Are you interested in grading methods that take the unnecessary stress out of the process, saving you considerable time and mental energy without sacrificing rigor?
If so, you might be interested in innovative or alternative grading, a broader umbrella term for assessment practices which eliminate or greatly reduce the usage of assigned points and letter grades.
- Innovative assessment is designed to help students learn and improve their knowledge and skill and is a form of grading for growth, where focus is placed on providing frequent and detailed feedback to students on their work in relation to course learning goals.
- Innovative grading encompasses a variety of “ungrading” methods, including labor- and contract-based grading, and specification (specs) grading.
- Because it empowers students to prioritize their learning over grades and embrace progress rather than perfection, innovative grading is central to the practice of inclusive teaching
The evidence behind innovative grading is clear: it helps motivate students, restores/reinforces rigor to our curriculum, mitigates end-of-semester grade panic, saves faculty grading time, and empowers our students to prioritize learning over grades.
What might be less clear, however, is how exactly to implement innovative grading practices in your course. Over the past two years, lecturers Joe Packowski and Emily Esola have successfully implemented specs grading systems in their courses.
Joe Packowski uses a version of specifications grading in his three professional skill courses at Kelley that he calls “Driver’s Seat Grading.” Students determine the level of effort they wish to invest and leverage tokens (or free passes) strategically to support their initial submission or resubmissions aligned to satisfactory or unsatisfactory work. Each student self-monitors their grade standing and drives their experience in these active learning classrooms designed to support students’ eventual transition to industry. As one of Joe’s students shared about Driver’s Seat Grading, “I LOVED it! It was so much more relevant than striving for a random number between 1 and 100. It truly put me in the driver’s seat of my learning.”
Emily Esola uses specs grading in her intensive writing courses that she encapsulates as a 60-40 split. 60% of a student’s final grade is based on the submission of 30 complete/incomplete (1 or 0 points) assignments that provide repeated opportunities to practice skills and receive timely feedback. 40% is based on the submission of six major deliverables that are evaluated with a complex specs rubric consisting of eight criteria, and which come with the option to revise and resubmit. The student response to her grading system has been overwhelmingly positive, and the most frequent feedback she receives is that students appreciated that this grading system prioritizes their learning over grades and that this system includes flexibility policies like revise and resubmit that support them in their progress.
Now, Joe and Emily want to help interested members in our faculty community achieve the same benefits for themselves and their students by offering structured, clear, and realistic guidance to implementing specs grading into your course(s).
We invite you to attend a workshop series in Spring 2024 where you will plan and develop a concrete alternative assessment plan that you will be prepared to launch in Fall 2024.
- Because there is no one-size fits all approach to implementing alternative grading practices, we can help you understand the tools available and choose and adapt the best practices for your needs.
- The good news is that you can start small. For example, you can create a specs rubric to grade one assignment or a group of assignments.
- The workshop setting will serve as an accountability structure but also as a supportive and generative teaching community where we can learn with and from each other.
- We will bring in students for a roundtable where you can ask them questions and here about their experiences being evaluated with specs rubrics.
If you are interested, please fill out this short survey to sign up.
In the meantime, here are a couple of resources to help you learn more about specs grading:
- Nilson, Linda B. “Yes, Virginia, There’s a Better Way to Grade” Inside Higher Ed (2016)
- A Specs Grading Primer created by Emily Esola
This post written by Emily Esola, Joe Packowski, and Lisa Kurz.
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