Alternative Grading Conference 2024 Wrap-up

I’ve been a member of MAA (Mathematical Association of America) for a few years now, so I get the MAA daily ‘Members Digest’ emails. I don’t always find things of great value in these emails, but every now and then I find a gem of a post, like this day in March when I saw someone post about an upcoming Grading Conference with a Higher Ed Focus.

I enrolled in the conference, knowing I wouldn’t be able to attend the entire day for three days in a row, but also knowing that all slideshows and zoom recordings would be posted. I ended up making it to several presentations a day, and enjoyed listening to it in the background while I graded AP exams during reading week. I also knew ahead of time that I would be one of the few high school teachers since this was technically geared towards college/university faculty. However, since I teach AP Calculus and am always thinking of how to prepare my seniors for college, I wanted to hear first hand what trends were gaining traction in college.

There were thousands of attendees at this conference from all across the country (and world!) which I found fascinating. This idea of ungrading, although still unpopular with the majority of professors, is really starting to take root among college campuses, and this is what my students will be seeing more and more after they leave me.

I took notes paper notes throughout the conference and kept a running GOOGLE DOC of any links, snapshots, or resources I liked.

The purpose of this annual conference is to advance the conversation on alternative grading/standards-based grading/ungrading at the college level. Many K-12 teachers already implement some kind of standards-based grading (SBG) system to allow student multiple chances to demonstrate their mastery and improve their score. Many college professors, though, grade using some version of the traditional ‘3 tests and a final’ to calculate a student’s grade with no opportunity for redos. This is how I was graded when I was in college, and it has largely been that way for many years. One of the speakers pointed out that higher-education did not always assess students’ level of mastery in this way though. She showed these facts in her presentation which was thought-provoking and intriguing:

I thought it was interesting that Harvard used oral assessments hundreds of years ago. As I discovered last month when trying it out in my Algebra II classes for the first time, oral assessments are very time-consuming and nearly impossible for a single teacher/professor to maintain for an entire school year with several sections of students, unless they have the ability to use TA’s to help reassess students until they reach mastery. This issue of time is such a barrier that one of the presenters did an entire session on how he uses an ‘army of peer tutor’ TA’s to help him manage the workload of allowing redo’s until students demonstrate mastery. He stated that assessing using SBG was unsustainable for a single teacher doing biweekly quizzes with constant reassessments.

Although I didn’t agree fundamentally with everything that was said by all the speakers, I got a lot of great ideas and resources to use as inspiration for next year.

(Most notably, one of the keynote speakers pushing the ungrading trend said she doesn’t keep up with points because she can’t. She also jokes with her students who say they don’t want to write papers for her class and replies that she doesn’t want to grade them. Another professor on environmental science said she gave her students full credit for just showing up to class and participating - no assessments or proof of knowledge needed. She said she gets pushback from her colleagues who say her grading is too easy).

Every year in June, I tell myself I am going to change my grading to be more like SBG, but every September I go back to my established grading plan. The thing is, I already incorporate after-school help with test revisions to earn points back, allow quiz redos after completing extra practice, and offer other various opportunities to earn points back. I feel there are plenty of safety nets in place for students who need extra time and support. That being said, I would still love to try a grading setup without the POINTS.

My favorite presentation was by a coding professor at Harvard named PJ Van Camp. In an effort to make sure his students were reading his feedback on tests, he created an innovative way of assessing his students that entirely removed points and was focused on students’ responses to his feedback.

PJ Van Camp gave his students an initial assignment at the end of every unit. That initial assignment was either satisfactory or unsatisfactory - nothing in between and NO points awarded or taken away. Students need to submit a reflection based on Dr. Van Camp’s feedback before they would get a score. PJ believes in GRADING FOR GROWTH using feedback - the students get points for responding to feedback and then resubmitting the assessment to get the grade they want. There are only four possible grades in his class: A+, A-, B, or F. Any student can get any grade they want if they follow the process to respond to feedback and demonstrate understanding.

Below are two images of his grading flowchart that show students how to get the score they desire. Even if a student got satisfactory on their first attempt, PJ thinks (and I agree) that students need to see something at least twice to master it. So a student with satisfactory still needed to revisit the assessment by completing another assignment related to the topics and possibly responding to any feedback they got. If they chose to not do the follow-up assignment, they got an A- on that assessment. In the first photo, PJ used the thickness of the arrows to show the frequency that this path was chosen by students.

This second photo is a cleaner version.

Since a grade always needs to be given at the end of the term, this was how PJ calculated the final grades for his students:

This grading method is great because in any class, some students will be much further along than others in their skills and understanding. Everyone’s growth is different, and this way allows everyone to reach understanding and a solid final grade if they want it and work towards it.

Another presentation I found very enjoyable and relevant was by Chemistry Professor Veronica Berns, who figured out a way to make SBG/ungrading work in a large enrollment lab class.

She pointed out that students will ONLY look at a number on an assignment if a number is there; they are drawn to it and will ignore any written feedback. Their solution was to stop giving a numeric score and instead use the following low-complexity scale:

I liked their analogy of ‘a la cart’ grading, encouraging everyone to remember they didn’t need to choose just ONE grading scheme: you can mix them up based on what works for you and your students!

One thing I noticed in all presentations was that when a professor was using a form of ungrading, they needed a way to refer to the students’ initial attempt and follow-up attempts WITHOUT using points. Veronica Berns’ has her chosen words above, while other versions I saw were:

The last two presentations that resonated the most with me were “Grading for Growth in the Calculus Sequence” and “Standards Based Grading in Calculus with Precalculus.”

In the “SBG in Calculus with Precalculus” presentation, the professor broke her course up into 37 skills during semester A and 37 skills in semester B. These are the skills students need to demonstrate mastery on. She gives her students weekly quizzes and each question on a quiz tests a specific skill. There are anywhere from 2 to 12 questions on a quiz, and each question is labeled with its skill number (but not name).

To complete a skill and check it off as ‘mastered,’ a student needs to get a perfect score on that skill on two quizzes - like PJ Van Camp said above and like Peter Liljedahl says in his book ‘Building Thinking Classrooms,’ one demonstration of understanding is not enough for long-term learning. Each skill appears on three quizzes, so a student has three tries to show mastery twice; after that, they go to office hours to attempt a skill.

Once a student has checked off a skill as mastered, they don’t need to do that question on a future quiz anymore. The way she weights her class is:

She has her own formula to convert the skills to a grade. I found that every professor had their own twist on how to take all the data, attendance, homework completion, and skill mastery and then convert it all to a letter grade. Some were more straightforward than others.

I liked her chart her students used to track their mastery of skills:

These were her suggestions to teachers trying out the SBG method:

The Resources page of The Grading Conference website is especially useful and has links to Google Drives full of professor syllabi for many different STEM topics taught. It’s really neat being able to read through syllabi and explanations of the SBG and ungrading currently being used in colleges.

I’m going to process all the information and ideas I got from this excellent 3-day virtual conference and try again to implement some kind of SBG this upcoming school year in at least one of my classes.