The Grading Podcast

Dave: An idea I would like to get out there a little more is there’s not just one way to do it. And I know we’ve talked about this a lot already today, but there’s so many approaches to alternative grading and there’s some common underlying principles, but I feel like it’s pointless and counterproductive to argue about what the best approach is.

Everybody’s situation is different. Everybody teaches different students in different classes in a different institution. There’s things you can do that are better, and if you are doing those and you are thinking about them and caring about them, then if that’s different from what I’m doing, that doesn’t matter.

Right? There’s not just one way to do it, and we can all be improving our grading and assessment practices in different ways, and that is okay.

Bosley: Welcome to the Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning. From traditional grading to alternative methods of grading, we’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our students’ success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K-12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Bosley: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. As always, I’m Robert Bosley, one of your co-hosts here with Sharona Krinsky. How are you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m doing well. You know, I’m excited to be back on the pod, excited for people to be listening if they’re still listening to us. So yeah, I’m doing well.

How about you?

Bosley: I am actually doing really good and I’m very excited today. We, again, have a very interesting guest, a math educator, author, one of the original organizers of the grading conference, dr. David Clark. Hello and welcome.

Dave: Hi.

Sharona: Hi, Dave. How are you?

Dave: Hi. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, it’s good to see you guys.

Sharona: Absolutely. So just to add a little bit to Boz’s introduction, you are, as far as I know, a PhD mathematician working at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So correct me if any of that is incorrect.

Dave: No. That you’ve, you’ve absolutely got it. Yeah. I’m an associate professor of math. So, sorry, I don’t know what else to actually add here.

Sharona: That’s fine.

Bosley: Yeah. So one of the first things we always like to do, David, when we have a new guest on, is kind of get your origin story. Like how did you get started in this world of alternative grading?

Dave: Yeah. So I can dig back pretty far to when I first started thinking about it.

And I remember this very distinctly, because I was a grad student and I was teaching Calculus two. And I did a lot of Calculus two as a grad student, and you can imagine that’s got a prerequisite of Calculus one. And I was always really annoyed when students would come into Calculus two and they didn’t really know the stuff from Calculus one.

And I kind of recognized that as, yeah, I was a beginning teacher at that point, but what it inspired in me was this thought that wouldn’t it be really neat if, instead of just knowing that, you know, this student came into Calc two with a B in Calc one. I’d rather know what it was they actually did in Calc one.

Right? How did they do on this? How did they do on that? And I could sort of see where they needed help and where they were solid already. And so I was in my brain kind of inventing this thing that I would call standards-based grading now. But I was a grad student and so I couldn’t do that, right? I didn’t have that level of control.

And it all kind of went into the background until I had graduated and I was doing a postdoc and I was teaching and doing a professional development seminar, basically, and I learned about this thing called standards-based grading in that seminar. And I, it was just like a lightning bolt to me. I was like, oh my gosh, this is that thing that I was daydreaming about, you know, a couple of years ago.

And I learned about it from this guy who was using it as it was almost incidental to what he was talking about. It was just, oh yeah, I do this sort of thing because I really care about my students being able to show me what they know and to show and understand things better rather than just having this one and done approach.

And that caught me so much that I went, and like the next class that I taught, I just decided I’m going to do that. I’m going to use standards-based grading right away. And I did, and it was ridiculous. Like looking back at it now, what I did was so complicated and so just hard to understand and deal with, and it was really all about me, right?

I wanted to know what the students were doing, and it wasn’t about them at all. But it was inadvertently really good. Like I realized all the good things that were coming from it so much that I just never looked back after that point.

Bosley: So, yeah, and that’s kind of funny because you both have something that has been very common amongst almost everyone we’ve talked to, and something that wasn’t very common.

Most of the people, including ourselves, there’s some really bad thing that happened that brought us to alternative grading. You know, and I’ve talked about my student Danny Flores, we’ve heard from several of our other people about just this really bad experience.

You didn’t have that. You were actually thinking about that beforehand. That’s, that’s, I find that very interesting. But yet at the same time, you’re first attempt at it wasn’t the most successful. Which again, almost everyone we’ve ever talked to, the first… it’s better and people don’t look back, but that first one really is an issue, which is part of the reason we’re doing this podcast is because it is so common for that first one just to be a nightmare.

But I know when Sharona and I did this and I know some of the other people that we’ve talked to, they didn’t have a lot of those resources, a lot of things to turn to. So that’s, like I said, one of the goals we’re hoping to accomplish with this podcast is putting some more resources out there so people don’t get frustrated. Because it almost seems universal. That first one is rough.

Dave: And it’s sort of like any kind of learning, right? You know, your first time around, maybe you don’t quite get it all. You have got to have a couple of go rounds before you really get to where you’re happy with it. But yeah, there are so many more resources available nowadays that, I’m really glad you guys have this podcast because it would’ve been great to have that kind of support. I was just making it up, right? All I knew was like the name and the basic idea, so…

Sharona: Well, and that leads me to two questions, which is, you mentioned resources, so I definitely want to hear you talk about the new book you have out with Robert Talbert, because that’s going to be one of big resources, but I also want to know, maybe before we get to that, so where are you now? So you started this standards based journey and how long, if you’re willing to share and, or I might’ve just Space Cadeted and missed it, but how long have you, when was that original one?

Dave: You’re right. I didn’t say that actually.

The first time I used standards-based grading was 10 or 11 years ago. And so yeah, ever since then I’ve been using it at least occasionally and nowadays full-time. So it’s been a lot of semesters of revision and attempting and, and simplifying actually.

Sharona: So could you describe a little bit your current practice, like what courses you have it in now and, and how that looks?

Dave: Yeah, so I use some kind of alternative grading in every class that I teach. So these are things like various calculus classes. I teach a lot of geometry for future teachers, so that’s an upper level geometry class.

In our math department we have an introduction to proof writing class, which is sort of a bridge between foundations classes and classes for the major. So any of these that I use, anything that I do, I use some kind of alternative grading, but it really looks different. It can look very different from class to class.

And that’s one of the things that I figured out is that there really isn’t a one size fits all solution to what kind of grading works best. So, for example, in a calculus class, that tends to be very skills-based, right? There’s a lot of fairly distinct, specific things I want to check that the student can complete that skill.

And so I use what I would call standards-based grading, focusing on a bunch of individual skills. But in like that geometry class I mentioned, there’s some really high level stuff. We’re writing proofs, which are both writing and mathematical and involve synthesizing ideas.

And I’m not worried about the individual skills. I want to see if they can put it all together. And so I’m using what I would call specifications grading in that case, where I’m sort of looking holistically at students being able to put all of these ideas together in a coherent manner. And in between, sometimes I use elements of both when there’s elements of both skills and holistically, you know, combining or synthesizing things. So I used some specific names there, standards-based grading and specifications. I just think of those as ingredients, right? I can pick and choose based on the elements of the class and what I want to emphasize in my, in my assessment practice.

Bosley: Yeah, we kind of refer to those as the many different flavors of alternative grading.

Sharona: Some people like chocolate, some people like Strawberry, some people like Neapolitan. You know, it all works.

Dave: Yeah. And they’re all right, they’re all useful in different places. I wouldn’t pick just one flavor, you know? Depends.

Sharona: Well, and I think you’re saying the same thing that we’ve come to realize, which is that context, it really matters. And another thing that I like to say now is I’m realizing that grading is almost the most important component of a relationship between a student and an instructor. Right?

Dave: That’s an important thing. Yeah. Even if some people, and I’ve done this as well, try to remove grades as much as possible in the class, that’s still an important element of that relationship then, right? Like the fact that you made that choice is an important part of how you’re choosing to relate to students and what you’re choosing to emphasize in that class.

Sharona: And yeah, you’re right. It’s absence or it’s presence. It overwhelms, in my opinion, it overwhelms, whether we want it to or not, in our current structure grading overwhelms every other element of the student instructor relationship. So it behooves us to be as intentional and values aligned as we can with our grading and our personal values as instructors.

Dave: It would be lovely to live in a world where we didn’t have to worry about grades at all. But that is not the world that we live in. Right? And they serve a purpose. And I think that if we’re going to use them, then it’s important to do something that’s humane, right? As we’re relating to students.

Sharona: Well, you have the most amazing segues though, oh Boz, do you want to..

Bosley: No, go ahead.

Sharona: I was going to say, you just said they serve a purpose and that of course is the other thing I want to talk to you about, which is that purpose. Because you’ve had a lot of discussions and conversations about this word "artificial scarcity", and I think it relates in part to the purpose of grades.

So do you want to share some of your thoughts on all that stuff?

Dave: Sure. So yeah, so I like to think, I like to use this idea of artificial scarcity as sort of a useful lens to examine what matters in grading, but just in almost anything in academia, for sure. And the idea is really just something’s artificially scarce if it is somehow arbitrarily limited, right? Somebody or something has chosen to limit its availability beyond whatever is inherent in it. So, like the classic example is due dates for library books, right? That’s artificial. The book is not going to burst into flames if you keep it too long.

But it’s something that is a limit placed on the availability of the book. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? It’s a useful thing to make sure that people have access to books and also that other people can get them when you’re done. But when it comes to grades, and to classes in general, I think there’s all kinds of places where we put arbitrary limits on things that we just do that because that’s the way it’s always been done or because we think it’s a great idea.

And it’s not necessarily. And grades are very much one of those. So a classic example of this would be curving grades, by which I mean, so I actually, in college, learned a rather different meaning of curving than I think it’s actually used. So what I’m talking about is things like fitting grades under a normal curve, right?

Expecting grades to follow some sort of bell shaped distribution where only a few people can get an A and only a few can have an F. And there’s a whole bunch in the middle, and the C, and it doesn’t matter what score they meant, that you’re sort of fitting everybody into their position relative to each other.

And that’s a form of artificial scarcity. It’s saying that there can only be so many A’s that there, no matter what happens, there cannot be more than, you know, 10 or 20% A’s that the vast bulk, you know, 40% of people in the middle are going to earn C’s. And that’s essentially saying that grades mean only what they mean relative to other people.

It only means that you are doing well or doing poorly in competition with others. And I couldn’t disagree with that more, right? If I want to, if I have to give students a grade, then I want it to mean something specific about what they’ve done. What they’ve learned, what they’ve achieved, what I’ve seen them do, and grow in my class.

And everything I just said there doesn’t refer to any other students at all. Right? It’s what did that student achieve? And so if they did everything they need to to earn an A, then they should earn that A, I should know what it takes to earn an A. They should know what an it takes to earn an A, and if they do it, they should earn that regardless of whether the next person over did it or not.

And so, in my mind, making grades artificially scarce through things like curving, or even just having the belief that it’s bad if too many students are able to earn an A, that’s actually a harmful thing. Right? It’s using grades for a purpose that is more harmful than it is good.

I feel like I wandered all over the place in that thing.

Sharona: No, you’re good. Well, so then what do you think the purpose of grades is then?

Dave: I think that I would like them to represent what a student actually learns. And so that’s the goal. I realize that that can’t always happen, there’s all sorts of other factors that inevitably creep into them, but I want the purpose of a grade to be simply to represent learning. And so, not represent learning relative to someone else, represent learning relative to some sort of clear standard that I’ve set or that somebody has set.

Sharona: And do you think that grades do that? Do your current grades do that better? Like what, like what’s, where do you stand on all that?

Dave: I think this is, this is a good question. I think that using different alternative grading approaches, a big goal is to improve and get closer to that goal. It’s sort of an ideal, right, that I would like grades to have those qualities, and do they?

Yes, to a reasonable extent. And more so than I think traditional grades, which include all sorts of factors that definitely are not about learning, are not about, they’re more about the student’s environment or the student’s behavior than it is about what the student has actually done and achieved.

I think it’s important to realize that like alternative grading practices are not magic bullets, right? They don’t magically make, you know they don’t magically perfectly represent what’s going on in a student’s head. That’s literally impossible to see. But we can get a lot closer to that ideal by thinking carefully about what matters, about making that really clear, about grading in a way that attempts to represent whether a student has achieved something specific or not. And trying to get rid of a bunch of things that are irrelevant to that, like curving, like things having to do with behavior, like things having to do with meeting deadlines, for example.

Sharona: So would you say, just trying to think about what you’re saying right now, Dave, would you be more confident in the current system that students who got say an A or a B, that that’s an accurate representation, but that maybe students who didn’t pass, it might not be an accurate representation?

Like they might know more, but other factors have come into play? Because I feel like for me there is a conflation between a student who shows me they don’t know something, and a student who fails to show me that they do know something due to an external factor. And both of those might not pass my class.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. So there’s, so maybe a way to think about that would be using some sort of alternative grading system, students who pass, pass because they have achieved specific things. Right. So that’s, that’s a positive achievement, right? They’ve done that thing, and you’re absolutely right that if they don’t pass, right, if they don’t meet those specific requirements, then there’s a good question about why not, right?

I mean, maybe because they didn’t learn the things and so they weren’t able to show me what they learned. But maybe because they’ve got a kid at home and they do not have the time to do the stuff in my, you know, in my class or because they’ve got a job that takes up way too much time, but they have to have it if they’re going to stay in school.

Or they were not super interested in my class and they didn’t want to make the effort. So it’s like all of these different ways that a student can fail in a class, basically, right? Or not earn the grade that they want. And so in some sense, what we’re doing with alternative grading is we’re saying, well, these are the things I care about that matter.

You can positively demonstrate them to me. And I would love to live in a world where I could filter out all those things that lead to sort of false negatives, right? Where a student does poorly because they can’t, or let me say that again. I’d love to live in a world where we filter out all those false negatives, right?

Where a student does poorly for reasons that is not related to their learning. And we can do better at that by like removing things that we put in, right, where we reduce the student’s grade for reasons that are irrelevant, at least as far as learning goes. But at least in the limited context of choosing my grading policy, I can’t do that.

When it comes to a student’s time, a student’s interest, a student’s ability to devote time because they have the resources to do that.

Sharona: I always love talking to you because you make me think. I mean, we’ve been talking for like four years and every time I’m just like, huh, hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s just what’s so fun. I think that’s what it’s..

Dave: It’s fun. I mean the trick in all of this is like, we can kind of talk about I would like the world to be a certain way, and then also the world is a certain way. And I can use the power that I have to try and push the world in the direction I’d like and to try to, you know, get rid of the things I don’t like.

I have that sort of control around me. Right. But I can’t make everything better, so. Right. And you know, I, it’s probably for the best. If I could just had the power to change everything in the world like that would, that’d be, there’s movies about that, right? Yes.

Sharona: Well, and I love what you’re saying about, you know, I’d like the world, the world to be this way, this is the world we live in. I feel like some of the people in our community are just like, no, I’m not going to accept that. I’m just going to push really hard to completely just burn it all down. Right? We have the burn it all down folks. And Boz knows this about me. I’m in the "I want to drag 80% of the people with us" group.

So I don’t need to burn it all down. I can let the burn it all down people work on burning it all down while I try to get the 80% of people who will do anything moving.

Dave: And I think there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to burn it all down. I mean, I understand the feeling there, but I’m very much, I very much agree with you Sharona that I think the way to make large scale change, to sort of improve the world of education to the extent that we can, is to find ways to bring people along, right?

To say, "Hey, here’s some stuff we can do" I mean, I’m a mathematician. We think about adding up lots of little things very often. Adding up a lot of little changes does make a difference. And that’s kind of the approach that I think Robert and I have taken in the book in particular, is there’s a lot you can do.

And there’s a little you can do, and you should do what it is you can do, as opposed to if you’re not doing everything that is possible, if you are not going all out, then too bad right then, then you’re not doing enough. I do not believe that.

Sharona: And I probably land somewhere in the middle. Because and Boz has heard this story too.

So the first time I met Robert Talbert in person, I was at Poly Teach, which is a one day conference that Cal Poly Pomona puts on. And the keynote that day was Uri Treisman from the Dana Center. And his message was basically the only kind of innovation that sticks is disruptive innovation. And the reason that that was such a watershed moment for me is I went back to my university and sat my co-coordinator down for statistics and said, okay, I wasn’t going to try to do this, but now I’m going to try to do this.

I want you to convert the entire course to standards-based grading, which for me was disruptive. It wasn’t, like people sometimes ask me, can you do a little bit of this alternative grading? And I’m like, of course you could do whatever you want. And then the secret me is going, no, no, no, no, just jump off the deep end.

Just go. Just go. You gotta go. So it’s interesting, I’m probably a little bit more in between the lots of little things add up and the burn it all down. I’m probably leaning more halfway between those two. I dunno. Boz, what do you think?

Dave: I think, well, I, I want to say you’re, you’re absolutely right. You gotta know yourself, right?

You have got to know what it is that’s going to do it for you. And if you are a person who’s like, I have got to jump in or else it just isn’t going to happen. Then you’ve got to jump in, right? And if you’re a, I want to stick my toe in the water and see what happens, then stick your toe in the water. Like, absolutely.

I think the danger is actually when people say, "this is the right way, you must do things in a certain way or else you’re doing it wrong". And that’s really where, I mean, there’s things I can encourage and discourage, but I think that saying this is right and this is wrong, is more harmful than helpful in this case.

Bosley: Absolutely.

Sharona: I completely agree.

Bosley: Yeah. I’ve done, because I didn’t start out going into alternative grading when I started looking at equity and grading and, one of the other people we’ve had on the show, Joe Zeccola and I, we spent a year converting our entire school into not giving zeros for blank work. Like just trying to show the mathematical damage that a zero does in a hundred point system and just how unfair that punishment was. So, you know, trying to take this one aspect of some of the things that we brought up in one of our early episodes with, you know, about the problems with traditional grading and just trying to convert people on just that.

Which, you know, if that’s all you’re comfortable with doing is looking at a couple of these elements of traditional grading that isn’t the most equitable or most mathematically sound? Great! Change that. I mean, that’s better than it was. However, I was doing a lot of those little things and it was like, okay, this feels better, but it’s still not there.

And it wasn’t until I jumped completely away from all points and percentages and averages, that grading made sense to me.

Dave: And, and you, I think that often happens, right? You get pulled in, you discover that, well this is how I felt after my first time using standards-based rating, which I did jump all the way into, right?

For everything I’ve said, I jumped in feet first there, or head first, I don’t know, all the way. I both felt like it was just ridiculous and difficult and super complicated, and I was never willing to go back. Because I could tell like, yeah, this is, this is good. This is way better than what I was doing.

Like, I felt morally better about what I was doing in grading.

Sharona: So what, what was better? Like, can you get some specifics?

Dave: So this is funny because what was better wasn’t any of the things that I meant to be better. I mean, I intended to have a better view of what exactly it was that students were succeeding at.

Like what do they know, what specific things? And I did. Because I had a list of standards and I could see sort of almost a barcode of, oh, the student’s able to do these things and not those. So that was great. But the things that really made it feel like I was doing something meaningfully better were all about the students themselves.

So, like, for example almost by accident, I built in this ability to, you know, try again on a future, in that class it was quizzes, right? Try to meet a standard in a future quiz and without a penalty. And that suddenly made office hours, like really matter, right? Like students cared about the feedback I was giving and they wanted to understand it.

And they’d come in and they would talk and they’d ask me questions in terms of the course content. Like it wasn’t, why is this a seven out of 10? It was, okay, I’m having trouble with this specific thing. Can we, can we talk about that? Here’s what I tried and here’s why I think I’m having trouble with it.

And that was just, everything about that was amazing, right? The office hours were better, but I could see the students were actually using my feedback. They were caring about coming back and relearning things. Like they were engaging in a feedback loop and the grading system was encouraging that it was, it wasn’t discouraging it in the way that traditional grades often do.

And so those things were just, they made me realize that those were possible in a class, right? It was possible for students to care, to want to relearn something. I mean, humans do that naturally, right? They want to learn something and that if you don’t discourage it, and if you incentivize it, they will.

The other thing that, it was just a bizarre consequence, that happened was so I was at the University of Minnesota at that time, and they have like two days during the week of Thanksgiving. And then three days off. And just before those two days where I had like one day of class, I had students saying, can we please have a quiz?

Like we would love to have a quiz. And they’re like, on the Monday of Thanksgiving break, who does that? Right? Who wants a quiz? But it was because it was a chance. Or it was a chance for them to show me what they knew. And I had just never had an experience like that before. Right. I was like, what? What is going on here?

This is like some alternate universe. But it was the alternate universe where people were actually just behaving like people where they care, they want to know, they want to learn. And I wasn’t trying to stop them from it.

Bosley: Yeah. See that’s, that’s interesting that you bring up kind of those office hours. Because you know, oftentimes when I tell the story of my first time doing alternative grading, and just how much of a disaster it really was, but yet I’ve never gone back. Because when it came, you know, to the end of the semester, The conversations I was having with my students wasn’t, "How many more points do I need to get to this grade? Can I get extra credit?" It was, "okay, what do I need to still show, or what understanding am I not getting about descriptive statistics? What do I need to show you about inferential statistics?" That conversation going from gaming and this kind of grabbing of points to actually talking about the math.

It is what sold me. And I’ve never gone back. I’ve never had a student ask for, you know, a group of students ask for quiz right before Thanksgiving, but that’s really funny.

Dave: It was, it was, you can tell it stuck with me. Right?

Sharona: So you mentioned though that you have this new book out. Why did you write a book? I mean, you’re a mathematician. Like we’re not supposed to write books, right?

Dave: Well, you know yeah. So the book is Grading for Growth, co-authored with Robert Talbert. And yeah, I think the thing that really drove both of us to do this was any time that we would talk with people about what we’re doing right? What kind of alternative grading we’re using or whatever, the thing that would very often that, that people would say would be something like, oh, that sounds neat, but you couldn’t possibly do that in, you know, fill in the blank with their situation.

Sharona: Oh my God. We say that so often.

Dave: And it doesn’t matter what the situation was. Like if I was talking about an upper level class. Oh, that’s great, but you couldn’t possibly do that in an intro class. And if I told them about an intro class, that’s great, but I teach this upper level class, it would never work. Right. Like, It felt like people were interested but also couldn’t imagine sometimes how it could work.

And so really the heart of the book is just a whole bunch of case studies, right? Interviews with people about how they used alternative grading and made it work in every situation we could possibly find. Big classes, small classes, intro level, upper level, lab classes, huge classes. Just anything, you know, any kind of discipline, any kind of institution.

Any student bodies that you could think of? Right. The goal is basically, and I’m sure this will not happen, but will be to put to rest those questions, right? And say there’s a way to do it. Check it out, it’s in the book.

Bosley: But that’s so funny because Sharona and I were in a meeting, training earlier today, I won’t mention what it was but, and we had that exact, because it was a mixed group of educators, and we had that exact thing come up.

Sharona: The number of times I get.. Okay, I’m talking to a mathematician and they’re like, well, I can understand how in English that would work. You know, they do rewrites and rubrics, but that doesn’t work in math. And then I go talk to the English people and they’re like, well, I understand how that works in math, because you guys are all procedural based. I literally had a Dental Hygienics program tell me that they could understand how it worked everywhere else, but in Dental Hygienics. And so I do have one ultimate answer now personally, which is, I will challenge any field that has a licensing exam. Because the licensing exam is the ultimate and alternatively graded. Because very few licensing exams have a limit on the number of times you can take the licensing exam. Now it’s expensive and there’s all kinds of constraints and you may have to re-study and all this stuff, but they don’t even give you your score if you pass the licensing exam. You know the bar, the boards. And by the way, do you know how many times it took your doctor to pass their boards? I don’t.

Dave: No one cares about that later.

Sharona: No one cares. So I’ve also, recently I was in a presentation at a conference and someone said, well, how do you account for how many times it took them to pass this in your grading system? And I said, on a microphone in front of the whole group, why do we care?

Dave: You know, we care, we care that you got there, right? I mean, that, that is what matters. And yeah, you are absolutely right. Licensing exams are the classic.

Bosley: And it’s every single one of them. I mean, you know, I’ve been pulled over more than a few times in my life. I’ve never got an extra fine because it, you know, I took two times to pass my driving test when I was 16 years old. From the simplest to that to any kind of licensing, CPA exam, bar, none of those average the scores, none of those punish you for the first mistakes other than maybe having to pay the extra to do it again.

But yet we seem to think, oh, but we have to count everything. What do you mean? Let a student retake something without averaging the grade, how will they know? Like it’s,

Dave: And another thing they all have in common is they have a really clear set of standards, right? What is it you have to be able to do?

What is it you need to be able to show that you know or can achieve? And so even if your score is, is points or something like that, in the end, it’s all based on were you able to do these things or not?

Sharona: So, I have heard a lot, when I talk to people about this, that I’m advocating for chaos. I’m advocating for unlimited chances to do everything until the last second and it’s going to get buried.

Have you gotten that pushback and what do you say to it?

Dave: Yeah, I have definitely heard that and it, it’s an interesting thing. I feel like people tend to jump to interesting conclusions when they hear about alternative grading. Right? And some of it is that it couldn’t possibly work for them and others are that things have to sort of be done all or nothing, right?

That you have to allow unlimited re-attempts or else you don’t use them at all, or you have to like get rid of all deadlines or lock them all down as hard as possible. And no, that is not the case at all. So like, let’s talk about reassessments, right? If we’re going to give students multiple opportunities to do things, that doesn’t mean unlimited opportunities. It means multiple opportunities and that there’s no penalty for using them.

But we live in a finite world of finite resources. We have to put some sort of limits on things, both for ourselves, right, as people who are grading, like we need to have a life and be able to do our own things, but also because it helps to encourage students to have to think carefully about what it is that they’re doing and to encourage them to do it well.

And so yeah, you can put limits on reassessments, right? How many or how frequently or things that need to be done in order to unlock them, like attempting some practice problems or whatever. You can, you can put limits on anything like that to organize it. You can make a nice, regular schedule so that everybody knows exactly when re attempts are gonna happen so that there’s not even any chaos involved in that.

You can do all of these things while still giving students the flexibility of having another chance. I could actually, I could probably say that a little more carefully by like spelling out the types of things, but I don’t know if you guys want, want that too.

Sharona: It’s whatever you want to say. That’s the beauty is that, unlike a book where you actually have to have non artificially scarce limits, on like pages, because it costs money to print.

Dave: Yeah. That’s not artificial.

Sharona: At the moment, podcasting has fewer of those artificially scarce things. It’s really pretty much just how long people are willing to listen to it.

Which is kind of one of the reasons we wanted to do, I wanted to do a podcast is I couldn’t tolerate writing the way you guys do. I write very well, but the thought of spending hundreds of hours writing just makes me want to puke, quite frankly.

Dave: It was a fun, it was quite a process, that’s for sure, but.

Bosley: Yeah, because on top of the book you also co-do the blog with Robert Talbert, correct? The Grading for Growth blog?

Dave: Yeah, so the Grading for Growth blog started actually with us basically workshopping ideas for the book. I mean, it was practice writing, it was getting ideas out there and seeing how people reacted to them.

And then it kind of took on life of its own and we’re still going. The book is out and we’re still blogging about things. It’s been really fun as a way to reach people, as a way to like put down ideas in medium length form, right? Not tweet length, but not also book length. A nd to get feedback from people and, and sort of also be able to do a deeper dive into very narrow ideas, even than we could do in the book, right?

So I can have a post about artificial scarcity in a lot of detail, far more than I could fit into a few pages in a book that’s supposed to cover all this different range.

Sharona: Well, in full disclosure, I’ve written a couple things for that blog.

Dave: Absolutely. Including, we need to get Bosley on there too.

Sharona: Yeah.

Bosley: Well we co-wrote one of them.

Sharona: We did co-wrote one of of them.

Oh,

Dave: you did, you did do that. That’s right. Yeah. We had Sharona on another one.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, and, and to clarify co-writing with Bosley and me means I write and he edits. Which it’s actually a very fair, it’s a fair division of work. So..

Dave: You know, the famous quote from, I think it was Pascal, right? I’m sorry, this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter. So that’s a big part of the work.

Sharona: Yes. So if you could put a couple things out into the world, a couple of ideas or a couple of hopes, where do you go from here?

What would you like to use this platform to say as opposed to the blog or the book, or..

Dave: An idea I would like to get out there a little more is there’s not just one way to do it. And I know we’ve talked about this a lot already today, but there’s so many approaches to alternative grading, and there’s some common underlying principles, but I feel like it’s pointless and counterproductive to argue about what the best approach is.

Everybody’s situation is different. Everybody teaches different students in different classes in a different institution. Yeah, there’s things you can do that are better. And if you are doing those and you are thinking about them and caring about them, then if that’s different from what I’m doing, that doesn’t matter.

Right. There’s not just one way to do it. And we can all be improving our grading and assessment practices in different ways and that is okay. And if you want to burn it all down, awesome. And if you want to dip your toe in the water, awesome. And that it would be really helpful if we don’t judge each other too much for that.

So that’s a combination of ideas I definitely want to be out there. The other thing, oh, go ahead..

Bosley: I was just going to say, kind of on that note, one of our keynotes this year in the grading conference was just about that. And I mean, it, it was a phenomenal keynote. Sharona, can you help me out? I’m drawing a blank on..

Sharona: Are you talking about the one by Dr. Lindsay Masland?

Bosley: Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

Sharona: We definitely need to invite her on this once I make sure she gets her speaker payment from the conference.

Bosley: But yeah, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to go back and listen to any of those. But yeah, that, that keynote was exactly what you were talking about right now.

Dave: Mm-hmm. And, and I’ve read a number of things that that Lindsay has written and gotten ideas like, I’m like, oh, that’s fantastic. I am totally going to go do that in my own class. This community has so much of that stealing each other’s hubcaps, right?

Of, of getting ideas and making it work for you and putting it together. And I think that is fantastic. And it’s a sign of a healthy, growing and, and thoughtful group of people.

Sharona: Now, did you have another idea that you wanted to get out there?

Dave: Yeah, the other one I wanted to get out there Yeah. Was it’s possible, it is doable, right?

Like you can use, you can improve your grading in whatever your situation is. So not only is there not just one way to do it, but that it’s not impossible for anybody in any situation. There’s so many little tweaks or big things that you can do that if you want to make it happen, you can.

Bosley: And from what I understand from our interview with Robert, that’s a big goal and point of your book. Is it not? That kind of showing the roadmap for someone that wants to try this? Because I’ve read a lot of great books talking about some of these issues. You know, some of the Guskeys and the O’Connor and so many other great books, but not a lot of them on: okay, now you’re sold, here’s kind of a roadmap to get you started to at least get you going until you can start figuring it out for your own. And from what Robert was saying, that’s a big goal of this, of your book, correct?

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a combination of case studies to sort of be inspirational, right? To see how people have, have achieved better grading in different circumstances but also trying to like abstract out what are the common features? What are things that are specific that we can do to guide new people into it? So among other things that means there’s a workbook, right? So there’s a step-by-step workbook where we try to be flexible enough in our steps that you can pick and choose the things that you’ve noticed from the case studies or elsewhere. And we guide you through sort of assembling them to make it work for you.

But also it’s like we literally have a frequently asked questions chapter, right? We literally have a what to expect and pitfalls to avoid thing, just like practical on the ground advice, right? So take a look at the model, get inspiration, put it together with the workbook, know which things you’ve got to watch out for and what you should expect. And when you should go talk to somebody else and make sure that what you’re doing is sensible. Like just all the practical stuff that you get by having someone who knows what they’ve, who’s done it before, they’re with you. We can’t be in the room with you, but we kind of tried to make that happen with the book as much as we could.

Bosley: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to getting my copy. I’m..

Dave: You know, I am too.

Sharona: Well, the problem is that like Bosley wants a signed one, so I’ve got to get one, get it sent to you and Robert, have you sign it and send it back, and then it should get here by Christmas. So..

Dave: Yeah, it’s going to take a while. I saw, I saw today that somebody has a physical copy in their hand, and it’s not Robert or me, so it’s out there, but..

Sharona: Well it didn’t help that your publisher got bought right when the book was coming out, so that was not helpful I’m sure.

Dave: There a lot of confusion right there.

Bosley: Yeah. Now it is already available on like Kindle and on e-versions of the book, correct?

Dave: That is true. Yeah. You can get several different ebook formats right away. But if you want the paperback copy, that’s still coming through the mail.

Sharona: And the other thing I was thinking about, one reason I’m so glad the book is out now, Dave, is that Bosley and I, we cross over communities. So we cross from K-12 to higher ed.

And we’re in multiple different professional communities. Like I’m now in the engineering education community, and I’m in the math community because of the work I’m doing, and there’s so much buzz out there now. Like, so many people have heard about it, but it’s at this very superficial level. And I’m afraid that people are going to jump in and try it and there’s not one right way, but there’s a lot of wrong ways and there’s a lot of ways where you can accidentally recreate the problems with traditional grading if you haven’t had the opportunity to learn what those are.

God knows, I’ve done it in my alternative grading. So there, there actually are some wrong things that you can do by accident that are harmful. So I’m really excited that these references, and that’s why the timing on the launch of this podcast is now. Is we’re trying to get this information out in as many formats as we can so that people who are hearing about it, because there’s misinformation rampant out there about what this is.

Dave: And I think there’s been a number of news articles and things in the Chronicle and inside Higher ed and places like that that They don’t do a great job of representing usually what is called ungrading. Right? I do not like the word ungrading. I think it is wildly overloaded.

It’s kind of an example of what you mean, where like people hear it and they think they know what it means right away. Like it’s at a very surface level. But it’s sort of has communicated a lot of misconceptions and had, some of those articles have even encouraged weird misconceptions like for example, a really bizarre one that has shown up in more than one place is that if you don’t give students, like if you don’t use a punitive grade, right?

So if you don’t like use grades as a way to punish students for not doing something well and then permanently include in their grade, if you don’t do that, that they’re not going to learn. I like, no, that actually closes off the learning right there. It’s, it’s a stops it right in its tracks. Right. Or the idea that alternative grading means not giving any feedback.

That’s the strangest one that I’ve heard. It’s the complete opposite of that.

Sharona: Yeah. It’s like if you take away points, then they’re not getting any feedback. How are you going to give feedback if you don’t give them like 6 out of 10? It’s like, words? Maybe?

Dave: Right, well you use words. Yeah, you use words.

Sharona: Communicate?

Dave: Which is a much better way to do it.

Sharona: And I guess that’s what I’m reacting to is we all, I know that we had a, I think it was a Chronicle article, that went around like, you’re all doing ungrading wrong. And I hated that language and yet there are ways to do this wrong. Not that there’s one right way, but there are definitely some bad things.

And so I’m not a fan of anything that’s going to cause an instructor to collapse under the weight of grading. Definitely not.

Dave: Yeah. So there’s sort of, there’s ways to do it wrong because you’re like setting yourself up for failure. Right. Like, you know, setting unlimited reassessments.

Or

Sharona: Or setting students up for failure. I mean, and you know, there’s definitely some people who have taken flexibility and deadlines to mean no deadlines, and you are setting up a group of people who need structure for failure.

Dave: Yeah. And on the flip side of that coin, like you can absolutely set up a harsh, punitive, alternative grading structure, right?

In which you’re essentially punishing students for not knowing something. And maybe you give them multiple opportunities, but what you’re fundamentally doing is somehow hurting them. Right? So there’s a lot of the philosophy and like, why am I doing these things that does really matter? And thinking carefully about that will make a big difference.

Bosley: What’s next for you? Like the book is coming out are you getting back into the classroom? Because you were on a sabbatical to help with the book, right? So what’s coming up next?

Dave: The book was actually a sabbatical project for me, although it’s extended pretty far on either side of that one semester. So yeah, I am teaching full-time as usual and using things that I’ve learned from the book in my classroom that has, doing these interviews for the book has actually made a big difference in my own practice as well. And continuing to blog and giving a lot of talks about alternative grading and trying to sort of spread the word that it’s doable and it’s possible.

So yeah, trying to make that incremental, encouraging positive change that we sort of talked about earlier.

Bosley: So if someone did want to, you know, have you come to their, their institution or to some sort of group to do a talk h how would they get ahold of you? How, how do they you know, look for that information?

Dave: So the best thing to do is probably to email me directly.

Sharona: We’ll post that in the show notes, put link to your email. And they can also use, I’ll start that. They can always also use the contact us form on our website and we will forward that as well. So we will put those in the show notes.

Dave: So I’ll start that fresh. Yeah, so, so the best thing to do is probably to email me directly and I know you can put my contact info in the show notes. And if you Google for David Clark. You’re going to find a lot of me out there, but David Clark Math, GVSU tends to find the right one. And I do have a page with information about about speaking and workshops and things like that.

Sharona: Aren’t there multiple David Clark mathematicians even?

Dave: There are. I teach Geometry from a book written by David Clark and it’s not me.

Sharona: So yeah, so we’ll definitely put..

Dave: So be very careful with which man, with which David Clark you find.

Sharona: Right? So we’ll definitely put contact information in the show notes and like I said, people can also message us on the Contact us form on the website and we will forward that information as well.

So, anything else you want share before we wrap up for this episode? Last thoughts? Bosley, last thoughts?

Bosley: No, just as always. I want to thank you. You know, when we had Robert on, he, he kept talking about how much of a genius you were. So it’s great to get to get you on here and really have you talk about this and hear from your perspective on this on the book and on so many other things.

Dave: So thank you. So I want to say it was really fun writing a book with Robert because we bring very different strengths to the whole thing, right? So like the writing versus editing. Like we both were writing and we were both editing. But yeah, Robert and I just think of things differently and putting all that together into the book made the whole thing a lot stronger. And that was, it was a great experience.

Bosley: He told a story about how you guys would write something and then you would get on together and basically just read what the other one had written and listen to the other person read it.

Dave: And so if your listeners want to know what that’s like, we actually put a a, I think it was a screencast of that.

Sharona: Yeah, we actually have that link for our show notes as well.

Dave: Excellent. Yeah. Yes. That was fun. And, and like, and if you listen to that, you’ll also get all the just random asides and stupid jokes and everything else that, you know, that happens along the way. So.

Sharona: Well, and one thing I noticed with talking to Robert that I actually wanted to ask you about as well. You know, a lot of people have said to you guys, you’re really brave for being so willing to admit your mistakes, in this process. And I wonder if it’s because you have internalized that failure is not a stigma, that failure is not failure. How do you, how do you feel about that thought for yourself?

Dave: I think that’s a great way to look at it. And yes, I’m going to embrace that. I mean, it’s true, right?

There’s, I do not think of like, if I design a complicated or maybe not super successful grading system, I’m not going to feel great about it, but I don’t think about that as that’s the end of it, right? That’s okay. I can do better and I’m going to do better next time. Like, it’s not a permanent failure, it’s just something that was rough and I’m going to do better.

But also, I know I have tried to start speaking out more about the things that did not work and the ways that stuff went south in my classes because not enough people talk about it. I mean, you see people succeeding at things and I mean, this is the social media problem, right? You only see the curated version of their lives.

And then that is not good for everybody else. Because you’re not, you don’t actually see what’s real there, and you get a fake, a false impression of it. And so, yeah, talking more about what didn’t work and why it didn’t work, and just trying to do sort of a live blogging, postmortem on something that I screwed up, I hope is helpful to people. And we certainly get lots of feedback that it is. Just both to understand what not to do and to see that that’s totally how it works, even for people like us who are, you know, supposedly experts on these things.

Sharona: Well, and when I thought of this idea of doing a podcast, Bosley is the first person I told. But you and Robert were numbers two and three, and I thought one of y’all was going to tell me I was insane.

And instead all three of you went Great idea. And I’m like, oh, crud, now I have got to do it.

Dave: Yeah. Go out there and do it.

Sharona: Right. Exactly. Absolutely. So this is your fault too.

Dave: And if you, if you think, I mean, if you go into it being like, I can only be perfect at this, it isn’t going to work. Right? Yeah. I mean that, that’s just nothing works that way in the world.

Sharona: We’re definitely on a learning curve with this, that’s for sure.

Dave: I am just back from a summer camp for middle schoolers who really love math, and one of the hardest lessons for them is, you know, they’re at this camp with a bunch of other people who are like that and like, Oh, it actually can, we can actually struggle doing some of the math here because we’re really challenging them and it’s a hard lesson.

Right. A lot of them are not used to it. And we work really hard to just normalize that. And I think being visible and talking about your failures is a way to do that.

Bosley: See that, that’s interesting you bring that up. I absolutely, I’ve spent some time in the middle school and you couldn’t pay me enough to teach at the middle school level.

But I did spend two summers doing a cryptology camp with students that were just leaving that sixth or seventh grade going into seventh or eighth grade. So at middle school age. But yeah, students that were advanced in mathematics and were finding mathematics interesting. Bringing them in to show them this whole field that was, you know, I definitely knew nothing about it when I was their age, despite where I was mathematically. But it, it was so much fun working with, with those students, but at the same time, oh my God, I’d never, I could never teach at that level, but..

Sharona: And see, I taught sixth grade for like six years. Not in math, but I love that age group.

Dave: Yeah. It’s a fun age group and like brains are changing so much. Like you can make a really big difference in that age group.

But also cryptology is fantastic because, like the story of Cryology is just people repeatedly failing right? Over and over and over. Not being able to decrypt the message and just trying something new until something sticks. Like Yeah. And you never get it on the first try.

Bosley: Yeah, and it was fun seeing, these early teens or even pre-teen, you know, 12, 13 year olds, in a subject that they felt very, very confident about and completely struggling and how they reacted to it and just how much fun they ended up having with it. It was a lot of fun. I got to do that. It was, I think, a two or three week camp, and I got to do that for two summers back to back. It was a lot of fun.

Dave: Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah.

Sharona: Well, I think we probably are at about time to wrap this up. I want to, again, thank you so much. You have been one of the key mentors for me on this journey and an inspiration to actually get off my you know what, and do this podcast and, and talk about it publicly. So I’m going to thank you. I know that the listeners to the podcast are just really going to enjoy this conversation because you’re just fun to talk to.

Bosley: Yeah. And then this definitely was the first, but will not be the last time that we have you on, I’m sure.

Sharona: Yeah. You’re not off the hook.

Dave: Well, thank you for having me. I look forward to next time and I’m glad that the two of you are doing the good work of making this podcast and spreading the word and and right doing the things that the rest of us aren’t.

So thank you for doing them.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website.

The Grading Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.