Alternate Grading Practices

Traditional grading practices can be grounded in inequitable and inauthentic assessments. There are multiple options for more equitable grading schemes that are becoming increasingly popular. Most of these grading schemes attempt to de-center the instructor as the arbiter of points so that students (and instructors) can focus on learning. If you want to learn more about these grading schemes, you see the overviews and resources below.

As you dive in, note that all of these grading schemes share similar beliefs about what grades and their relationship to learning. Those shared values are listed below.

Grades should reflect students' learning, not their compliance of behavior.
Grades should reflect what students can eventually show they have learned.
Students should have multiple opportunities and methods to demonstrate their learning.
Grades and points are nonexistent or de-emphasized in favor of rich, deep feedback.

As you go through the grading schemes below and the examples from your colleagues, you'll see that they isn't one way to implement any one of these grading schemes. Most faculty end up doing a mash up of these different ideas that suits their discipline, existing assessments, and course design. We hope these examples will light a spark for you to use in a way that works for your students. If you or someone you know at Mesa is doing a variation on one of these, let MOST (MesaMOST@sdccd.edu) know so we can continue to build out this page with examples!

Standards-Based Grading

Standards-Based Grading is a framework popular in content / skill-heavy disciplines and one of the ideas floated in Joe Feldman's Grading for Equity. After determining the learning objectives for a course, you allow students multiple opportunities to show their understanding and proficiency of those distinct objectives. Think here of having your students graded entirely based on how many of the student learning objectives located in the Curricunet course outline they can successfully demonstrate understanding of.

Standards-Based Grading, commonly referred to as SBG, is distinct from the other grading schemes in this section in the belief that grades should reflect students' proficiency in clearly defined learning objectives.

Students are provided a clear list of learning objectives (standards).
Assignments are marked based on students' demonstrated levels of proficiency on each of the relevant standards.
Course grades are primarily based on how many of these standards student demonstrate in their learning on over the course of the semester.
Students are given many chances to demonstrate their learning.

Examples from Mesa Colleagues

Professors Gina Abbiate and Kelly Spoon have re-imagined their Calculus course using standards-based grading. As part of work with a SBG Calculus FIG with Professors Juan Bernal and Sharon Hughes, they started by determining what they wanted students to be able to do before leaving their Math 150 courses. They then created weekly quizzes based on those standards that students can reassess. After their first semester of implementation, two adjustments were made - limiting the reassessment window (i.e. topics from Weeks 1-3 had to be reassessed by Week 5) and having students complete some review before attempting a reassessment.

Contract-Based Grading

Conract Grading was made popular by Asao Inoue who wrote Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Especially popular in English, contract-based grading deviates from our other grading schemes in that it rewards labor, rather than the quality of that labor. The purpose is to remove any subjective evaluation from the grading process, putting students in control of their own success and able to take risks in how they express themselves. Additionally, contract grading allows faculty to focus on feedback as a response rather than a justification for a grade.

Contract Grading is distinct from the other grading schemes in this section in the belief that grades should reflect students' labor.

Each assignment is marked as complete, incomplete, missing, or late.
Course grades are based on completing a certain amount of work - sometimes determined as a class, but typically an 'A' student is completing more complicated or additional assignments as compared to a 'B' student.
Students are entirely in control of their standing in the class.
Faculty can include revisions based on feedback as one of the assignments in the contract, allowing all students an opportunity for growth

Examples from Mesa Colleagues

Professor Jason Kalchik has been using Contract Grading in his English classes for years. In the videos above, he breaks down what he is doing and why he is doing it.

Specifications Grading

Specifications Grading was made popular by Linda Nilson who wrote Specifcations Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time. She also wrote an article on it that was featured in both Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education called Yes, Virginia, There’s a Better Way to Grade. Spec and Standards-Based Grading are very similar in terms of providing students to feedback on assignments typically graded pass/fail. The distinction is between what is defined as specifications versus standards, while you can assess a particular standard more than once, you may have a certain specification like "communication" on every assessment in your course.

Specifications Grading is distinct from the other grading schemes in this section in the belief that grades should reflect students' completion of work to clearly specified levels.

Each assignment is accompanied with a clear list of “specifications” of what constitutes acceptable work.
Assignments are marked based on whether students have met each of the specifications for that assignment.
Course grades are based on completing bundles of assignments to specified levels.
Students are typically given chances to revise their work to demonstrate their learning.

Examples from Mesa Colleagues

Professors Tasha Frankie and Allan Schougaard have created their CISC 191 course using a mix of standards-based and specifications grading. In the video above, they give a detailed overview of their course grading structure, which includes several levels for students to work through, such as:

Intern Level - Students self-learn from their option of a variety of written and video learning resources, then take a multiple choice quiz on Canvas to check whether they have learned the basic information about the material.
Middle Developer Level - Students explain specific topics related to the concept in a screencast that displays student-written code to support the explanation. Rubrics guide the students in what topics they need to explain. These Explain videos are posted on a class discussion, and students are required to watch and write reviews of at least two other students' videos.

Ungrading

The concept of Ungrading was made popular by Susan Blum in her book Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What To Do Instead). Josh Eyler, author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education) is also a prominent figure in the ungrading movement and has multiple posts about it on his blog: A Lifetime's Training Links. If you want a quick introduction to the concept, listen to the Ungrading episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Ungrading is distinct from the other grading schemes in this section in the belief that grades should be minimized or nonexistent, and should be determined collaboratively by students & instructors when they must exist.

Assignments are typically not marked with a grade or other evaluation; instead, the focus is on providing feedback.
Students are typically asked to reflect on their learning many times throughout the semester.
Course grades are determined collaboratively by students and instructors, often through one-on-one meetings.

Examples from Mesa Colleagues

We currently don't have an example from an ungraded class at Mesa, but if you or someone you know at Mesa is doing a variation on ungrading, let MOST (MesaMOST@sdccd.edu) know so we can share!

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