The Grading Podcast

160 – Susan Blum

===

Susan Blum: Well, I think that that’s where really fundamental discussions of what formal education is about have, have to happen. And my book Schoolishness really tries to look at all the dimensions, but I do say in there the buildings are built, the accreditation organizations have their funding. You know, w- everybody knows what a transcript means.

So for us to really go back to fundamentals about what we’re trying to do is going to be very hard.

Boz: Welcome to The Grading Podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning, from traditional grading to meth- 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.

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

Sharona: I’m doing really well. The summer is flying by, and I keep checking big things off the list, but then other big things are coming up. So I wanted to take a minute here at the top as we’re ban- as we’re talking, Boz, to let people know that one of the big things coming up for me is MathFest, and if you’re gonna be at MathFest and you’re listening to this pod, please get on the alternative grading Slack channel, ’cause we’re gonna do a live recording of the pod for the third year in a row at MathFest.

So I’m just, I’m checking those boxes off, but I wanted to make sure to remember to tell people about that one. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: I’m doing all right. I’m really excited though, and I wanna jump right into this, ’cause last week we had a Mount Rushmore level guest on with Dr. Linda Nielsen.

We’ve got another Mount Rushmore guest. Mount Rushmore level

Sharona: guest.

Boz: So Sharona, who do we have in the virtual studio with us today?

Sharona: So today we have, and I’m so excited, I can’t believe it’s taken us this long, but Dr. Susan Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, well known to this community as the author of the book, Ungrading, Schoolishness, and so many other books. Her work has gone all over the place from the fields of cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology, particularly in the context of China, but now has really been looking at the nature of institutional education.

So I am so, so, so happy to welcome to the pod Dr. Susan Blum.

Susan Blum: I’m so happy to be here. We’re such kindred spirits, and I don’t think we intersected right at the beginning, but once we discovered each other, we certainly have had a lot of interaction.

Boz: So there are so many things that we want to get into it with you.

But before we do, and I’m actually really excited to hear about this one, but we always like to ask our guests the first time they’re on just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Susan Blum: Okay. Well, I’ve written about this, I’ve talked about it at many conferences and things, but it’s great to have an opportunity to talk about it here.

So I began, lo those many decades ago, as a very conventional, very strict teacher. I believed in school. I believed in what I’ve learned to call schoolishness. I loved grading in the sense that I like math, so yay for math. And I liked figuring out formulas so that I could translate the, Engagement, participation, formats for bibliographies, all the little teeny-tiny points I could translate into a grade.

And I would have so much fun at the end of the semester adding everything up and generating a grade. And then I began to be an anthropologist of my own situation. So 20-some years ago, I began to study this thing that became, was sort of in the air at the time, it’s relevant for us again right now, people were talking a lot about cheating and plagiarizing.

And so I began to study that kind of expecting, or not expecting to end up quite as sympathetic to the students as I have. And I used my anthropological training to see what students were doing, and then to ask why. And so one of the things that I discovered 20-some years ago was that motivation is one of the key explanatory factors for why students do what they do, why anybody does anything they do.

And I discovered Alfie Kohn, and I discovered the whole strangeness of grading, and how grading has, had become a- and has been for a while, but not forever, the kind of central focus for most students. So I really began to question what we were doing. Why is it that students are so fixated on achievement in this metrical sort of way, rather than learning things?

So for me, as a former true believer, learning and high achievement went together. And I learned that for many, many students, they’re completely separate things. Achievement is one thing, and learning is another thing, which may or may not happen in school. And so the first major publication I had about, at higher ed was called My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture.

So I began experimenting with what now is called active learning, with self-reflection, and all kinds of other things. In my book, I Love Learning, I Hate School, there’s a chapter called What Do I Have To Do To Get An A? And, you know, that’s every faculty member’s least favorite question. Um, so I, in that chapter, I talked about students’ obsession with grades, especially at high-achieving schools like mine, where the student’s entire childhood essentially has been devoted to producing high grades.

So they come here and their entire focus is, “How do I, how do, what do I have to do to get an A? I don’t have to learn it, but I have to look like I’m learning it so that I can get the grade.” And in that book, I wrote a sentence that said, “If I could change anything about education, I would get rid of grades.”

And I thought at the time, “But I can’t.” And then I discovered maybe I could, and that was a decade ago. And I, one of the things that happened is I discovered all the K through 12 teachers who were doing such amazing pedagogical things. One of my daughters went to Hampshire College, so I knew that it was possible in higher ed to have alternative assessment practices, but I’m at a conventional school, can I actually do that?

And then I discovered Starr Sackstein and her book Hacking Assessment. So she worked at a conventional school, and she had these little conferences, and they talked about feedback, and I discovered all the amazing writing, Linda Nilson, you know, all the people who were talking about alternative as- approaches to assessment.

And my feeling at the time was, if they fire me for this, I’m willing to take that chance. I had tenure. I am a white woman. I, you know, am at a private university. I’m willing to take o- use my privilege to do something that I truly believe in because I didn’t believe in the conventional approach where mistakes are eternally factored into your final outcome even if you learn from them.

And like how ridiculous is that? Um, so for a decade, I have not put any grades on anything. I have conferences with my students mid-semester and end of semester. We now, people have started to call that collaborative grading. On almost every assignment, students are practicing reflection, metacognition, you know, I, I tried this hard thing and I wasn’t great at it, but it was the first time I did it, and it was so exciting, and it was fun, and it was risk-free because there’s no penalty for trying something new.

So a lot of people were really rethinking their, all of their pedagogy, including their assessment practices. So there was an audience for the book, and your work happened to coincide at the exact same time. So, you know, there were a lot of people really rethinking this. And I mean, this rethinking goes back a century.

It goes back 50 years. It’s not that this is brand new. But it, there was a kind of convergence, I’m gonna say like eight years ago, where the There was a collective recognition that what we’ve been doing doesn’t work, it’s harmful, and we’re not … and it, it doesn’t have to be this way. And so I think y- your, your work and my work and the work of people like Robert Talbert and David Clark and other– Linda Nilson, you know, is showing that there are lots of ways of engaging seriously with student learning, and it doesn’t have to be take a test, average the scores, and generate a grade.

So that’s kind of my origin story.

Boz: All right. So we have– we’re at 160 episodes at this point. We have had dozens upon dozens of guests. We always ask this origin q- question. I think you are the first person whose origin story doesn’t come from, you know, I hated grading or I saw this negative effect with a specific student, or

Like, but yeah, I didn’t … Like I said, I had read Ungrading, I had read Schoolishness. Had no idea. But yeah, I thi- I find that really interesting that, you know, we’ve had lots of people that have come to it from assessment, like the assessment side. But you came to this from a very unique s- place where you were studying and, and really, like you said, doing the work that you teach, anthropology, and really studying a completely different thing and found, oh wait, this grading thing is actually contributing a lot to the student’s perception of needing, you know, to, to find shortcuts, needing to find ways to make sure that, that they get those A’s.

Not that they learn, but that they get the achievement, like you were saying. It was about the achievement, not about the learning.

Susan Blum: Yeah. I mean, so certainly I’ve had negative experiences with a student who’s challenging a grade or something. But I, I had, uh, uh, I… And I’ve written about almost all of this, you know.

‘Cause I used to give C’s. Um, “Why did I get a C on this project?” And I said, “Well, what did you think about my comments?” And you won’t be surprised to find out that what she said was, “I never read the comments.” And, you know, there’s research going to the ’80s, Ruth Butler. Um, if you give grades, students don’t read the comments.

And she had a strategy which I also learned about this year. I had a student who actually tried to use the strategy with me as well, even though it didn’t make any sense. But the strategy is you always negotiate your grade. It’s because most faculty give in, and we’re, we’re… If a student comes to you face-to-face, and usually it’s a more privileged student who will do that, and says, you know, “This is good enough.

I, I, I think I deserved a B+,” it’s very hard to come up with all of the justifications for why, especially in writing, why this was not excellent. I, b- I had a student last semester who, you know, I, I had not graded anything, any particular assignment because the grade is holistic at the end of the semester, but the student had not been engaged.

The student had not, in fact, mid-semester admitted that they had not even procured the books, and they were not doing the reading, and they were really not doing the things that contribute to the learning. And mid-semester, the student said, “Well, how can I work with you to get an A?” And I, I said co- engage with the work, you know?

And they said, “Well, how g-” I said, “Look, I’m not negotiating about your grade because it’s about your learning.” And the student said, “You’re the first professor in four years who has not engaged in this conversation.” And so it’s a strategy that has nothing to do with learning. It has to do with gaming the system.

It has to do with using Personal attributes to get a better grade. And I understand all the reasons why this is helpful if you’re going to graduate school, if you’re going to medical school, if you’re going to get into a, the next level of education, or if you’re going to procure a certain kind of job or internship or something.

It’s not that the GPA isn’t consequential, but that’s an entirely different use of assessment from communicating about learning, and that’s what I, I’m interested in communicating about learning, which might take more than just popping a number or a letter onto something, but it, it means actually having some interchange about the learning.

Boz: Yeah. As a K12 educator, even though the conversations I’m sure were not nearly as sophisticated, trust me, four times a semester we had those conversations. You know, “Mister, can I get some extra credit? How can I get a few extra points? How many more points do I need to get to a B?” Yeah, as a K12 educator, or at least as a six through, um, 12 educator, we all have that conversation with multiple students.

And like I said, that’s been the, the one of the biggest changes with the relationship between me and my students is I don’t have those conversations anymore. Like, the, it’s what do I need to show you I actually know? It’s about, like you said, about the actual learning, not about the, the point mongering and, and the, you know, can I get three more points to get my 77 to a B?

Susan Blum: Right. And, you know, the extra credit conversation is a very interesting one because it tends to be in more advantaged schools where extra credit is an option. But the extra credit, a- and I have colleagues who mean really well, you know, if you go to this lecture you get extra credit, and the lecture may be related to the subject and that’s a good thing.

But also in K through 12, as I understand it, if you bring in Kleenex you get extra credit or if you do these things that aren’t related at all to learning or even … Well, I guess that’s contributing to creating a community, and so that’s useful, but it also requires a certain level of economic safety that you can do that.

You know, I had them do basically a history project on a mathematician, ’cause I think the history of, of math and history of mathematicians is incredibly entertaining, ’cause there are so many that, you know, were crazy, suicidal, drugs, drug addicts. Like, it’s a really colorful history if you look at some of the mathematicians.

So I thought this was a really unique thing, and I got some great papers. I, I still have them, and this was 15 years ago. But yeah, it had nothing to do with the students’ learning at all.

Sharona: So I have a question, though, that I wanna tie in here, um, to get us back to some of your work. So you s- so you started in plagiarism.

You went to grading with your, with your research, and one of the things that I loved about alternative grading as I went through it for the last several years was we used to say, “You can trust your students. Cheating’s gonna go way down because the motivation is there.” How do you see the conversation circling back around now in the age of AI?

Because has the … You know, how does your research and your knowledge as an anthropologist, what are you seeing? What do we do? Like, where are we going with this? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem to be working the same way.

Susan Blum: Well, I think it’s really all about the same issues, but with some different tools. And what AI has revealed is that when things are not meaningful and important to students, they will find a way to produce a facsimile of the product that we are asking for.

And so our job is harder, way harder. I think the AI tsunami has been terrible for higher ed. It maybe, K through 12, also not great. I’ve seen a lot of students use it In ways that basically bypass the opportunity to learn skills. And so our job, as it has always been, is to persuade students that there is value in learning those skills.

And people have been talking the last year especially about productive friction and, um, productive difficulty, but the motivation is the same. So the motivation is return on investment for as little effort as possible for the best possible result when the result is what is motivating you. So if the goal is to produce the highest grade for the least amount of labor, AI will do it for you.

Agentic AI can take your whole course. It can sign in, it can do discussion boards, it can take quizzes, it can write papers, it can produce brainstorming. You know, it can do all the stuff. So what is it that students are going to feel worth their time? And I, I think the whole structure of school at scale is designed to work so that we don’t have to do that, so that our persuasion is in the form of threats and grades, and that’s how we have gotten students to do the hard work.

And it’s not gonna work anymore because they can just have Claude write the paper. They can have Claude do the reading. And I’ve been writing about this, this year s- particularly, I have a, a student-run lab, and the topic this year was about reading, and, you know, why are students reading? Why aren’t they reading?

And s- so I, I think we’re in this really interesting and very difficult and challenging moment where everything that we’ve always taken for granted is going to work is not working. But for instance, yesterday I went to see The Odyssey, and I went, I drove with my spouse and a friend of ours, a- an hour and a half to

It, it was summer. It was a great field trip. We went to this IMAX that had it in the full glory of whatever it was. So it was a six or seven-hour investment. I could have asked Claude to summarize the story of The Odyssey for me. I didn’t do that. I know the story of The Odyssey, but there is something about experiencing it that people are, are investing in.

So that’s what we have to somehow get students to buy into, is that, yes, you can get the answer. Yes, you can do the shortcut. Yes, here is a paper that looks sort of like a paper. But how can we persuade them that they will be happy to have engaged with this process? And there are not easy answers for this.

Sharona: Well, and what troubles me is you have to persuade them before they’ve even tried the experience, or they will opt out of even trying it. Yes. And that’s what concerns me, is if I can keep them showing up and I can build the relationship, I think I can do it, but I lose them a, some of them I lose very fast, and I only have classes of 30, so.

Susan Blum: Well, there, that’s something that, um, we have to figure out as well. What is happening when we are gathered together that can’t be replaced by any other thing? And I’m talking about co-present, synchronous, in-person courses. I did, I taught remotely for a year and a half at the beginning of the pandemic. I, I tried, I worked really, really, really hard to have a lot of activities that were valuable and meaningful.

It was quite exhausting. Um, Flower Darby has a new book about online teaching joy, which I’ve ordered, but I haven’t read yet Asynchronous remote courses are going to be really, really, really challenging. But I, I remember I, I was in California giving a talk at a community college to English professors, and they were very concerned about the fact that students were not coming to class.

And if you’re not going to threaten them with attendance points, which they are not allowed to do because it’s an equity issue because of all the many reasons students might not be attending, how can you entice them to come to class? What happens in class that’s so valuable that they will skip an opportunity to take an extra shift at work, or that they will find a babysitter for their sick child?

You know, what is it that happens in the class? And that’s a real challenge for all of us, I think, especially people not at residential campuses.

Boz: Yeah. See, and that’s… Y- you bring up a really interesting, um, like, challenge that we’re, we’re facing. ‘Cause I, I have a daughter that, um, is about to start college.

Sharona, you’ve got two boys that have just finished. But one of the things that we’ve noticed since pandemic is this rapid growth of alternative class modalities, whether it’s, you know, online, synchronous or asynchronous. But universities have, th- they have to respond, and they have been, by offering a lot more of these classes because pandemic showed that remote learning is possible.

But then right after that, we see this wave of AI that, you know, we… Sharona, you’ve talked about the friction- frictionlessness of, you know, cheating and stuff now with AI. Well, if you put on top of that, you know, asynchronous or, or even synchronous but online, it really glides easily. So we w- we’re coming to this weird place where, you know, we saw the need, we saw the benefit, we saw how it can be helpful to have these non-traditional classroom models during pandemic, but then right after that, this, this AI explosion.

And like you said, Sharona, you’ve talked about this. Some of those classes that your boys had that were, you know, asynchronous or even online synchronous, just the ridiculousness of those classes. So w- as higher ed, and Sharona you’ve said this many times, like higher ed especially, it has to change or it’s going to become obsolete.

Like, there’s a real danger of, you know, higher ed really losing its value. So how do we, what do we do? How do we stop that?

Susan Blum: I think, I think we are at this danger point right now. Higher ed has lost some or a lot, depending on the poll you look at, the Pew people, um, track it. It’s lost a lot of confidence from the public.

It’s been declining anyway because of concerns about return on investment- Mm … and the cost of higher ed, and the foregone wages, and is it worth it, and then the student loan problem. Um, and then we also have what people have foreseen for a long time, the so-called demographic cliff, where the population, uh, college-age population is declining because of declining birth rates.

I think elite schools are going to be the last ones standing, but there is going to be, and there already has been, a real shrinking of the kinds of schools there are, from small liberal arts colleges to little tiny niche schools. I just saw today about a merger from two schools in the Northwest, and they’re going to call it, like, University of the Northwest.

One is Willamette, and I, I can’t remember right now the other one. Um, regional campuses of state schools are also closing, merging, reducing their course offerings. People are going online for credentials. There’s a, this is a moment of really rethinking what it’s all for. And for a little while, we are going to be able to say higher ed signals a certain kind of commitment and knowledge.

But soon, if that doesn’t hold anymore, nobody’s going to believe it. And so even the credential won’t really be valuable.

Sharona: I’m, I’m gonna ask something controversial for this podcast. Um, because we advocate to take the behaviorism out of grades, do you think we’re gonna get even more pushback on changing grading?

Are, because are some people gonna double down on control through grades and through proctoring and all of that kind of stuff, and basically say that we’re part of the problem

Susan Blum: Sure. I, I think that there’s a lot of discussion. You know, when you, you emailed me about what we should talk about, you mentioned the Harvard decision about reducing grade inflation.

Um, but I, I’ve also seen people responding from Australia where they have something called quality assurance. So they have outsiders who are coming in to essentially verify that what students are producing is what they say they’re producing. But how do we do that? Uh, at the same time, we have a lot of other people who are doing oral exams and blue books and

So I, I think, um, there’s a lot of experimentation going on, and some of it’s gonna fail, and some of it, some people are going to go back to the schoolish practices of trying to control behavior because if you don’t show up, then I don’t know what you’re doing. And that might work for certain kinds of courses.

I prefer my students to show up in my classes. Um, but we also honor the autonomy of our learners, and so I, I, I don’t think anybody knows. You know, you can have, for certain kinds of subjects, you can put people in a room and lock down the computers so they can’t access anything, and you can try to make sure there are no glass- you know, AI glasses, and people don’t have their Apple Watch connected to their phone.

And y- you know, this cat and mouse game of preventing cheating is, I think, going to go on for a while.

Boz: Well, but with, with the technology and the way and the speed that it’s coming out, that’s a cat and mouse game that cat’s never gonna win. I mean, it, it’s … Like I said, you, you mentioned a few, you know, the glasses, the smart wat- there’s so much smart technology.

And again, it’s growing so rapidly that i- if that’s how we as educators are gonna try to battle it, we’re going to lose. Like, the, it, it’s not winnable. It’s not a cat and mouse. We’ll never catch it, because it is just becoming way too easy and just too many different technologies out there now that are smart, you know, that are, can be connected in very creative ways, so.

Sharona: Well, and Susan, I had read with interest, and Bosley, you don’t even know about this ’cause I didn’t get a chance to mention to you, uh, your post yesterday about the reading, right? Hm. That, so there’s this, you know, push for reading, and you said in yours if, yes, everyone needs to read to learn to read, but if they end up hating it, what have we done?

And I kind of feel the same way about learning in general. Like, if we’re so determined to make them learn that they hate, end up hating learning What are we doing?

Susan Blum: Right. Well, I think that that’s where really fundamental discussions of what formal education is about ha- have to happen. And my book, Schoolishness, really tries to look at all the dimensions, but I do say in there, the buildings are built, the accreditation organizations have their funding.

You know, w- everybody knows what a transcript means. So for us to really go back to fundamentals about what we’re trying to do is going to be very hard. And I think what we’re seeing now is a kind of fragmentation of different approaches so that you won’t know what a B+ means. If you see a transcript, whether it’s the GPA, meaning the sort of averaging of an entire school experience or a particular course or even a particular activity or artifact or exam or whatever, without knowing everything about it, you don’t know what that means.

Is this a hard grader who gave a few B+’s? Is this a student who had no background before and worked really hard and learned really well? Is this an advantage student who is basically going through the motions of a class they already took in high school? I- is it, you know, a super hard class with a curve?

Is it not curved? Is it, does it give points for promptness? Y- y- we don’t know what any of the grades mean, and that’s only one dimension. So if we’re going to force students to learn, which, you know, doesn’t seem very humane, then I think that we’re going to have to expect what Yong Zhao calls side effects.

So I, I’m glad you saw that post of mine yesterday. I, I’ve been writing a piece about reading for about a year, and I, I, I don’t know if I’m ever gonna really write this, but it might be a book, it might be a post, whatever. But Trevor Aleo has written great stuff about reading. He’s a literacy specialist, and there’s been a lot written about the so-called Mississippi Miracle And phonics, and how there, there’s the whole reading wars issue, which is related to but not the same as the math wars.

You know, what, what should students do? How should we do it? And then what are the consequences if they don’t do it? And what are the structures in place to make these things consequential? So, you know, in math in high school, it’s a question of algebra. Does everybody have to learn algebra? What if they don’t?

Do they take developmental courses that, uh, don’t count? Or I know that they have to count now in California. Um, but reading, a whole language was what my children learned on. And I learned on primers back in the day. They were boring, uh, and by the time I got to third grade and I could read Beverly Cleary, I became this fanatical reader that I still am.

But if students are spending all of their time reading, like here’s the phoneme, here’s how it comes out, I mean, maybe they can pass the test. And as somebody said in, in one of the things I, in the article I was referencing yesterday, a very high-achieving student said, “I’m so glad I got to level Y in my reading, because when I get to level Z, I’ll never have to read anything again.”

Oh, I’m not sure that’s what we’re aiming for. Yeah.

Boz: Exactly. Now y- you had mentioned something, and, and I don’t know if everyone is familiar with this, um, but you mentioned the Mississippi Miracle. Um, so for those that don’t know what the Mississippi Miracle is, um, Mississippi in K-12 traditionally has been ranked above, you know, among the bottom of the country.

Right now, Mississippi is like among the top 10 of states in almost every measured me- uh, metric in, uh, in K-12 education. Reading, math, science, like, and a lot of that turnaround, well pretty much all of it, was these massive changes. Like it wasn’t one thing. Like they completely rehauled their whole system.

But yeah, I, I just kinda wanted to bring that up ’cause first we have picked on a few states before, but that, that Mississippi miracle, it, it really is an interesting study of just how education reform can work in a very positive way

Sharona: Uh, in a positive appearing way because part of these articles that are coming out is starting to show that it’s a Mississippi mirage potentially.

So- Right.

Susan Blum: So, so this gets us to the question of measurement. What are we measuring? And how do we … We know what we … Well, we, we don’t agree probably about what we need to measure, and then we definitely don’t agree about how to measure it. So if one of the things you want to develop in your students is, let’s say, curiosity, how do you measure curiosity?

Well, that’s hard. So what you can measure is do they know the difference between this word and that word? That you can measure. And so i- is that a meaningful thing to measure? And what about being able to read political analysis 10 years later? Are they able to do that? Are they able to be critical consumers of information?

Which I think we all want our fellow citizens to be able to do. And does this focus on extracting the main idea from a paragraph lead to long-term ability to do the things with literacy that we hope they can do? And I don’t know that we know yet, but one of the things, as you’ve said, and Boz, am I allowed to call you Boz, or?

Boz: Oh, yeah, please. Please.

Susan Blum: Um, is that there was a huge infusion of training and a huge infusion of resources, and I was reading this article yesterday, and they were saying that they have basically two adults in a classroom of 20. And that is a way better ratio than I’ve read about in most under-resourced classrooms.

So would that alone help raise reading ability everywhere? I don’t know. And they have coaches, master teachers who coach all the teachers, and they have time for the training, and then they have kind of debriefing sessions. So there are a lot of things that they’ve added while they’ve been trying to use this, this method, but the method also doesn’t give teachers any autonomy at all.

The teachers basically have a script that they have to follow, and here is what you say when you’re teaching this particular writing grapheme or whatever. And so is it a mirage? Is it a miracle? Are there side effects that are undesirable, and how do we gauge those? I, I think those are really essential questions.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: And it’s all just so fascinating, ’cause because you’re right, Boz. Whatever else, they definitely had this massive change. Like, they, they did systemic change. It’s just … And it looked on paper like it was really great, and I’m hoping it’s great, but there are some cracks starting to show. Um, so getting back a little bit then to what we as, ’cause everyone listening to the pod probably has some interested in these alternative grading strategies, what do you see f- where do you see yourself going now at this point with, within your classes, and then also as sort of one of the leaders or one of the influencers of this movement?

Like, where would you want us to keep directing our efforts?

Susan Blum: Well, I think asking the question about what grades are for and then how we implement them, I think we really have to interrogate the assumptions. And- Your organization has been really great at that, you know, really showing that there can be measurement of learning and ability, but it doesn’t look like what we’ve done before, and having evidence for that, and a lot of evidence.

There are so many dissertations being written about it now to show that actually students emerge better able to do math if they have had standards-based grading or specifications grading rather than if they’re having conventional average everything and get penalized by mistakes grading. I think that having A, a, a menu of options is going to be really important for new teachers.

I think schools of ed, I don’t know exactly what they’re teaching in terms of assessment now, but assessment has to be r- reliable and all, all the things. It can be most … There can be most consistency if it’s a simplistic measure. But is that measuring what we want it to measure? So, uh, clearly we are in a moment where we disagree about the purpose of grades, and the Harvard restriction on high grades is one example of it.

Y- you know, they are doubling down on conventional scarcity models of high-quality grades, while so many others of us are saying, “If everybody learns well, then everybody gets a good grade,” and then that’s the problem of the employer to sort out who gets the job. It’s not my role to sort my students and pick winners and losers.

Um, but I think the motivation question is really, really essential, and … But it also comes back to what are people learning? What do they have to do? Is AI going to be able to do a lot of the math that, that people can do now? Is that okay? It can do coding. Is the coding problematic? Apparently, AI can discover errors in coding that have eluded humans for a long time because of the massive amounts of data that they’re scraping, stealing, whatever they’re doing at whatever environmental and labor cost.

Um- Are s- humans simply going to be learning how to do prompts and then asking another AI agent to verify the sources? I think all of these fundamental questions have to be raised, and so grading alternative assessment has a role to play in all of it, but we don’t really know what that is right now. I, I think if, if our listeners are confused, that’s appropriate because we really don’t know.

For my own courses, I spend all my time figuring out meaningful, engaging activities, whether that’s reading or writing or in-class activities that will produce the sort of Big goals that I have for my courses. So I’ve learned about this idea of threshold concepts, that threshold concepts are the transformative, fundamental ideas in every field that once you learn them, you can never see things the same way again.

And for me, that’s what I want my students to get. That’s what I can help foster. They can read information and facts and definitions on their own. They can look things up. That’s okay. But I might need to be there to help them sort of embody these ideas of, you know, what is cultural relativism? What is holism?

Let’s take some case studies and work on them together, and then if everybody in the class gets that, that is great, and if they feel confident in their own learning and they can show some sort of artifact that demonstrates that, then they have earned a high grade. But for me, the grading is sort of beside the point, but I, I understand that that isn’t how most of our listeners are, are feeling about it.

Sharona: Oh, I don’t know. I think most of our listeners would agree, but everyone’s working within structures that disagree.

Boz: Well, and, and like Sharona, I think you’ve said it before, grading isn’t a silver bullet that does anything. It, uh, what it does do is it allows all the other stuff to get out of the way. Like, it takes this, this smothering thing o- of, you know, point mongering and chasing the grade, it takes that out of the way so we can address those bigger concepts that you were just talking about, Susan, that, you know, what is the actual purpose of education?

What is, you know, the, these big ideas that we want our students to leave the, you know, our particular class with? So it’s, you know, the grading isn’t the point. The grading just allows all the other stuff to get out of the way so we can try to get to that-

Susan Blum: Right, and I have often said that alternative assessment is necessary but not sufficient.

You know, we have to- Yeah … change the assessment system, but a lot of other things also have to change along with it. And it’s very hard. I feel nothing but sympathy for the laborers in education right now. People often don’t have time to rethink their courses from top to bottom, and we all have to do that, and we have to do it fast because, as you say, the cat and mouse game is underway, and the mice will always win.

And, and the technology is constantly changing. But fundamentals of human learning are not changing So if we can understand that and build educational experiences around what we know works for learning, which is curiosity, meaningful relationships with classmates as well as teachers. If we, we know that people need a certain amount of security to take risks, um, all of those things are not changing.

So AI has kind of demonstrated that if the goal is super simple, there are tools for that. But if the goal is more complex, then AI can’t really replace what a great educator can do.

Boz: Well, I cannot believe this. Um, we are already coming up on time. These c- these interviews go by so fast. Sharona, is there any last minute thing that you’d like

Sharona: to bring up?

It was the third day, June 15th. Um, but also just if they ever see … I, and I’d like them to go and join you on LinkedIn. So that has been shocking to me recently. All of a sudden LinkedIn has popped off as basically the new academic Twitter. Like it’s not quite as fast, and it’s a little bit more long form.

But I would just recommend that everyone go find where Susan is writing things. Um- And I also wanna thank you for writing things, because I do not like writing things, and I had to write something this week. Let me be clear, I write a lot, but there’s a reason we have a podcast. I like to talk about the things.

And the formal writing, it’s just … I, I’m a really good writer. Let me be clear. I just don’t love it. Like, I just don’t love it.

Susan Blum: So thank you for the plug. Um, I did not allow my, um, session t- tw- two years ago to be recorded and shared out because I am concerned about intellectual property and things like that.

But I turned that into a post on Substack.

Sharona: Okay.

Susan Blum: So I have a Substack, and it’s called Ungrading Five Years On. And it- Well, I,

Sharona: we will definitely link that then.

Susan Blum: It has a lot of pictures. I basically took the talk and I turned it into a more formal thing. It has a ton of links and sources. It’s got a, like it’s, it’s almost an article.

In fact, I mean, I don’t know that everybody needs to know all this, but I did pitch it to three journals, and they all said, “Sounds really great, but we don’t do that.” And so I just decided, okay, I’m gonna publish it myself. And so because I did it Um, on Substack, Without Gatekeepers, I have a lot of images, so it should be fun to look at as well as informative.

But I, I echo you on LinkedIn, in fact, has become this very vibrant conversational platform for people in education. And I have multiple conversations every day about important things, and people post incredibly serious links, writing, links to s- incredibly serious writing there. So please do check it out.

Sharona: I, I’m just stunned at what LinkedIn has done recently. I absolutely love it.

Like it is absolutely hilarious. And what’s kind of fun is because I deal with a lot of the registration end of the conference, like that’s part of my duties as an organizer, I usually get to tell f- you know, who’s coming first. So I’m usually the first one to know that you’ve registered again.

Susan Blum: You guys are some of my people.

You know, you’re, you’re really engaging with these serious issues that I think about every day. And I, I, I, I learn so much every time.

Sharona: Well, one of the things I love about our chat at the conference is that we can get people who’ve been such thought leaders like you, like Asao Inoue, who will come and they will pop into the chat, and there’s, you know, 600 other people in the chat who are going, “Wait, I get to chat with Susan Blum?

I get to chat with Asao Inoue?” ‘Cause when do you normally get to do that in, like, life? So it’s really fun. So but thank you. We’re just, we’re so glad to have you as part of the community. Do you have anything further you wanna say before we, uh, before we sign off?

Susan Blum: Well, I just wanna thank you for your work.

Um, you’ve been working really hard. You have really expanded the conversation, and you’ve given it a kind of legitimacy. You have funding. You have a nonprofit. You have a conference that has grown and grown and grown. And you really are making these conversations not just niche, kooky conversations of a bunch of eccentrics out in, you know, the woods, but w- w- who also are wonderful.

Um, but you have made it almost mainstream, and that is really essential. So thank you for persisting in this work.

Boz: Well, thank you again for taking an, um, an hour out of your day to join us. Um, for our audience, I hope you guys have enjoyed this interview as much as Sharona and I have had, had making it. Um, but this has been The Grading Conference.

Not The Grading Conference. You

Sharona: have not got that

Boz: right in like four weeks. I’ve, I’ve done that two or three times now. Yeah. This has been The Grading Pod 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.