Accessible Design
Teaching How All Technologies Are Accessible in Data Structures and Algorithms
Alternative Grading
Equitable Grading and Ecosystems for More Caring Communities
The Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Washington recently invited me to give a talk for their Reflection and Practice Seminar series on alternative grading. I’m proud to have presented the talk to over 200 attendees from UW and beyond. Contact me at kevinl@cs.uw.edu to arrange a talk.
In this talk, I’ll reflect on my experiences with alternative grading practices that better represent the learning that students achieve over time, producing more equitable outcomes by changing the way we determine final grades. Moreover, alternative grading also has the potential to empower students by making space for creative student work that might not otherwise thrive in a points-based grading ecosystem. But grading policies on their own often aren’t enough—at least not in the grade-focused culture at UW—so I’ll also share some of the challenges that I’ve faced and how I work toward better relationships between students, educators, and grades.
The recent 2024 Teaching & Learning Showcase highlighted three UW teams’ work on alternative grading.
- Ungrading Empowers Students to Value Progress over Perfection
- Student buy-in, grading and flexibility in a non-major physics course
- Assessing course syllabi with a rubric: Strategies for inclusive teaching
At the end of the talk, a number of remaining questions focused on workload: How do you approach and respond to workload issues when using Alternative Grading?
It can certainly seem like a burden to provide both helpful feedback and redesign grades to reflect student achievement by the end of the quarter. But many practitioners that use revisions or resubmissions actually report workload staying about the same as before: instead of spending time wrestling with assigning the most fair amount of partial credit, that time is instead spent working with students to evaluate their revisions. Ultimately, this depends on answering a few questions about the learning objectives for the course: What are your course’s learning objectives? How are they currently being assessed? Considering both the syllabus and prior quarter’s gradebooks, which objectives are being underassessed, overassessed, or assessed just right?
- For objectives that are overassessed, can you redesign the assignments such that they are still required to be completed (so that learning occurs), but adopt different feedback mechanisms like instructor-moderated peer review through the FeedbackFruits tool in Canvas? This can be particularly beneficial for giving students an opportunity to see how other students approach their work, incentivizing student engagement by means of instructor oversight, and reducing instructor grading workload.
- Beyond the scope of an individual assignment, can we reorganize the final grading process to reflect student achievement by the end of the quarter? It is my hope that all students can demonstrate excellent proficiency by the end of the quarter, so it may not be necessary to require revision or resubmission of earlier assessments. We could instead focus assessment once, twice, or thrice at the end of the quarter rather than every week throughout the quarter.
- Do all dimensions of every assignment need to be assessed every week? When I taught large introductory programming courses at my alma mater, the teaching team strategically reviewed only a few parts of each programming assignment where the bulk of the difficulties were expected to occur. Likewise, revision and resubmission might not necessarily require the student to redo the entire assignment: Can the student demonstrate their improvement on the learning objective by addressing a smaller subset of your feedback? If so, can you focus your feedback on these objectives?
- What are the most effective communication mediums for feedback? Not all feedback needs to be provided through writing. One way is to first identify work that needs a major revision and provide high level feedback that informs students that their work doesn’t meet expectations. Then, encourage these students to come to office hours to get the deeper feedback that they need through a helpful conversation—it can be both easier for educators, more helpful for students, and potentially build better relationships when we provide detailed feedback through a conversation rather than a write up.
If you would prefer to present, adapt, or extend these ideas yourself, the slides are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.