likely to assign a Revisable mark. If I think they need to work to show a fully correct solution from scratch, I’m less likely to assign it. If I’m feeling overwhelmed by grading, I can assign fewer Revisable marks for a while. If students aren’t revising their Revisables, I may set a date several weeks in the future when those marks will “expire” and revert to New Attempt Needed (and, of course, I advertise this deadline loudly and often).

Another option is the “Progressing” mark. This counts the same as “Not Yet” or “New Attempt Needed” but attempts to communicate that I can see a student’s work improving – they just aren’t there yet. This may work for you, but I abandoned it a while ago since it caused some confusion about whether it counted for partial credit, while other students (rightly, I think) understood that it was functionally just “Not Yet”.

Revise your standards

In general, standards (or specifications) should be clear, actionable, and specific. It’s this last one that can cause a bit of trouble in this situation. If you have standards that are too broad and cover multiple aspects of a topic, then students can truly understand some parts of the standard but not others. That likely results in “not yet” when their work lacks understanding of just some parts of the overly-broad standard. This can be especially frustrating for students who – rightly – know that they understand other parts, but aren’t getting credit for that.

One solution is to break apart over-broad standards into two or more smaller, more specific standards. Then students can show their progress on each separately, if that makes sense for your situation. Alternately, you might decide that some parts of the broad standard just aren’t critical, and eliminate them entirely.

For example, a too-broad standard in a Calculus class might be “Calculate derivatives using shortcut rules.” There are lots of shortcuts, all with names – the power rule, the product rule, the quotient rule… so a student who understands some of those but not others will see a long string of “Not Yet”s before they can pass the standard. Breaking it apart into “I can calculate derivatives using the product rule”, “I can calculate derivatives using the quotient rule”, etc. might help.² If you notice that students are consistently “getting” part of a standard but not others, that might be a sign that you need two standards.

The same works for specifications: An assignment that uses specifications is graded holistically, so everything in your list of specifications must be essential for a student to earn “Successful”. If you’ve included too many non-critical items, that can lead to students earning “Not Yet” even when they have really shown their understanding of the core ideas. In this case, you’ll likely need to eliminate less-important specifications. Or, consider having two levels, such as Successful and Excellent, in which “Excellent” requires meeting all specifications (including minor ones) while “Successful” allows a student to miss those non-critical specifications.

The big picture

To tie up this post, I’m going to return to a theme whose drum I’ve been beating for a while now: empathy. Having empathy for students’ real experiences is critical to making alternative grading work. Be on the lookout for places where – even if your grading system is working as intended – students aren’t having the kind of experience that you intend. The “tunnel of not-yets” is one of those places where a student’s experience can be different than what we expect, and addressing it is important.

1. Be sure your reassessments are structured to require reflection and metacognition, so that students can’t just throw things at the wall to see what sticks. I wrote about this here: https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/structured-flexibility.

2. A word of warning: It’s easy to end up with too many standards. There’s a tension between having specific-enough standards, and having an appropriately small list of standards. So think carefully about adding too many new standards.