Alternative Grading

Problems with Traditional Grading

Traditional grading has been described as “a collection of grading systems based on assigning points or percentages on individual assignments, which are then fed into an averaging or weighting formula to produce a final grade. Grades usually involve partial credit and are permanently averaged into the final calculation without the option to reassess.”  Alternative Grading Glossary

Traditional grading usually includes the following features:

  • Instructors give students numeric or letter grades, often accompanied by narrative feedback
  • Graded assignments are usually “high stakes” (i.e., few in number, come later in the term, and may not be revised or resubmitted)
  • Students have little or no say in creating or choice in which ones they complete
  • Students do not have the opportunity to set their own learning goals or reflect on their work in the course
  • In grading, instructors focus more on product than on process Beyond the Grade

The potential purposes for grades include (a) feedback on performance, (b) a motivator of student effort, (c) a tool for comparing students, and (d) an objective evaluation of student knowledge. Alternative Grading Frameworks

Questions have been raised about whether grades are an adequate indicator of student learning and whether they, in fact, undermine rather than maximize learning.  Some of the specific concerns about traditional grading practices claim that they

  • Are subjective and reflect the instructor’s opinions rather than an objective standard
  • Are influenced by instructor bias
  • Are not comparable across instructors or institutions because they reflect individual instructor’s standards
  • Represent a mix of effort, achievement, and behaviors (e.g., participation, attendance, and promptness) rather than learning
  • Are not reliable or valid indicators of students’ knowledge or understanding
  • Pit students and instructors against each other because they lead to attempts by students to negotiate grades
  • Increase stress and anxiety for both students and instructors
  • Reduce cooperative learning, critical thinking, creativity, and intrinsic motivation
  • Discourage students from experimenting and taking risks with courses and assignments
  • Reduce students’ ability to learn from feedback because they focus on letter or numerical grade and ignore the more in-depth feedback

Definition and Characteristics of Alternative Grading

To address these challenges, educators have developed alternative approaches to grading. According to the Elon University Center for Engaged Learning, “Alternative grading is an umbrella term that covers any grading method that differs from standard practices. Most alternative grading practices aim to evaluate students’ work based on effort and learning instead of performance.” Perspectives on Alternative Grading

Talbert and Clark have titled their efforts to developing alternative grading strategies grading for growth and have compiled the major themes of alternative grading into what they call Four Pillars of Alternative Grading. In their view, “Taken together, these pillars create a continuous feedback loop that enables students to self-regulate their learning through reflection and revision until they achieve success.” Grading for Growth

  1. “Student work is evaluated against clearly defined standards for what constitutes ‘acceptable work’.
  2. Student work, when evaluated, is given helpful, actionable feedback that the student can and should use to learn and improve their work. Feedback is the heart of all alternative grading practices. In all these alternative practices the students’ work opens a conversation and initiates a feedback loop.
  3. Student work doesn’t have to receive a mark, but if it does, the mark is a progress indicator and not an arbitrary number.
  4. Students can revise, resubmit, or reattempt work without penalty, using the feedback they receive, until the standards are met or exceeded. It’s in the trying again that grading turns into growth.”

For a more detailed description of the four pillars, see Four Pillars.

Thus, according to the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, “Overall, alternative grading aspires to recalibrate the way we evaluate and give feedback on students’ work to incentivize learning and effort (rather than performance alone). These approaches provide clarity about expectations and provide students with the freedom to make mistakes as part of the natural process of learning.” Beyond the Grade

Types of Alternative Grading Frameworks

Several alternative grading frameworks have been developed. The Bok Center has provided brief descriptions of four alternative grading strategies, with the caveats that there is flexibility in how instructors might implement these strategies as well as overlap among them. Beyond the Grade

Specifications grading

In this approach, grades are based on the combination and number of assignments students complete satisfactorily. The instructor designates bundles of assignments that map to different letter grades. Bundles that require more work and are more challenging correspond to higher grades. Students choose which bundle(s) they would like to complete. The instructor defines clear learning objectives, and grading is based on meeting these objectives (satisfactory/unsatisfactory). Students may have opportunities to resubmit work that didn’t meet the standards.

Contract grading

In this approach, the criteria for grades are determined by an agreement between the instructor and the students at the beginning of the term. Each student signs a contract indicating the grade they plan to work toward; the contract can be revised during the term. Grades may correspond to completion of a certain percentage of the work or completion of designated bundles of assignments. This approach emphasizes the learning process over the product and rewards completion of activities (e.g., completing drafts) as well as behaviors (e.g., participating in class discussions). Work is graded as satisfactory/unsatisfactory.

Mastery grading

In this approach, grades are based on the degree to which students have met the course learning objectives. The instructor develops a set of learning objectives and creates assessments aligned with these objectives. Students’ work is assessed on the basis of whether it meets a specified subset of the course objectives. Students are allowed multiple attempts to show mastery by wither revising the original submission or submitting a new one in response to related questions. The final grade is based on the total number of objectives the student has mastered. An instructor might designate essential objectives everyone must meet to receive a certain grade, as well as additional objectives students could meet for a higher grade.

Ungrading

In this approach, students are responsible for reflecting on and assessing their own learning. Instructors provide regular feedback on assignments, but this feedback does not include a grade. Instructors provide guidance to help students reflect on their progress toward meeting their own learning goals. At the end of the term (or at the midterm), students assemble a portfolio of work and assign themselves an overall grade. Fina grades are at the discretion of the instructor, who may retain, increase, or decrease the grade the students have assigned themselves.

Many other descriptions of each type of alternative grading are available, each with its own perspective and details. Some sources introduce additional terms and variations (e.g., criterion-referenced grading, competency-based grading, grading for equity, labor-based grading, and standards-based grading).

Small Starts for Alternative Grading 

Robert Talbert laid out concrete suggestions for trying out aspects of alternative grading strategies in what he called Small Starts for Alternative Grading. He organized these according to the Four Pillars and suggested beginning by choosing one pillar and implementing one small change related to it. Here are changes he suggested.

Clearly defined standards

  1. Write out the learning objectives for a single lesson. List what you want students to be able to do, once a lesson is over, that will give evidence of learning. This article has a template for how to write these.
  2. Write out the learning objectives for a single assessment. Look at an upcoming assessment and give a list of what students should be able to do that gives evidence of learning.
  3. Pick one item on an upcoming assessment and explicitly detail how it will be graded. If you are clear on the standards for an assessment, you can list those right there on the assessment, so students have a sense of what’s expected.
  4. Make sure your lower-level learning objectives are in alignment with your high-level learning objectives. Learning objectives come on three different levels. One of those is the “course level” and consists of high-level aspirational objectives. There also are “assessment level” and “lesson level” objectives that are specific, observable actions. Make certain that the lower-level objectives reflect the higher-level ones.
  5. Audit the language used for learning objectives. When you look at your lower-level (assessment- and lesson-level) objectives, do they all use concrete action verbs that faithfully describe what a student should do to provide evidence of learning?
  6. Audit whether there is a direct link between learning objectives, activities, and assessments in that order. If you intend to assess a standard, then students should have the opportunity, ideally in class, to practice the tasks associated with that standard through active learning experiences, and then that standard should show up on an assessment. Do you have some standards that never get practiced, or never get assessed, or get assessed more often than they need to be assessed?
  7. Do an inventory of learning objectives to see where they fit in Bloom’s Taxonomy. There’s no rule that says your assessment-level standards must be evenly distributed across the six layers of Bloom’s Taxonomy or even that each layer must have at least one standard in it. However, it’s still useful to map your standards onto Bloom’s Taxonomy to see if, maybe, you are overemphasizing one level while underemphasizing others.

Helpful feedback

  1. Audit the language that you are currently using for feedback. Look at the feedback you’re already giving and ask, honestly, is it clear? Does it focus on learning outcomes and growth? Is it given with the best interest of students in mind?
  2. Make templates for commonly used feedback. Open a new text file or Google Doc and any time you find yourself giving the same feedback more than once, write up a clear, helpful, kind version of that feedback that you can copy/paste later. This allows you to compose your feedback and then use later without re-composing it.
  3. Phrase feedback in the form of questions. Since helpful feedback encourages collaboration and growth, phrasing it as a question often makes it more helpful.
  4. Consider giving feedback via audio or video. Sometimes non-printed media works really well for giving feedback. Some LMS’s now have this capability built in Audio/video feedback is particularly helpful in online courses.
  5. Give helpful, structured feedback on one upcoming assessment. Pick one assessment upcoming and give your absolute best effort to put the above ideas into practice.
  6. Give feedback outsideof formal assessments. Don’t wait for quizzes, papers, and projects to give students feedback! A quick word before or after class, or even during class, can often go farther than 1000 words of feedback on an assessment. Give praise in public; however, save constructive criticism for one-on-one moments if at all possible.

Marks that indicate progress (change from points to more descriptive “marks”)

  1. Pick a small assessment and replace points with a 2-4 level rubric that maps to points. This plays on an idea that I floated in this article about hacking your final exam: Take a lower-stakes assessment you have coming up, that is already graded with points. Let’s say it’s a 20-point homework assignment. Announce to students that instead of grading using potentially all of the integer values from 1 to 20, only four grades will be given: 20, 16, 12, and 0. And, those four point values will be assigned using this flowchart— this is the EMRN rubric — with E,M,R, and N corresponding to 20, 16, 12, and 0 respectively. What this does, is implement the EMRN rubric without actually saying you are implementing the EMRN rubric.
  2. Make your final exam pass/no-pass. If you are giving a final exam and have some control over how it works, rather than grading it on points, make it pass/no pass: A “Pass” mark is given for work that would normally receive, say, a 70% or higher and equates to full credit. A “No Pass” mark receives 60% credit3.
  3. Ungrade something. Pick an assessment and instead of grading it with points yourself, “ungrade”4it as follows: First, mark it up with helpful feedback. Then, decide on a point value based on the totality of the work — maybe using a variation of point 14 above where you sort the work into one of 3-4 bins each of which has a point value. Then, meet with the student to decide on a final grade collaboratively. This takes a lot of work, and it’s not really “ungrading” because there’s a grade on it, but it will give you the gist of how ungrading might unfold on a larger scale, and students will appreciate having the input.

Reattempts without penalty

  1. Institute a one-retake policy on a small assignment. Pick one thing, something small that doesn’t require a lot of work to (re-)grade and allow students to reattempt it once with no penalty. Take the better of the two results.
  2. Allow two submissions per week on one assignment for a limited time. If you have an assessment that benefits from revision over a longer time scale (e.g., essays or research projects rather than quizzes or tests), you can announce that, on a trial basis, you are allowing revisions on that item until a deadline that’s a few days or weeks into the future, and up to two submissions a week are allowed until that time.
  3. Allow three submissions per week on one thing, for each week over the course of a semester. This is a variation on the previous point and is limited to just a single assignment rather than an entire category of assignments. If three submissions per student per week is too much grading, you can dial it back to two submissions per week, or place other reasonable boundaries around submissions5.
  4. Allow live oral reassessments in office hours. Rather than doing written reattempts, students come to office hours and do a reattempt right there in front of you at a whiteboard.

Sources

Boise State University Center for Teaching and Learning
Alternative Grading Frameworks

MIT Teaching + Learning Lab
Grading for Growth

University of California/Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning
Alternative Grading Frameworks

Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning
Alternative Grading Approaches

Harvard University Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning
Beyond the Grade

University of Nebraska/Lincoln Center for Transformative Teaching
Alternative Grading

Barnard College
Alternative Approaches to Grading

Boston University Center for Teaching & Learning
Alternative Approaches to Traditional Grading

University of Miami Academic Technologies
Alternative Grading

Oregon State University Center for Teaching and Learning
Teaching Guides and FAQ

Saint Louis University Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning
Alternative Grading Resources

Lafayette Center for the Integration of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship
Ungrading Pedagogy

Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
Equitable, non-traditional grading

Pacific University Library
Alternative Grading Strategies

David Clark
Alternative Grading Glossary

Robert Talbert
Finding common ground with grading systems

Additional Resources on Grading for Growth

In addition to their book, Grading for Growth, Drs. Talbert and Clark have provided many resources on alternative grading, including practical suggestions for designing and implementing a plan for a course. They have a blog Grading for Growth with regular posts on related topics, including

An overview of their work is also available in two podcasts