The Grading Podcast

142 – Stephanie verses Harvard

===

Stephanie: And so in our analogy, we’ve got this proposal that’s at the balcony level trying to control what this means for the whole university, but it has no stage instructions, like there is no enter stage right.

Boz: 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 student 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.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-host, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I am very happy but very tired because if I may do a shameless plug. My show opened last night, my first ever production in the theater of a professional equity production in my own theater company and it’s called the last five Years and it was really well received. So it anyone. Los Angeles is listening to this within the two weeks that it comes out, please come see our show. I’m gonna probably put a link in the show notes, but it’s called The Last Five Years by Chalomot Productions. It’s directed by my son and we just had a blast at the opening, so I’m happy but tired.

Boz: So does that Chalomot Production is gonna become a sponsor of this podcast? No kidding, kidding.

Sharona: Considering that I wholly own it. Yeah, it’s already, it’s gonna pay us in ice tea and Mountain Dew.

Boz: Alright,

Sharona: how are you doing? How are you feeling this morning?

Boz: I am doing really well. I am also fired up about this episode I’ve done this before. I’m gonna give a little pre-warning that I might get a little worked up during this one. And we’re not here alone. Sharona who else do we have with us in our virtual studio?

Sharona: So we are excited because if you think you were worked up, the three of us together are gonna be, oh my gosh. We’re so excited to welcome back Dr. Stephanie Valentine from the Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. We had Stephanie on in episode 127 to talk about her work with a LMS system, TeachFront designed to support alternative grading. But Stephanie, the same day that we brought out episode 138, about too many a’s posted an unbelievable rant, let’s call it manifesto part three about the issue with Harvard, and too many A’s, and that is gonna be the topic tonight. So welcome back to the pod Stephanie.

Stephanie: Thanks. I’m so happy to be here. I am also a little bit fired up about this as my article shows.

Boz: All right and since that episode 1 38 came out, and since your manifesto part three came out, there has been some updates, and that’s why we wanted to bring you back to talk a little bit about your manifesto. Some of these updates with Harvard and just some of the other things that have come out since then. All right. So the big update is Harvard has actually got a new grading policy that is due to be voted on in April and this new grading policy what it would do would be putting a cap on A’s not A-‘s, just A’s that only 20% of a class plus four students could get an A. So let’s say if there was a class of 50 people 20% of that would be 10 plus the four. So you could have up to 14 students getting an A no more and a class of a hundred, that, that same would be 24. Even though it’s doubled the size, it doesn’t double the number of A’s. Now this does not include a minuses, but like I said, it would put this hard cap on the A. So wanted to talk about that. This is due to be voted on in April. So just within the next, probably two or three weeks from when this podcast comes out. So that’s the actual proposal. Now I, like I said, we wanted to bring you back, Stephanie, to talk a little bit about your manifesto and some of your reactions to this. So welcome back.

Boz: Yeah, why is this getting so much national intention? We’ve really done now several episodes on this. It is because of the historic influence that Ivy Leagues, but especially Harvard has had on our grading, not just our grading system, our education system, not just in higher ed, but going all the way down to, K 12.

Sharona: So as I was thinking about all of this, I then read the Stephanie that you posted the same day we put out our episode. So I wanted to maybe give you a moment to talk about what motivated you to write that post and what that post says. Because it was on an interesting platform. It was on LinkedIn, which is not usually where I go to, to find grading articles.

Stephanie: Yeah, that was one of those articles that just came out of me. I didn’t really have an option but to write it, I needed to get it out of my head. Where it came from, I was having a really hard time sleeping, woke up at 3:00 AM and decided that I wasn’t gonna get back to sleep. So I started browsing my phone and what came up, but an article from the Harvard Crimson describing this new proposal that they are making. And after reading that there was no way I was going to get back to sleep. I was just filled with emotion and fury and confusion. And it took me a long time to pierce not pierce, but divide all of those feelings and try to figure out where they were coming from. And I felt like I needed to tell my story because I work at, as you mentioned, the Jeffrey Raike School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. And what that is a elite honors program that combines or works at the intersection of technology and leadership and management. And so what, like the students that I deal with, they are Harvard level students. They were the valedictorians of their high schools. They have never failed in their lives. They are absolutely wonderful and eager to learn and very obsessed with grades.

And so I imagined if I were to take this policy and enforce it on my students, I started playing out what that would look like. How would my students react? And I have like actual faces of students and I can imagine those faces and how those individual personalities would respond. And I was just mourning for this fictional future of my students given this decision. And so I started writing an article about this, but focused a lot on my students really. So they are perfectionists completely. And what that means for them is that, they see an 87% and that is just a complete hit to their self-worth. It’s not saying, oh, an 87%, yeah, I have some room to grow. It’s no, I myself am a failure. And I was a perfectionist like that in school as well. So I can completely relate to that.

But at some point that fear of getting anything less than an A, or anything less than a hundred percent, really even a quarter of a point taken off, can really impact them in really negative ways. And so the behaviors that result from that are decreased risk taking behaviors. They’re not gonna go out on a limb, they’re not going to try a new thing. They’re not going to struggle on their own. They may be more tempted to choose academically dishonest options or anything else that might prevent them from the shame that they might feel if they fail when they’re trying. And so with that, I explored my students and how I was really struggling when I was, I first started teaching with managing students of this caliber and trying to keep their interest in learning. Without the shame that came with failing and I found alternative grading.

And so a lot of the article is about how I was able to make that change. I teach the intro to computer science course in my school, which in general university courses not in my school, it has about a 45% DFW rate, so only 55% of students actually pass that course. And with integrating alternative grading and the idea that they can resubmit and that it really requiring them to learn all of the things. Our school has had a hundred percent retention rate, three years running. So it’s really the ability that we’re this alternative grading and a lot of the other things my school is doing. I’m not taking full credit for this, but changing their mindset into I can do this instead of I am bad has been huge. And then I go from there to, okay, so now Harvard is doing this thing where they are saying that only a few students can actually earn the grade that earn is the wrong word. They can only be assigned the grade. That is that high grade, the A, regardless of whether they met the bar or not.

So many students will meet the bar and not get the grade of the A that they otherwise deserve. I go through some of the statistics of grading and how just using statistics to grade is not fantastic. And then another thing that is part of the proposal that we haven’t mentioned yet is that yes, we are capping the number of students who have A’s, but we are also, we Harvard. This proposal is also saying we can still no longer trust grades in order to rank and sort our students because we must rank and sort them because we must be able to give privileges to some and not to others. And so they have chosen to internally use this other metric to try to rank and sort students. And that is basically saying you we’re gonna keep track of your relative rank in your courses. So if you were in the course in the third position, then you have some sort of rank, whereas if you’re in the second position, you have a different kind of rank and then you’re gonna try to combine all of those things and somehow that’s supposed to be a better metric. But really it’s just two really terrible metrics used together to make even less sense than they did before. And

Sharona: I’m have to update my misuse of math talk because they’re just layering math on math. On math.

Stephanie: I can get really passionate about this, so I am blurring over some of the details, but yes, absolutely. Basically they are just making a double layer cake of error and instead of actually making a policy that increases rigor, that requires students to learn, that might differentiate the students who are learning and succeeding versus those who still have work to do. I don’t see how this policy is going to help. I can only see that it’s going to harm their ability to innovate. We at the Raikes school are very entrepreneurial. We are innovation forward. We are trying to build the leaders and the founders of the companies of tomorrow. And you cannot build the founders of tomorrow if they’re afraid to fail. If they feel like they are not capable of succeeding on their own two feet, if they feel like they need to tear each other down instead of relying on their network to succeed this policy is going to undermine the very innovation that Harvard is famous for. So that was an overview of my article and what I felt really strongly at 3:00 AM .

Boz: So we keep calling it the article. I don’t think we’ve actually named it yet, but because I love the name. It’s “points are insidious, a manifesto.” This was part three you’ve actually done, and I think it goes back all the way to November of last year, is when you started this multi part manifesto.

Stephanie: Yes. I’ve been planning it for about two years though.

So it’s, it was just that it first got published in November. Yeah.

Sharona: But when you did that first one, did you think at the time that was complete or did you already have a part two in mind?

Stephanie: I had a three part sequence in mind at that time, but I inserted another one for this.

Sharona: Okay, because I was saying,

Stephanie: because there’s still one more chapter planned

Sharona: in November.

Stephanie: No, it was not.

Boz: But I love one of the points that you brought up in this manifesto, and you touched on it briefly, but in this manifesto you’re talking about also now layering on the stress that grades and something like this kind of cap can add on, and all of the negative effects that has on, working memory on memory processes just declining under this high stress and high pressures and how all of that is completely in incompatible with innovation and with, like you were saying, the Raikes school, you guys pride yourselves on, on, on innovation and you can’t have that mentality and be completely risk aversion.

Like you. That’s one of the things in my K 12 world we talk about all the time, is we have to set up our classrooms to be a safe place to take risk. This policy and your manifesto is really pointing that out, that this policy is doing just the opposite. It is killing all risk taking whatsoever, which is then going to kill all innovation that could possibly come from these, extremely bright students.

’cause they’re, they’re, you don’t get to Harvard by accident.

Stephanie: Yes. And risk taking as well as even intellectual curiosity. So the ability to take what you’re learning in the classroom and see it in the world around you. I, in my experience, before I did alternative grading, I was seeing consistently that students were saying, okay, what’s on the exam?

You didn’t explain exactly how you were going to grade this or just all of these very specific things about this specific question instead of the content in general. And now. Students can explore. I got back from spring break and asked my usual, what was the best thing you ate over? Break question. And instead of answering that, they were like, I went to this museum and I saw the Madian art you asked us to build.

And we took a picture in front of it and someone else was like, I went to this PY museum and we looked at the enigma machine. That was our last assignment. We had to hack it. And I told my family all about it. Like that is intellectual curiosity that is taking what you’re learning in the classroom and seeing it in the world instead of trying to optimize your performance to get an A on this exact one thing by saying exactly the right thing.

Exactly what do I need to do to get an A? It’s different. It’s totally different.

Sharona: And then one thing that’s occurring to me right now as you’re saying this, because I also do the same thing where I picture my own students and my students are not Harvard students. My students are not your students.

My students are in college by the skin of their teeth and staying in college by the skin of their teeth. But yet a lot of the same things you’re talking about the risk taking is very much present for them. The difference being because they struggle so much, they give up very early. Like you get one bad quiz, grade one, bad exam grade, and they’re done for the semester because they know that they can’t recover mathematically.

So a system like this where the a’s are capped, like they’ll give up on day one of the class, they would just be like, and that’s not me. I’m done. And yet for me, yesterday I had my second exam. I had. More students almost. I didn’t have more students take it, but I had more students take it than past the first exam.

Like I had very low pass rate on the first exam. More students took it yesterday and persisted. And like the first exam they were done in 20 minutes. ’cause I gave up yesterday. I had people there an hour and a half, almost two hours working on not only the exam, but like all of these things about persistence, like they’re showing up even in the non-perfect students.

Stephanie: That’s so powerful.

Sharona: It’s breaking my heart.

Stephanie: As you said that it made me wonder, okay, so what would my students do if they failed the first exam? And I’m not sure they would stop. I feel like they would pay every bit of physical health that they had to prove to that professor that they can succeed.

And then the math in the end wouldn’t allow them to. And they would just. Crumble. So I see from both sides, absolutely. Either one is going to crush the spirit of the students, whether they continue trying and trying, or they just give up and decide not to learn at all. Either way, the, at least the mental health outcomes of that student are devastating.

Sharona: In speaking of mental health, didn’t Harvard Medical School a few years ago as well as many other medical schools go to pass fail because of the suicidality of their students. There’s all kinds of articles, about the mental health of medical students, and that’s an epidemic.

Stephanie: And does Harvard really believe that their undergraduate students are that different than their medical school students? They’re cut from the same cloth. I don’t understand how they made this proposal without thinking through the consequences for are the different populations at the university.

I can’t fathom how they could have imagined the impacts on their students that this would cause in terms of mental health, in terms of innovation, in terms of all of these, the things that researched and my experience show shows, I think. Completely unfathomable. They perhaps they just didn’t think about it.

Boz: But it’s also interesting though, ’cause you bringing that up is this from all the different articles and things that are coming out of Harvard themselves, like this is, does not seem like a universal accepted way to deal with this. And in fact, one of the things that was printed just yesterday in, or just recently in the Harvard Crimson, was another article about this called Grade Caps Fail, the Game Theory Exam.

Talking about, this is again from Harvard already criticizing this grade policy talking about, basic game theory and how this grading. Is going to do exact opposite of what it’s intended to do. And I love the, this article, it starts off with, the, a classic analogy that I’ve heard millions of times, you, you come across a, you and a partner come across a bear while you’re hiking. You don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the person you’re with. But yeah I, it’s cracking me up to see the different viewpoints that are coming outta Harvard themselves.

Sharona: Yeah, it’s interesting, like in the middle of this article, the person who’s writing it teaches at the Harvard Business School.

So we tar talked about Harvard Medical School, which has gone to pass fail. Harvard Business School uses a fixed curve in their courses. And in a typical year, there’s not enough of the top grade to go around. And some students who would otherwise get high honors don’t get ’em because they took a class with a bunch of other students who get high honors.

And this reminds me of analogy I always use in a high school setting where if you have a student who takes six AP and honors classes and gets perfect a’s they have a 5.0 ’cause of the way that we add that point value, you have another student who takes the exact same six classes, same six AP and whatever classes gets the same a’s, but also takes orchestra and gets an A orchestra is not an honors class and therefore drops their GPA despite the fact that they did the same as this other student with an additional class.

Stephanie: I lost valedictorian in high school because the intro choir for men was honors and the intro choir for women. Was not honors. Oh my. And so I was the top female in my class. But I had no chance.

Boz: Okay. That’s a whole nother thing I gotta do.

Stephanie: I ended up seventh. Like I don’t need to, I don’t need to like rally that point, but,

Yes and no.

I agree with what you’re saying.

Sharona: That has informed part of who you are as an instructor because you have that sort of determinative grading completely outta your, there was nothing you could have done other than not take a course that you were interested in. Like literally you would have had to limit yourself and that’s just wrong.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Sharona: So this article really lays out some of the problems right. So he, they say in this A grade cap, systematically penalizes ambition students for surrounding themselves with strong classmates. Perverse course shopping incentives ensue. As a result. A student who is prepared for an advanced course but concerned about landing in the bottom, 80% may choose to drop down preemptively seeking a pond where they are a relatively bigger fish.

As strong students move into lower level courses, competition for a grades increases there while harder courses continue to shrink, reducing their A allocation further, so not, so if I choose to opt out of a harder course and drop down, not only do I make it harder for the courses in the course that I’m going into to get an A, but because the number of students in that top course goes down, someone there might also not get an A because I chose not to take it.

I like this. Is mind bogglingly bad?

Stephanie: Absolutely. And you layer on top of that, that these students who are in your classroom are the ones who are supposed to, like as a fellow student, your peers are the ones who are going to get you through your career as your network. Is it a time now to make enemies?

What is that gonna mean for you moving forward?

Boz: We’re just teaching you to avoid that situation where you are not the biggest fish. I’m sure we can all think back. I thinking back to my college days, there was one person in our program, I was I’ve got a bachelor’s of science in mathematical education.

There was about 20 of us in that program my year. There was one student there that, in the math, the pure math classes, we couldn’t shine his shoes. The pedagogy classes? Yes. But the actual mathematical theory classes and stuff, like we couldn’t shine his shoes. Can you imagine being in that situation and going, oh, I know that person is taking abstract algebra this semester.

I can’t take it this semester ’cause I know mathematically I’m not gonna compete. What kind of mentality does that build again, this is at Harvard or, at a school like rake with our supposed future leaders. What message is that giving them that, hey, not only should you avoid risk because we can, we can’t afford to fail, but let’s also avoid any hard competition, any way of collaborating with someone that might be better at you in this particular subject, instead of trying to grow from them, instead of trying to, build that collaboration.

Let’s just avoid it.

Stephanie: And the Raikes school is all about that collaboration. We are about, okay, we are gonna put you into groups and you may not know, may not like the people you’re in a group with, but you will succeed in that group and. They learn from each other. So that person who you couldn’t shine his shoes, like maybe by the end, you might at least have a rag.

You might be able to start because you have learned from his excellence, and what a privilege for you. But this new system would not, it would try to make you stay as far away from that guy as possible.

Boz: Absolutely.

Stephanie: It’s heartbreaking.

Sharona: And then they go into some options like, oh, okay, this is terrible, but we’re gonna give faculty options.

So one of the options they suggest is that faculty could instead opt into satisfactory, unsatisfactory grading. And I’m like, great, let’s all do that, right? Thank goodness everybody let’s set a bar and pass it. But that course then gets excluded from this ranking system that they’re putting in place in addition to capping the As.

And this ranking system is not only across the whole student body. Or their whole group, but it’s internal to a course. So let’s say you’re, you have a 10 student senior seminar of like doctoral level work. Okay. So just crazy difficult. The person who gets the bottom but passes a doctoral level course in their senior year would be ranked at the zeroth percentile for that course.

And that is what mathematically goes into their percentile ranking across all their courses. Just the math upon the math is making my head explode.

Stephanie: Double layer cake of error.

Sharona: And that’s, so the person writing this particular article in the Harvard Crimson, they have a paper that I clicked on about the information systems problem with grading.

But I read the abstract, saw that it was 78 pages, and I couldn’t understand the abstract because of the level of math, honestly, because it’s all about compressing two different signals because you have the student ability, but then you have the course difficulty and there being compressed into a single dimension of a grade.

I like literally couldn’t even read the paper. So I’m gonna make Bosley read it and then he’ll have to report back on it.

Stephanie: I can’t wait to dig my teeth into it.

Sharona: Yeah, you too. We’ll get you back on and you guys can explain to apparently me the dumb ass who has a master’s degree in math, but I’m not a statistician and I don’t understand that.

Stephanie: I don’t either. I would look up a lot of words.

Sharona: But even him, who’s this is a problem, this is a problem, this is a problem. They then say, even better would be to apply statistical methods to these aggregate rankings. I, like how many error bars are we gonna put on this topic?

Stephanie: And here’s another idea, okay, just hear me out.

So I have been living in this world where I just accept their rules and I try to figure out ways to still get what I want inside the rules. So what if we accept their A cap but we raise them an A plus? So we have a cap on As, but we do not have a cap on A Pluses. You can have any number of A pluses in a course.

However, students throughout their career only get to choose five courses where they earn an A plus. So you get to list those five courses on their transcript. So you can say, okay, this student chose to excel in this class. And those are their A pluses, but then they don’t have to try to cutthroat harm each other as they go through their other classes because they either chose that a plus rank or they didn’t, and it also expands then the number of A’s that can be earned by other students who did not choose that as an a plus. This is a totally out there idea, but I don’t know. I’m trying to take this hideous policy and turn it into something that might not destroy the students.

I, I am saying that in a really light way, but, and that’s true.

Sharona: That’s possible.

Stephanie: I’m trying to live on the other side of the rainbow here, that like we can make I don’t know, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt or improve this in some way, but if there’s anything we can do to make it so that the students don’t.

Okay. So another thing I have, okay, so this is basically the Hunger Games, right? And I know that saying it that way sounds like an exaggeration because the students will not literally be killing each other. However, because of the connection between grades and stress and anxiety and depression and suicidality it is not unreasonable to believe that these students may attempt and complete suicide that like these are real lives that are on the line here.

That I do not want to say that Harvard itself is going to be intentionally, physically harming any of their students. I am not trying to put that liability there, but the effect of this decision would be that so

Boz: And Sharona said earlier. The Harvard School of Medicine already realized that’s why they changed their policy to pass fail a long time ago like this.

That’s what I don’t get again.

Sharona: And they have all kinds of initiatives that they’re investing in about mental health on campus at Harvard.

Stephanie: I hope they’re quadrupling those investments.

Boz: Yeah, no doubt.

Sharona: I want to change the track a little bit because I think, we feel like we have some answers, to be honest, including Harvard faculty.

If you happen to be listening to this vote down this policy, just vote it down. Oh no. Right there. But I do want to acknowledge one thing, and that is, that was something we discussed a couple of weeks ago as well. I don’t remember at the moment which episode it was on but. We talked about that article about grade inflation and we tore it apart a little bit, I

Boz: think.

Yeah.

Sharona: Huh?

Stephanie: It was 138, I think.

Sharona: 138?

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Oh, so it was in the same one that we did the episode about Harvard. Yeah.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Sharona: But I do wanna acknowledge this lenient grading problem. Because we do have a situation where if your grades have no value, because they’re not based on anything, that’s not helpful to students either, right?

So I do think the fact that Harvard has 84% of their students have As, and there seems to be a disconnect between those As and what students actually know. I do think that’s a problem. I don’t wanna say they could leave it as is. ’cause I don’t think that works either.

Boz: No. And that is actually, so flipping from higher ed to K 12, one of the other things that has recently come out in the NEA today was this article titled, yes, grade Inflation is Real, but Is it a real Problem? And one of the three takeaways, or one of the three things that they were looking at mentions just that, ’cause we’re not just seeing this at Harvard or at Ivy Leagues or at higher ed, we’re seeing this across the board.

So one of their three key takeaways was, while grades keep going up in high school, other measurements of achievement are not. So yeah, I and Shirley, you and I have said this and we’ve brought this up many times. ’cause a lot of times when people, especially ones that. Don’t know a lot about grading reform and don’t want to know much about it.

They hear grading reform and they think just, oh, you wanna give everyone as in this pretty little, unicorns and bubble gum world. That’s not what we’re saying. In fact, since switching to alternative grading, yes, I have more a’s in my classes, I have more b’s, I have less less D’s and F’s.

My bar for what it takes to pass my class has also gone up. Like it’s not gone down. I’m not lowering and I would never, ever recommend or suggest that the way to fix grading is just, let’s lower the bar. No, let’s just make what we’re actually saying is a measurement, actual measure what it’s supposed to be doing.

Which in my belief is purely on learning, not ranking and sort. But yeah, you’re right Sharon. It’s this idea of grades going up, but other measurements not is an issue.

Sharona: And I was thinking through in my head, what would that look like at Harvard If instead of doing all this weird ranking and sorting stuff, they actually did the grades based on learning, right?

Using alternative grading. And let’s say they had a class, an instructor designs a grading system, sets their content, and everybody gets an A because they all met the bar. The three of us would cheer, but maybe that instructor’s not happy with that. Maybe they do want this distinction. They can raise the bar and they can keep raising the bar until they get what they want.

That could have some negative consequences because the bar might just get so high that we get back to this mental health thing. But that’s a different conversation. How amazing would it be if all of these students who already were skimmed off the top of the top could all be phenomenally successful.

What would Harvard’s reputation be then if everybody came out of there just an extraordinary superstar. So I don’t know. I’m just like, yeah, this NEA paper looks at several things and then ties it back, right? So they talk about that same garbage in, garbage out, lenient grading paper that we dissected the last time.

But then they go in this article back to Harvard, to this policy.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: And then there’s some things they say that I like, and then there’s some things I say. I’m like, okay, so for example, there’s a paragraph in here that says the proposal, meaning Harvard’s is clumsy, arbitrary, and represents some degree of invasion into faculty autonomy.

It’s not ideal, but the alternative is the status quo. And the status quo is awful. No! Those are not the only two alternatives. Any ideas? Anyone here?

Stephanie: So there’s this thing, it’s called alternative grading. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it. But I think it’s really awesome and perhaps you could read a book or listen to a podcast. I’ve got this great one I can recommend.

Sharona: So they go two more paragraphs down into the, now one clarification, nEA is the National Education Association, and it is a K 12 focused organization. So they go, so they’re talking about Harvard. They go a couple paragraphs down and they say alternatives to traditional grading structures exist like narrative evaluations, but also specifications grading or mastery learning. Some educators may also be experimenting with un grading, which is when students give themselves a grade and then the educators decide whether it should go up or down this scene. They’re like so tentative, there’s this weird thing out there.

Stephanie: People may be using it. Possibly.

One of the things that you brought up Stephanie in your manifesto, but yeah it found that what you had seen with your own students was also backed up in this research that grades in increase student anxiety and made students avoid those more challenging courses. How they did this is they actually compared students that were taking with the traditional A, B, C, D type of grades.

Doesn’t say if it was traditional grading, but just the traditional five letter grade versus pass fail. And they found some really interesting things that go right back to what you were saying and what you have found in your own course that without grades, students were driven to learn because they enjoyed learning, because they felt it was important to their own personal growth.

That it was actually about learning and not the point mongering, the grade hunting. And that it is the conclusion of this article which I absolutely love. And I wanna read this this last like paragraph from this article. ’cause Sharona, you’ve said it before, we call it the Burn It All Down Camp.

I, even though I am, don’t get to live in that world. I am part of that group. I want to burn it all down and start completely new. But this last paragraph “the path ahead isn’t to rebrand grades the same way we have “clean coal” as if something like that actually exists. Instead, we need to end our reliance on traditional grades and create a new grading system based on what we know is true about learning and motivation. In other words, the problem isn’t grade inflation, it’s grades.”

And going back to this quote and what we know about learning and motivation, we’ve known issues with traditional grading going back over 113 years now. We’ve known about motivation and we’ve known about how people learn like you. You ask anyone, how did you learn to ride a bike?

You get on it, you fall, you keep falling until you stop falling. You don’t take those and average ’em and, oh, you’re a good bike rider ’cause you only fell, two times compared to me that fell 10. But now I ride marathons and you haven’t ridden in 10 years. That doesn’t make any sense.

Sharona: Yeah. So I want.

Stephanie: We’re all just avoiding getting on our soapbox right now, just like holding the rants back in our heads.

Boz: We’re trying maybe.

Sharona: The problem is, A, we’ve all given the rants and B, the rants are not particularly helpful for instructors trapped in these systems, including us.

So I wanna read one last thing that we came across while prepping for this episode. And then Stephanie, you gave me an example of one of the other problems and then you asked me a very challenging question that I want to explore. So I want to those three things. Okay? So first of all University of Texas, Austin put a post on the site formerly known as Twitter, just to give away my politics, yesterday. And it’s really interesting. It’s a whole set of unsolicited advice. They say that they say, congratulations, getting in was hard and you should be proud. Now here’s some unsolicited advice so you don’t waste the next four years. So this is the school in theory, talking to their students.

And I did check it as a verified account, but whatever. I wanna just mention their first paragraph and then I wanna jump to where they talk about grades. So they said, “Go to class. We know this sounds obvious, but as the New York Times reported recently, Harvard students routinely skip class, rarely speak up when they’re there, and focus on their devices instead of the discussion. Faculty say few students do enough preparation to contribute meaningfully.” If that is not the most damning quote for Austin to put out okay. So they talk about a few things, do this, do that, say what you think, blah, blah, blah. Then midway down they say, ask for real grades.

What does that mean?

Stephanie: I love that.

Sharona: It says “60% of Harvard undergraduate grades are now A’s 25 years ago it was 20%. It got so bad that the legendary Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield started giving students two grades, the official one for their transcript and a private one reflecting what they actually learned. He called the official grades ‘ironic.'”

So here’s the suggestion. “Take your A,” in other words, we’re not gonna fix the grading system. “But also ask your professors for a Mansfield grade so that you know where you stand. And don’t avoid difficult classes to keep your transcript clean for law school.” Okay. And then a other, a bunch of other stuff.

That’s actually pretty good advice. That was their advice. Yeah. So I wanna go back to you, Stephanie. So one big issue you have with this is the level at which it’s written. Can you explain what you mean by the level at which this grading policy is written?

Stephanie: Yes. So the committee who wrote this proposal, wrote it very much in the frame of requirements for the administrative level.

So in my copious amounts of free time, I’m working on my MBA. I graduated in May, so that’s exciting. Thank you. I think you should congratulate my husband a little more than me because he’s been so patient. But yes, in our classes we use this language of the balcony versus this stage. So this proposal was sent directly from the balcony.

And the balcony is where you can see all of the actors and all of the dancers. And you can see the choreography coming together. And you can see how this show relates to the show. 10 shows from now, I think Sharona you with your own production company. You are very familiar with the balcony as I’m describing it right now.

So it’s the overall view that every decision is about what. It is go what that decision is going to impact for the biggest picture possible. So that’s what you can see from the balcony. And then there’s the stage. And on the stage you’ve got the individual actor who is playing their part.

You’ve got the prop master who’s making sure that the, act three candle is ready to light and you are trying to make this production as great as it can be for the other actors, for the audience. And so there’s this big disconnect between the balcony that’s trying to maintain a long-term vision and this stage where the work is actually being done.

And so in our analogy, we’ve got this proposal that’s at the balcony level trying to control what this means for the whole university. But it has no stage instructions. There is no enter stage right here. There is only. This is what we need you to do. So there are no instructions to the instructors or to the students really about how to operate in this new system.

So it’s not saying increase your rigor because we think it would be unethical to lower students’ grades after they have been told that they have earned them. It doesn’t say okay, in the case that you have two equivalent students on the grades that you have done, I want, you should look into this specific category to try to differentiate them.

It doesn’t give any instructions for how this should actually be put into place on the stage or in the classroom and in the grade book. And so a lot of the thinking that I have been doing is okay, I’m the director or stage manager of this show. I’m the choreographer. What can I do to live in my integrity with these rules?

If, I would love to say that if I was working at Harvard and this got pushed that. I would quit and protest or something like that, but I’m not actually living at Harvard. And so it’s not fair for me to claim that I understand what living in their shoes is like. But I am curious, you too, Sharona and Boz, who are the experts in this space, not the experts, but among the thought leaders in this space, how would you recommend Harvard faculty live in their integrity under this policy?

What can they do? Because even in your article or your last podcast talking about Harvard, you talked about how many amazing instructors there are there. This is our love letter to them. What can we do?

Sharona: So I have three thoughts ’cause I’ve been thinking about it. ’cause you asked me before we started recording.

So thank you for that. And of course my, my number one advice is vote this policy now. Just flat out reject it. Okay. Please.

Stephanie: Step one check.

Sharona: Okay. Assume now that it goes into place, my second piece of advice is set aside your A’s. Just put ’em aside. You’re gonna decide last how you’re gonna do A’s and turn the rest of your grading system into something really good for students.

Put in alternative grading, put in your grading architecture. Do all the things that we teach up to the A minus, so maybe everybody meets your bar and everybody gets at least an A. I would be totally for me, that’s what I could live with. I would just do everything I can, everything I’m currently doing up to the A.

And then I probably at the beginning of the semester, would sit with the students, show them everything up to the A-, explain the A situation and maybe try to do a collaborative grading piece with my students. What is it about our content? What is it about my course? I probably would have some ideas. Maybe I’d talk with my department or my colleagues.

What is gonna get you that last little bit? ’cause I don’t know. But part of that is because it’s my classes, right? The type of classes I teach and the type of students that I’m just thrilled when they get up there, right? So that would be my thought is make the rest of the grades valuable and tied to learning.

And then try to deal with the A, I don’t know. Bo what do you think?

Boz: Stephanie, you asked us this question before we started recording and Sharona you and I have not had any conversation about it since, but I was thinking the exact same thing. We’ve just had an episode where we’re talking about the importance of student input into the meaning of the grades and how that kind of mindset differentiates and does, puts the grades and the students in a different place.

So that’s where I was first going to is okay. I bring in student voice whether it’s I bring it in to distinguish the difference between the A and the A minus, or I just bring it in, period. But then what happens, and this is where I got stuck in my own head, what happens if we do that?

I, let’s say we, I do what you were suggesting, Sharona, I define up to the A and then I have the students bring in their own ideas of what we could do to distinguish between the A and the students come up with something that sounds reasonable, sounds doable. And I get 30% of the students that still meet that.

Sharona: So I think unfortunately, what has to be a part of it, and you have to have this conversation with the students is they’re going to have to help contribute to ranking and sorting because that those A’s are only coming from a rank and sort process. There’s no criteria you can set on this earth that does not compare these students to each other, that will not result in that exact problem.

Boz: I don’t know how I do that In good conscience, I would be in a tough spot if I was a Harvard professor, and especially if I’m teaching similar courses to what I teach now. I teach freshman level, entry level math classes. So if I’m teaching courses like that where I just at my core do not believe ranking and sorting has any part of. I honestly, I, I don’t know what I would do.

Like I, I would be in a very hard spot.

Sharona: Again, I’m gonna fight against it as hard as I can. But the ways that come to mind are, first of all, things that students would have to opt into doing to even have a shot at it. Like a project, a presentation, something in addition to if you don’t wanna even try for the A, you just don’t have to do this at all.

You just don’t have to. But if you do it, then there’s either I rank and sort it because you present it to me, you submit it to me, and I will never tell anybody other than, if someone doesn’t make it, or the students might be participating in a evaluation of final presentations.

And everybody just understands that last little bit is a competition among the people who chose to compete. It’s the only thing I can think of, I, ’cause I there’s no other good way to do this.

Boz: So I wanna throw this back on you, Stephanie. To answer your own question, what, what kind of advice would you give?

Stephanie: I’m really inspired by your answers. That, that participatory thought had not occurred to me. I’ve thought through a lot of different things, and my first one was a sort of defeated can we just use random? Can I just randomize because that’s going to have the same like statistical effect. I can’t prove that it’s the same statistical effect.

I I was saying that in a light way. But I know that’s not correct. My biggest fear and something that I am very strict about in my own syllabi is that like I reserve the right to change the thresholds that allow you to earn an A based on your, or to earn any grade, but I refuse to do so if it would harm a student’s grade.

So I’ll only do it in a way that will improve grades and the idea that at the end of a semester I may need to harm a student’s grade. Would really go against my own value system. So the idea of okay, I will define what it takes to get an A minus. I really like that because then I would never have to lower a student’s grade.

But what I was thinking prior was that okay I think I anticipate that an A is going to be here at this specific threshold, but in case that’s not actually the A, I’m also going to provide some thresholds that are a bit higher and then a bit higher than that. So overall, this is where I think the A is going to be, but if I need to shift up another level, then I will.

And if I need to shift up another level, I will too. And then in that way, students at least know what’s going to happen and it’s not a surprise to them. And I’ll feel like I’m living in my integrity because I’m doing what I said I was going to do and estimating the best way that I can. But I don’t see how that solves the problem of them not trying to get to.

If we have a and then negative A and negative B, that they’re not just going to be going for negative B. Yeah.

Sharona: So here’s a couple things that are occurring to me. First of all, I do like them opting in to compete for the A. Okay. Now if you’re at Harvard, they’re all gonna opt in, right? Yep. So you set this insane bar, you let them meet it, everyone who meets it, maybe you do a random draw, right?

And then you help them with their grade appeals. Like you literally flood. Yes. The zone, like you provide letters of recommendation and evidence. This should have been an A, this should have been an A. And just like flood the zone with grade appeals. Because if your grades as an instructor have meaning and other classes don’t, you’re flooding against the other classes and it would be toxic as shit for the instructors, but if they’re the ones who vote this policy, and I don’t care. Like I only care about the ones trying to do the right thing, that’s just a really mean thing to say. But.

Stephanie: We talked about how they need to allocate resources to this. That might be a place where they need to allocate some.

Sharona: I would find a way to rank and sort, and then everyone who didn’t make it, I would, and I would do this from the beginning of the semester, I would say we are setting up for grade appeals. Like I would be, that would be my toxic, like pushback, if I were tenured. If I were tenured at Harvard. Please do not do this if you do not have tenure.

Boz: Okay. And.

Stephanie: Unless you feel you have to and you’re willing to.

Sharona: Yeah, you have to be willing sacrifice your job.

Boz: Okay. And this is why you are my partner in so many things. This okay. This okay, fine, we’re gonna play in, we’re gonna play in your little silly rules and then I’m gonna help break them. I, that, that idea had not even occurred to me. I bow down to you that I

Sharona: Thank you.

Boz: Yeah. I, that, that’s I think the best advice. Okay, fine, we’ll play this game and then I’m gonna help every single student that wants to do the grade appeal and let’s flood the system with grade appeals. Let’s flood and just, what is that called? Oh, there’s a word for that. Malicious compliance. Malicious compliance. That I love that idea that was absolutely gold.

Stephanie: I’ve got myself in this place for okay, I am going to be like your second assistant chief of staff or something like that. And I have these ideas like, okay, they have to keep track of a learning log.

Okay, here they have learned about this. And every day in class they’ll talk about, I learned this and I learned that. And they’re like meticulously recording their learning, but at the same time that’s meta recognition, which means that they are learning the things that they’re learning and that’s better for the students in general.

And so yes I am all in, let’s do it. But we don’t work at Harvard.

Sharona: No, but what’s really funny is I’m pretty open on this podcast about what I’m doing in my class this semester, which is full blown malicious compliance with some things that I disagree with. And I’ve said that, and I’m like, if my department can’t figure out that I have a podcast, which I talk about that I run a center for grading reform, that I have told my director, my department chair, to her face that I will never teach a class with traditional grading again.

And they don’t realize that I am doing this. That’s on them. Because they said things like your first exam has to be 15% of the grade. I’m like, great. I have actually more than 15% of my learning outcomes on the first exam. No problem. They’re like, you can’t give a retake of the exam. No problem. I’m not retaking the exam.

I have checkpoint quizzes that happen to have the same learning outcomes on them, but not retaking the exam.

Boz: And because the grades aren’t averaged. Yes, they’re done by how many grade learning targets the students? That’s, but it’s not, retake

Sharona: It never actually says that you have to average the grades. It just says exam one is 15%, exam two is 15%. Exam three is 15%. The finals, this percentage, the homework’s, this percentage never says you have to average them. It doesn’t actually say that.

Stephanie: We can play vocabulary games all day long.

Sharona: Please forward this to everyone you know, at Harvard. We support you. We think your instructional team is amazing. But please make this about learning and find another way to rank and sort your students that is not grades and that they have an option to opt into or opt out of. Do you really need to rank and sort everybody? How about just ranking and sorting, like the top?

Boz: All right we are coming up on time. I want to thank you for coming back on Stephanie. I love I, I’ll be honest, I’ve not read all three parts of your manifesto. I am going to go back and finish the second one. That’s what I’m missing. And I look forward. ’cause it sounded like you originally had three and this one was a add-on.

So there might be another another, part at some point.

Stephanie: Yes. The next part was intended to be how Teach Front was born. Look forward to that one.

Sharona: And congratulations on finally getting to use it because you’re using it now.

Stephanie: Yes. Talk about malicious compliance. Yes, I get to use it in my classroom and everything is wonderful.

Should hear the things that my students are saying about finally being able to have this tool that they should have had for a long time.

Sharona: So we’ll have you come back on after the semester’s over to talk about what it was like to finally get to use this tool. So

Stephanie: I would love to. It has been magic.

Boz: All right.

Thank you both ladies for this episode and to our listeners, thank you for listening. This has been the Grading podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

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.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.