The Grading Podcast

Sharona: Just the first thing that really struck out, it just hit me squarely in the face, was the quote in the third paragraph, ~where, ~where they’re explaining why the biology department is moving to traditional weighted average grading. And she says, “The teacher explains how standards-based grading standard enhanced chemistry and physics, but limited teachers in biology.” So I’m already going, “Huh?” Biology is not such a unicorn so different from chemistry and physics that it would work in one and not in the other because of a disciplinary thing.

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 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 well. I’m still adjusting to the fact that I’m teaching five days a week, and I’ve never done that in my entire career. I have been in the classroom, in my own classroom since I was 19 years old, and I’m now 50 and, yeah, that’s been a more of a system shock than I expected, and I don’t expect any sympathy from you whatsoever.

Boz: I was about to say, ~I, I, ~I wanna feel bad for you, but nah.

Sharona: Okay. But you, believe it or not, make more than I do. I don’t make enough to have to go five days a week to the university. ~Uh, ~so anyways, yeah, so that’s been a little bit of a shock. How about you?

Boz: I’m doing good. I had some really good coaching sessions that, just walked away from feeling good. And one of the schools I’m working with, I had two coaching sessions with teachers on an observation of a lesson that, didn’t hit on all cylinders. And the level of reflectiveness that these teachers had it make my job so easy and I really am… It’s really nice to be this early in the process and be working with teachers that are just that self-aware and reflective. It is, it really does, it makes my job a lot of fun

Sharona: And I love it when you talk about coaching successes because my sort of perceptions of you when we first met and what I knew about you being from Oklahoma and stuff, and just the way sometimes you physically look, I’m like, I would not have first thought how good a coach you were. And then now having gotten the personal benefit of you coaching me for so many years, like you’re spectacular. But the stereotypes that people would have and the ways that you break them is just, it still breaks my brain. ~I gotta be honest. I’ve gotta be honest. I,~

Boz: I don’t understand this, but I have heard that, I was at Santee for so long and was a department chair for so long. The amount of teachers, after they’re there a couple of years that will tell me how afraid they were of me the first year or two.

Sharona: I’m petrified.

Boz: And I’m like, I d- I don’t know how, I don’t mean to do that. I don’t know- Well- … what it is, but- But

Sharona: You tell stories about things that you say in meetings, and I’m thinking, “I don’t wanna be in the meeting and be the target of that,” right? But that’s different because usually when you’re being obnoxious, you’re either fighting on behalf of somebody or you’re frustrated at an administrator. But those are the stories you tell when you meet people.

Boz: So I’ll change my stories, is what I need to do, huh?

Sharona: No, I don’t think you should because it’s really fun to break the stereotype because it means that we can look beyond what people see or what they anticipate based on stories and look at who you actually are, and we should be doing that with everyone we meet, but it’s just fun. So I love hearing about how great your coaching calls do. And it reminds me too, like even I was– when I was working with you this morning, so for people who’ve been listening for a little while, we’re doing this faculty learning community, right? And you and I do this together, and it’s so much fun to do together. But I have to tell you, I think, and you were part of this conversation, I loved some of the conversations we had this morning in the FLC.

Boz: We were a couple people short of what we normally have been, but man, did we have some great conversations, especially the conversations around AI. And you weren’t part of this, but, later on, I think it was in one of the breakout groups and a little bit after you got off and I stayed on with a couple of people afterwards, like talking about getting back and, how do we combat all of this AI? Let’s get back to our roots. One of the participants was talking about doing research and how to use geometry as a launching point to so many other subjects and to improve teaching through geometry. And I’m like, “Yeah, you wanna talk about getting back to our roots? There’s a 4,000-year root going back,” ’cause that’s really where the subject of mathematics and the study of mathematics started, was within the study of geometry. You know, what’s, what was the, um, I think the, the sign that hung, um, above one of the great philosophers, “Let no man ignorant of geometry cross these doors,” or something like that.

Sharona: Something like that. But what’s really amazing to me, and it was really brought home, is yes, we’re dealing with the threat to AI, but the reason it’s coming up in the FLC is because we’re asking people to write learning outcomes. So they’re grappling with how to write learning outcomes and how are they gonna assess them, and then the question of what would should we really be teaching. That conversation doesn’t come up ever, as far as I remember, in a traditional grading system. People say, “What should we teach? Okay, we’ll do this topic.” But we don’t get to the depth of what are we going to assess? What are we going to measure? Especially if, the AI can do this stuff. So we had some just truly remarkable-.

Boz: Although, to be fair, when’s the last time you had an in-depth conversation with anyone doing traditional grading since AI came out? Can’t say that they’re not necessarily happening, but yeah, we-

Sharona: But see, even when I went through the redesign process to do the pathways, there was… the conversations that have continued ever since then have been, “It was a mistake to get rid of remediation. It was a mistake to get rid of remediation.” There’s never actual discussions of what should we actually teach. I’ve never had that with anyone doing… and yeah, I think even when we had to do that unfortunate experiment about putting traditional grading back into our statistics class, that conversation still didn’t happen.

Boz: There was another part of the conversation that was in a breakout room you weren’t part of that particular breakout room, was we got into, again, this offense versus defense against AI. The defense being how do we try to prevent it, all this other stuff, but the offense was how do we attack this so we make our students understand and not wanna use it, rather than trying to defend and prevent them from using it, ’cause that’s a losing battle. And that was a really interesting conversation. It was with the same participant that kinda started it in the whole group. So we had a great conversation in that calc group breakout room around that.

Sharona: And I feel like we’re also making assumptions about our students, because I, in my voting class, gave students a choice to either intentionally use AI for this project or intentionally not use AI. And I’ll be honest, I expected way more people, I expected to skew dramatically towards AI-assisted. I was about 50/50-

Boz: Yeah … .

Sharona: With students opting out of using it versus opting into using it.

Boz: That’s really interesting, and it kind of brings us to our topic for today. Okay. So talking about students. You and I, especially recently, we have loved how much news and media alternative grading has gotten in national and local media. But this last week, and I, and when I say last week, I, we literally mean since we last recorded. We c- very quickly came up with three articles written by students and from the student point of view, and I think this is such an interesting voice that we need to hear more of, and a voice that, in a lot of areas is completely absent. I know in the grading conference we have tried to get more student voice, and we’ve had some great panels with, college students of different, levels and different, subjects, but it’s still a minority voice in the whole conversation. So coming across these three different articles was absolutely amazing, and I’d kinda like to actually spend some time talking about this and looking at some of the student viewpoint of all of this alternative grading stuff.

Sharona: Well, and to be very clear, these are three articles written by students in newspapers that are within their schools. They’re on the internet, they’re publicly available, but these are intended, the audience is their schools, and they’re very much at the high level of traditional grading versus standards-based grading. They’re a direct head-to-head, so it’s not the nuances, it’s not the four pillars or any of that stuff. It’s literally pitching, traditional-based points and percentages and averages, weighted average grading versus standards-based grading. And I agree with you. I wanna go through this, but I wanna set some caveats.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: So first of all, we in no way want to criticize these authors.

Boz: No.

Sharona: These are student journalists who did a phenomenal job with this reporting. So whatever we talk about, it is in no way meant to criticize a student in any way, shape, or form.

Boz: Absolutely not.

Sharona: What we are gonna do is really look at what they say from the perspective of they truly believe everything that they said in these articles.

Boz: Yes …

Sharona: ~as far as I can tell. ~One of them’s a little more newsy. The other two are definitely opinion pieces.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: So these are the students’ own opinions, and what I think we can take away from it, even if we disagree with what the statement is, this student probably represents a lot of students who hold this particular opinion, and if we ignore it to our detriment.

Boz: A- absolutely, and that’s one of the things that, you know, one of our getting started episodes is completely about student buy-in. We’ve talked a lot about, student in different episodes. I know it came up a lot in some of the reassessments with Becky Pepler and a few others. So regardless of if we agree or disagree, these are opinions and viewpoints that are out there and that a lot of students are coming into our classes with, and the better we understand it, the better we’re able to design and clearly message those alternative grading structures of our classes to help our students understand why we do it, how it’s done, and all the nuances in it.

Sharona: Yeah. Absolutely.

Boz: All right. So we said there’s three of them. Do you wanna just, first introduce all three of these articles?

Boz: And although it doesn’t say this, it looks like this was something implemented pretty much school-wide, or at least in many of the subjects.

Boz: Yep, history.

Sharona: And then this article is specifically about all the biology classes. So the biology classes are moving back to an average-based grading system. So that’s the first article. The next two articles are at Florida International University, I believe. So this is now university level, and they have a opinion structure at their school newspaper where they present dueling columns, so they basically take both viewpoints and publish them simultaneously. So both of these articles came out on September 17th. One of them is arguing for traditional letter grades and the traditional ways of computing them, and the other one is saying, “Going beyond A’s and B’s.” And one of the differences between the two is that in addition to the way they compute final grades, they go further, and one system is pass/fail, and one of them still uses A, B, C, D, F. So now we’re conflating sort of two different pieces, which is the way you get to the final grade and what that final grade is.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So which one of those two situations would you like to start with?

Boz: Let’s start with the individual article, the one about the biology going back. This was released September 13th. It is titled Science Department Changes All Biology Classes to an Average-Based Grading System.

Sharona: And this is the one that is more of a news report and less of an opinion piece.

Boz: Although she give definitely, the author definitely gives some opinion in

Sharona: I’m not sure if- I’m not entirely clear how much of this is her reporting and her belief system.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: ~You know, ~it’s hard to tell sometimes with a student journalist. But a lot of the stuff she’s saying is quotes from people she interviewed.

Boz: Yes. And this is the one that I think we are more in danger of coming across as, as attacking. That is not our purpose. That is not what we’re trying to do by any means. This is a very well-written, lots of respect to this author. There are some ideas that we might disagree with, but we are-

Sharona: This author interviews a teacher, and if we assume that what the quote that’s attributed to the teacher was reported correctly, I do think the teacher is wrong in some of the things the teacher is saying.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: But again, that’s not to crit- criticize the student reporter

Boz: All right. So let’s jump into this one, and then we’ll do the duel- the dueling column, which-

Sharona: Okay …

Boz: I love that idea, by the way. Dueling columns. ~Yeah.~

Sharona: So I have to read the, just the first thing that really struck out, it just hit me squarely in the face, was the quote in the third paragraph where they’re explaining why the biology department is moving to traditional weighted average grading.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: And she says, “The teacher explained how standards-based grading standard enhanced chemistry and physics, but limited teachers in biology.” So I’m already going, “Huh?” Biology is not such a unicorn so different from chemistry and physics that it would work in one and not in the other because of a disciplinary thing.

Boz: Okay, but how many times have we heard, “Oh, I see how that works in someone else’s subject, but in mine it doesn’t”? Like, we have seen that every which way you can imagine.

Sharona: Right. And this is, so then I’m gonna read the quote. So the teacher’s quoted, quote, “For biology particularly, the learning objectives were just really narrow, and it didn’t allow us to really connect one concept with the next.” And she continues, “We never really got to ask that question about explain to me the evolution of a cell and how that came about, and how that fits in with photosynthesis or how that fits in with cell respiration.” So I’m like, okay, so you wrote your learning outcomes too narrow. That’s not a flaw of standards-based grading. That’s a flaw in your standards.

Boz: A- absolutely. And I don’t know for sure if, you said this was in Chicago, right? But the way the next gen standards are written, those standards are a mix of three different things, and if you’re doing your standards, for your standards-based grading system in a way that aligns with next gen, that question not only could have been, should have been asked.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So it’s been a decade. So I’m already gonna dispute the factual statement, which is stated as a fact, ~uh, ~because the reporter goes on to say this SBG or standards-based grading prevented teachers from portraying biology as an interconnected field. Grading systems don’t do… at least alternative grading doesn’t do these things. That’s the grading architecture or the learning outcomes. There’s nothing in standards-based grading that prevents you from assessing literally anything.

Boz: No, it’s literally how you set up your standards, your learning objectives, whatever you wanna call them, and then how you decide to assess those.

Sharona: Now, I just have things to say about this. Do you wanna pick out the next one, or do you want me to go to my next point?

Boz: No, go ahead

Sharona: So then you read a little bit down further, and the next thing that I- is a personal pet peeve of mine, and again, no shade to anyone who does this. I understand why people do this, but you’ve heard me rant and rave about using numbers as marks. And what happened in this case is their grading system, they used 50, 60, 80, and 100 as the things you could get, as the marks you can get on assessment. I’m like, “Okay, that’s a weird set of numbers.”

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Which hints to me that they’re doing math on those numbers, ’cause there’s no reason to have a 50, a 60, an 80, and a 100. I mean, why don’t you call it four, three, two, one? Like, what is that?

Boz: Yeah, and that was one of the complaints that was brought up in this article was that I can’t remember if she was quoting a student or was talking from her own experience, but that a small little mistake would drop you from 100 to an 80. That any little thing, and the author believed in a, traditional grading system where you could, give 100, 99, 98, 97, that those little mistakes would actually be less harmful.

Sharona: And that’s one of the things we’ve said, and we caution the people that we work with, it’s all fine and good when you’re working on your learning outcomes and we ask you what makes an A, don’t suddenly shoot for perfection when you were accepting a 93% before. Don’t suddenly shoot for a C to be they can do all the minimum things, when before you accepted a 70%, where if they did all their homework, they didn’t have to actually be able to do anything. So we have to be really careful with the design of our system to not accidentally make it too hard and too out of reach compared to where you are. Now, you can have high standards, you just have to make attaining them very clear to the students how they get there.

Boz: Yeah. But I do think, your first point was the, the bigger issue here, that- If we’re counting our, giving proficiency scores, on our rubrics and they’re coming to the students as numbers, especially numbers that they have experience and backgrounds with, and you’re seeing 50, 60, 80, 100, th- those are going to have some weird reactions to students. And without a really clear explanation, which I think the easiest way to have a clear explanation is don’t use those numbers.

Sharona: And the fact that they’re not even intervals.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: You have a 20-point gap, a 20-point gap, and then a 10-point gap. What does that mean? Clearly, to me as a mathematician, there’s meaning behind those intervals. Yeah. There’s, they’re doing something with that. So I’m like not loving that.” Moving along, they said they posed specific challenges in the honors biology class because the tests were super complex. So now I’m hearing, okay, so you’ve got super complex tests, but your learning outcomes are narrow. So now I’m like, are your assessments actually assessing your learning outcomes? Or is there a mismatch in alignment?

Boz: There seems to be some sort of mismatch here between those two statements. Between they’re too narrow that we can’t show the cross, and we can’t show the interconnection, and these tasks are just too complex that-

Sharona: Yeah

Boz: yeah, the, I’m having a hard time seeing how those two realities exist within a single- … class.

Sharona: So I definitely would love to work with The Latin School. If anyone listening works with them, I’m happy to help their biology department because I don’t think they’re gonna get what they want from going back to traditional weighted grades. But the s- last part of the article does switch to the student beliefs.

Boz: Are you gonna talk about the reassessment? If not, I wanna bring that up before we get down to that.

Sharona: Yeah, go ahead and you talk about that.

Boz: So that was one of the other things that w- that was brought up, was that in the SBG system, students were given the opportunities of reassessments. And now all the tests are gonna count, so there is no reassessments. The author did, put in some concern that some students had about since there’s not going to be this opportunity, and how some of the students who have already completed biology said that was a really big benefit to their learning process, was this ability to test, get feedback, and then take that feedback, do additional learning, and reassess. And that final grade was, and I’m adding this part, but that final grade then ends up representing the end of the learning journey and not all the stumbles along the way. And this author does bring up that since those aren’t gonna be available, that, some people might be a little bit worried about it. Now, later on, they do also talk about this also making, people maybe take this test more seriously and study harder, which we hear from adults all the time, “Oh, if we give reassessments, they’re just not gonna take the first one serious.” And yeah, sometimes that does happen, especially if you don’t, and this is what, Becky Pepler really talks about. If you don’t explain to the students the actual purpose of reassessments, that it is not just, oh, you get to blow one off and then throw all the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks, and just keep doing that till you get a grade that’s, good enough, for what you’re wanting, then yes, you’re gonna get that. It’s gonna happen. I’ve had it happen to me. But yeah, this, this belief that, oh, we’re just gonna– students are just gonna study a lot harder now, we’ve seen a lot more evidence and so is some research out there that shows that is not necessarily the case. That’s usually not what happens.

Sharona: And I feel like there’s something built in. Behaviorism creeps in, right? So the quote from one of the students says, “I feel that people that were using reassessments to get their grade but not really caring about the original tests are probably gonna do worse.” There’s an, a built-in judgment there.

~Like-~

Boz: Absolutely … .

Sharona: Is it fair that if they didn’t really try hard on the original, should they be able to get… And that fairness, that behaviorism, we have to be really careful about that. There’s a lot of reasons that have to do with caring, right? A student may not feel that they have enough self-efficacy. They’re worried about that they’re, they don’t have the ability to do well. Some students may not have the ability to do the first time they try something. So-

Boz: ~And, and ~sometimes a student just might have life come up and, it takes them two weeks longer t-to get it. One of my favorite stories that Dr. Robert Talbert talks a lot about, which is why he got into non- traditional grading, was this very lively student who was full of zest and energy and love for learning, and just needed a couple more weeks than most of the other class to get it. And because traditional grading punishes that, by the end of the semester, all of that enthusiasm and all of that, wanting to learn was beaten out of the student.

Sharona: But what’s interesting to me then is at least a couple of the students that were interviewed for this article are really excited, but some of the things that they’re excited about, I’m like I don’t know if that’s gonna be the way it works for you.” It might, but like one person said, “I feel like the topic of biology’s so interesting to learn because it’s so applicable to real life, which not many classes can be.” So I’m like, “Well, hmm, that’s an interesting statement.” But having a test every week just made it so stressful. So the frequency of assessments was bothering this student. And she’s hoping that students will be able to find a passion for biology with the new system instead of stressing about their grades constantly. Not what our experience with 100 years of traditional weighted average grading. So again, I’m not bashing the student’s belief, but she, like many students, do honestly believe this.

Boz: It’s not just students either.

Sharona: But the point here is that we need to deal with our students that may have the same belief.

Boz: There’s another quote, it’s in the, I think this is the second to last paragraph that I absolutely love ’cause I think it has absolutely nothing to do with grading. And that is, I’m actually gonna read this whole kinda like last paragraph ’cause it’s only a sentence or two. “For the class as a whole, she views the grading change as an opportunity for a new start. I have heard mixed emotions on biology because some people say it was like the easiest one, some people said it was the worst one. Sloane said, ‘I feel like now with the new grading, that it’s a whole brand new, , slate to see what we can make our own opinions on.'” I’m sorry. People loving and hating a subject, that’s normal, that’s natural. That has nothing to do with the grading system. I absolutely hated English for most of my life. My, wife, who is a, a thespian, has a degree, she literally changed her degree from a, literature major to, a theater degree so she didn’t have to take the one basic math class that was required at the time for the literature major and not the drama. So that has nothing to do with the grading system. That is just some of us like subjects more than others, and that’s always gonna be.

Sharona: I would agree with you, except it does sound like from what we’ve read earlier in the article that maybe the biology department didn’t do as authentic an implementation that matched their goals for the class as maybe some of the other departments did. And so if there is a mismatch in the design of the grading system, I do think it can damage the class.

Boz: Oh I definitely agree with that. But still people, in any system you put in place, you could put, the best teacher ever created, and they’re gonna have a certain amount of students that absolutely hate them. You can take the worst teacher ever created and put them in front of 100 students, and you’re gonna have a few that think they’re the greatest teacher in the world.

Sharona: No, I, I understand that. And I do wanna get to the last paragraph. Okay. Because to me this is the one I’m like, “Oh. Oh, boy.” So this is about the, back to the teacher. So this teacher wants students to not worry as about, as much about their grades and instead look forward to the new learning opportunities this shift poses. “I think we’re so focused on grades all the time, and not necessarily focused on having fun in a class and learning things and finding things that are interesting. The big thing is really making kids think deeply about biology as a whole and really make those connections.” This is not a new system. This system is 100 years-plus old. There are entire books out, like by Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards. But the, the Butler research you cannot think that shifting to traditional grading is gonna be the answer.

~Oh.~

Boz: A- and the fact that we’re so focused on grades all the time, that’s, when you go back to traditional grading, you- Don’t think that’s gonna … right now you have the ability for students to reassess. You’re taking that away. You don’t think the focus is gonna be on point mongering and, point accumulation and final instead of learning? Yeah. A- and again, nothing against Alta. This is all against the, the teacher’s opinion, but imagining this, this teacher was not either bought into alternative grading from the get-go or, was involved in a poor design grading architecture, example of one which we know from experience, you can, y- you can absolutely make things worse with a bad implementation of a alternative grading system.

Sharona: I do wanna repeat one more time, a shout-out to the journalist. The journalist got quotes from a teacher, got quotes from a student. The writing is excellent for a high school junior. Like- Yeah … kudos to the author of this article So I just have to shout that out.

Boz: All right. So let’s get into this other one, which we’re gonna talk, ~um, ~back and forth between both of them, ’cause that’s really how it was set up, this dueling column. So we’re gonna talk about both of them simultaneously.

Sharona: I do wanna say one thing, though.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: So these two are intentionally opinion columns, and they make some pretty bold statements. The previous article was really this person said this, and this person said this, and this is what they’re hoping to see. It wasn’t a lot of unsupported argumentation. I have some issues with unsupported argumentation in these two, so on both sides. So I’m gonna try to there’s some statements that I just can’t let pass to say, ’cause the article writer will say this is true,” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not true.”

Boz: Let’s introduce them first. So these are the dueling column. One of them is named Making the Mark: Do Alternative Grading Systems Really Work? And that is the pro-traditional grading, right?

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: Okay. And then the pro-alternative grading, ~um, ~counterpiece to that is called Going Beyond A’s and B’s: Can Alternative Grading Help Students Learn More Effectively?

Sharona: So I already have an issue with the titles. Actually, I really like the alt-grading one because it asks a very specific question, do they help students learn more effectively? And the other one says, “Do alternative grading systems really work?” What does that mean, work? Work to do what? So I’m already picking apart things,

Boz: okay. So l- let’s bounce back and forth, but where do you wanna start? Do you wanna start with the pro alternative or pro traditional?

Sharona: I think we better start with the pro alternative because I’m just gonna go on to rants on the pro traditional one.

Boz: Okay. It’s

Sharona: gonna be a problem.

Boz: All right. So let’s get into this one a little bit.

Sharona: Okay. I have to say on this one, I love the first sentence. So this is written by a senior who’s graduating, and she says, “The grading system of GPAs and letters that have been an omnipotent presence in my academic career for most of my life will no longer be important and no longer determine my success upon graduation.” And she says, “The transition from a strict numerical system of quality to the more flexible and fluid systems of workplace performance indicators is, to say the least, very jarring.”

Boz: So I did have a question about this. Is she referring to- changing, ~um, ~from a traditional to a alternative grading system, or is she talking about transitioning from academia to work life?

Sharona: Academia to work is this paragraph.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: And I think the plan is that she’s going to make an argument that alternative grading systems have an opportunity to bridge the gap between academia and work.

Boz: But I wanted to point that out because as an educator and as someone who has worked with grades 6 through 16, the amount of times that I have heard, we can’t change this,” or, “We can’t do that ’cause we have to teach our students how to function in the real world.” Oh, you, you, oh, no, you, you can’t turn anything in a second late, ’cause that’s not how things happen in the…” The hell it doesn’t. When you were in marketing for a while. If you didn’t get your, your project, done in time, did you just stop doing it? You know- No … “Oh, sorry. Sorry Toyota, I didn’t finish your marketing scheme for this new launch. I guess we just won’t have one ’cause it’s late.”

Sharona: Well, and then here’s the thing. Remember when we had Joe Packowski on?

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: ~The new, ~the new subtitle of the Specifications Grading 2.0 book is, it used to say re- Restoring Rigor: Motivating Students and Saving Faculty Time, and now it’s added, “And Developing Career Competencies.”

Boz: Yep. ~So this is Joe-~

Sharona: And Joe was making the argument that this is much more, potentially much more aligned-

Boz: Yep …

Sharona: with that. ~So I’m like, “Hmm, yeah.” ~

Boz: And you’re right. ~Um, ~but- That’s a lot of what the rest of this article is. It talks about some of that.

Sharona: But that being said most of the alternative grading that you and I talk about is not actually addressing changing GPAs and final letter grades. There are definitely movements afoot to do that. You’ve got the Mastery Transcript Consortium who’s trying to get away from GPAs and present college admissions as a more full picture. You have things like MIT where and University of Michigan where they’re covering those grades, right? So there are systems that you can do that change the giving of a final letter grade. That’s not typically what you and I talk about, but that is the transition that she’s talking about.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: It’s not even just like what happens during a course, but it’s that final letter grade GPA transcript thing that doesn’t exist in the workforce. Like especially, have you ever gone from one job to another, not in academia, and they sent over anything that like was a record of your work?

Boz: Other than confirming some of the things I tell them that, “Hey, I put this whole system in place,” yeah.

Sharona: And these days a lot of companies will only confirm dates of employment.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So it’s not even the company, it’s the client you worked for might give you a letter of recommendation, but there’s not like, “And they, in this quarter, this person did this, and in this quarter, this person…” That permanent transcript record doesn’t exist once you leave academia. And it’s a leftover from when we started doing public funding of schools, and we can talk about the history of all of that another time. Um, so I love that I love that. And she goes on to say, “The current system of grading and letters and GPAs is not entirely useless or even poorly constructive, as it is still very useful for more objective subjects such as mathematics and many scientific disciplines.” So this is where we start to get the student voice and student opinion in. I appreciate so much, this is the student’s belief. These are things we need to address. I definitely dispute the factual nature of that statement.

Boz: But I love the fact, ’cause again, we hear this argument from educators all the time. This student was arguing the flip way. Instead of saying, “I see how it can work in someone else’s, class, but it won’t work in mine,” she’s actually saying, I believe it was a she, but-

Sharona: Yeah …

Boz: ~um, ~she’s saying, “This worked great in, these art and these media type of classes, but I can understand why others it might not.” But I love the fact that it’s the same argument except flipped.

Sharona: Now, she goes on to argue many of the things that we’ve heard about alternative grading systems. What I do love is that she says these things would allow for more room, not that they automatically allow, do better things. But they would allow for things such as nuance in determining the quality of students’ work or for the student to learn more effectively through feedback. So these things are possible, not automatic. So I definitely like that.

Boz: And again, even though she doesn’t completely point it out, she definitely does get into how this would mirror how things are actually done in the real world, in the occupation that it sounds like she’s wanting to get into, which is news media and stuff, and how articles and videos, are edited and feedback are given.

Sharona: And I also wanna point out is that she’s actually had several experiences with alternative grading. So she talks about some pass/fail courses that she had. She also talks about mastery-based grading ba- based on learning objectives. , She has, , so like I’m like, yay, this is a student who’s a senior, who’s graduating from her university, and who’s had several classes at least in alternative grading. And I’m like, steps, steps. Yay, professors at, at Florida, I think it’s, uh, Florida International University. So I’m like, “Yes, let, let’s do that.” And she says, “These systems were fantastic for the specific courses they were used in.” So again, her belief, what worked for her is that the instructors in these specific courses tailored their alternative grading systems to that specific course.

Boz: And that’s one of the power of alternative grading. We can tailor it much more so than a traditional grading system to our needs of the course, to the sequencing of our course, to our students, and to our own pedagogical belief system that traditional grading system just, you can’t.

Sharona: Right. Now, one of the things where I have an issue with this article is the student is conflating alternative grading with the assignment of a final course grade. So she is calling pass/fail as an alternative grading system. But I know plenty of courses that are fa- pass/fail that are still using weighted averages.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And I know plenty of A, B, C, D, F courses that are using the alternative grading we promote. So I do think that there is a distinction between how you calculate or how you come up with a final grade and whether that final grade is pass/fail or not pass/fail.

Boz: But I think that was more of the experience she had with that course that was pass/fail. It was a alternative grading course. And that might have been, one of the first or only times she’s come across a pass/fail type class.

Sharona: Right. The issue is that’s the part that the dueling column is picking up on. So let’s jump over if okay, we can come back to this other one if we want, but let’s jump over and talk about the other one, Do Alternative Grading Systems Really Work? And in theory, both of these columns are in response to the other one, but I’m not sure how that works ’cause who writes theirs first?

Boz: They’ve gotta be some sort of collaboration between the two. I would assume.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: Okay. So I’m gonna pick this apart, even though, again, no shade to the student. Please, no shade to the student. But one thing I am gonna– Because again, this is what the student believes. These beliefs are out there, and they are authentically held. I think the big thing that I have an issue with is traditional letter grades are more efficient, and then the reasoning.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Because we all think that they’re comprehensible. We think we understand what they mean. But often when we do our professional development, we find out that nobody actually knows what they mean.

Boz: Yeah. She goes on a little bit further, a couple paragraphs down, and you’re right, the pass/fail is definitely– The pass/fail versus ABC, DF is definitely where this author is making a lot of their arguments on. But I wanna read a couple paragraphs down. “One main reason traditional letter grades are better is because they give students the opportunity to receive clear feedback.” I’m gonna come back to that in a minute. “With this type of grading system, a student can clearly comprehend where they stand in the class. For example, an A indicates a student is doing very well in the course, while an F demonstrates a person is struggling tremendously. While pass/fail grading methods take the pressure off students to achieve academically, a great deal of educators believe there is an obscurity to this evaluation system.” So definitely misunderstanding or conflating this idea of pass/fail versus traditional ABCDF versus traditional points percentage and , average grading to alternative grading.

Sharona: I also think that– But again, this student believes this, and this is what a lot of people believe, a lot. And deconstructing this for people, for example, she says, and you read it, they encourage motivation. But we actually have research that shows that intrinsic motivation goes down in these systems.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: When you have ~a, ~a grade assigned. Yes, you’re right. An A and an F, that’s pretty clear. But in the very next sentence after what you read, I think what we see is also another belief. If a student earns a 75% and another earns a 95%, they can both pass the course. However, letter grades indicate that one student has performed much better than the other. So now we’ve got ranking and sorting.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So again, this goes back to what’s the purpose of all these grades? Now, you know what I haven’t seen in any of the first four paragraphs is one word about learning.

Boz: No.

Sharona: So it’s about how students are doing in the class, but it’s not about learning.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: Although they keep saying the purpose is to motivate students to learn and succeed But there’s no actual learning motivation. It’s, I’m motivated to get the grade because I have a personal goal of the grade, not the learning

Boz: But I wanna go back to that 75 versus 95. So she s- she was saying this about a single, exam, which I will address in a second. But if we take that a step further in looking at a final grade of a 75 compared to a 95.

Sharona: That’s actually what I think she’s talking about is the final grades, not the exam.

Boz: Well, no, it said- I don’t think, no … if, if a student earns a 75 and another earns a 95, they can both pass the class.

Sharona: Yeah, I think she’s talking final percentages, but-

Boz: Then we have, we’ve done our training on misuse of mathematics so many times, and we can show in there how subjective and not objective grades are, starting with a single problem, going to a single, assignment or assessment or artifact, and then wrapping all of that up into the final grade. We literally in these trainings will take a sample of student work and give some, but not a lot, guidance and ask teachers to grade it, and those scores will range almost the entire gambit of possible number evaluations. We give them zero to 10. We will often get, sometimes in extreme cases, zero to nine, often one to eight. But then on top of that, we go to an assessment level, and we did that at McMasters, and the group in the room when we did the assessment, here’s 15 questions, 10 of them were this level, five were this level, two were the… The spread of final grades on that, whole s- assessment was shocking to a lot of people in that room.

Sharona: Right. But I think, and that’s why we deconstruct the mathematics. But I really think that what we need to hone in on here is what are the beliefs that this person has, because these beliefs are so common. Instructors have them, students have them, administrators have them, parents have them. Every stakeholder in education has these hidden assumptions, hidden belief systems inside this, and that’s why it’s so important to understand where the resistance is coming from when I read through this article, there’s, the last paragraph, if I can jump to that for a second, this author really articulates their beliefs that we’re going to have to address. We can’t ignore them. So it says, “Although there are some benefits to alternative grading systems, traditional letter grades provide objectivity that other grades, other methods do not. Standard academic evaluations offer structure, encourage discipline, and help students develop a clear vision of how well they understand what is being taught in their courses.” So there’s a whole set of beliefs there about the importance of discipline, the importance of structure, the importance of standards, and how math is objective. So until you can address those beliefs, you’re gonna have a fight on your hands with some of these people.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And then to conflate, again, the pass-fail versus the A, B, C, D, F. So I thought it was just really interesting to see these contrasting viewpoints from the two students at the same institution. Now, I also noticed that this student never mentions any personal experience with these systems.

Boz: Yeah, but I would absolutely assume they would have personal experience with traditional grading.

Sharona: Yes, but my point is that I would think that if this was a student who had an alternative grading system and it didn’t work for them, they would’ve mentioned it here.

Boz: Yeah. I also think this goes to a deeper thing. And as I read this, and even as I read the last couple of paragraphs, there really seems to be a misunderstanding of this author that, there seems to be a real misunderstanding with this author that alternative grading means pass-fail, and that traditional grading means A, B, C, D, F, which we have talked about this a ton of times. The amount of assumption and confusion from any and every aspect of alternative grading. What are your favorite things, that w- you first say when we start talking about reassessments? You hear reassessments, how many people think unlimited reassessments?

Sharona: And that’s why I usually say, we say reassessments without penalty, and then I usually stop and I say, “Note, I said without penalty. I didn’t say without limit.”

Boz: But there are so many, misconceptions when someone has a, surface level understanding of something. We’ve seen this in so many arguments against, some of like Joe Feldman’s work or other alternative grading, principles, that they’ll argue the whole thing based on one misconception or one thing that they’ve seen that maybe someone actually did it, but they assume that’s what alternative grading means then. That if someone wants to come in, a student wants to come in the day before a semester is over and hand you a stack of 50 assignments, you have to take it. The- Yeah … so I think that actually is a, goes to a bigger problem, and again, nothing against this student. This is a issue and a problem that we see in adults all the time, that a small understanding of something can be more dangerous than a no understanding of a of a subject.

Sharona: Kudos to both of these authors because the articles are clearly written, they are well-articulated. I might have some issues with some of the statements, some of the factual ways things are presented, but these are easy to read. They’re clearly stating what they intend to state. So again, huge kudos to both of these authors. I just don’t agree with one of them at all. And the other one, I like much of what they say. I do think they also make some statements that I might quibble with the facts on. But I’m just so thrilled that in one week we got three articles written by students about this, this topic.

Boz: And I would love to get more student voice in everything we do. Even though a lot of us on the organizing committee for the grading conference encourages, like I’m one of the, the big advocates of yeah, anytime I can get student voice involved, I wanna get it involved. So I’d love to seeing more student voice in this tidal wave of recent media and articles and that we’re seeing over the last few months. I’d love to see more student opinions on this and research on like directly how alternative grading principles and systems affect students and their beliefs of how it affects them. All right. I think that’s a great way to wrap up unless there’s any other last-minute thing that you wanna bring up.

Sharona: I meant to bring this up at the top, so if you’re still here and still listening, we do have our … We’re gonna be giving our Grading is the Misuse talk at Cal State LA on October 24th as part of the Math Association section meeting. So if you’re coming, if you’re in LA, you wanna hear the talk, come join us at the MAA section meeting for Southern California.

Boz: All right. You have been listening to 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.