The Grading Podcast

Bosley: Does traditional grading meet the purpose that most people say is the, that end letter grade is this actually showing some sort of achievement that a student has made towards progressing towards the goals of their of that class?

Sharona: And I would say even if it does, which I don’t grant that it does, I as an instructor couldn’t tell you what achievement it was. Like if a student came back and said, Hey, I got a B in your class. What did I learn? I had no record. I could tell you you got a 90% on the first exam and 80% on the second exam, and 85% on the final. But if you asked me, did this calculus student know how to do sequences in series, I have no clue.

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

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer.

Whether you work in higher ed or K-12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Bosley: Tonight’s episode, we’re gonna start really diving into why do we need a different grading system? What’s wrong with the traditional grading system? But before we can do that, um, Shona, can you kind of define what we mean when we say traditional grading, just so we’re all on the same page.

Sharona: Absolutely, and welcome everyone back to the pod.

So what do we mean by traditional grading? So we wanted to kind of start by setting some assumptions and context, understanding that these are also assumptions that we might do episodes on and challenge in the future. So the first assumption we’re going to make is that we are going to be talking on this episode strictly within a structure where an instructor needs to give an end of term multi-level grade. So some form of a A B C D F or A B, C, no credit

Bosley: pass fail,

Sharona: possibly a pass fail, although less so in that situation. But you have to give a final grade as an instructor. And so that is the context inside which this episode is going to be happening because the whole thing about multi-level final grades is an entirely separate issue with grading that we will do on another other episode.

Bosley: Absolutely.

Sharona: So what do we mean by traditional grading? So again, with the caveat that we understand that this is by no means universal. Lots of people are doing different things. By traditional grading, we mean some form of a points and percentages based grading system.

So the things that go into the final grade are comprised of student work that is marked with points and some sort of a percentage is calculated in order to assign the final grade. Would you say that’s a accurate

Bosley: Well and those points end up getting into an average, whether it’s a, some sort of straight average or some sort of weighted average. But, um, the an average or, or a total count comes in at some point to define the difference between those multi-level, you know, the difference between A and a B, a B and a C, and so on.

Sharona: Exactly, and I would say that again, for many of us, 90% or above or 93% or above has been an A and 80% to almost 90 is some sort of a, B, et cetera, et cetera and again, we’ve seen all kinds of variations. Uh, we recently discovered a school where they have some A grade called an ab, and that’s from typically 87 to 93%, and it has a gpa equivalent of a 3.5 in the GPA calculations.

Bosley: So even though that might not be. Normal, we’re still, that’s still gonna fall into our traditional grading system because it does still have percentages and points and based on averages.

So regardless of if you’re doing, you know, the, the really ultra, um, traditional of 10 point scale, you know, 90 to a hundred is an A, 80 to 89.9 is a B or some other vari variation of that. It’s still traditional cuz we’re still using points. We’re still using percentages. We’re still using averages. So for the, um, purpose of this episode, when we’re talking about traditional grading, that’s what we’re referring to, correct?

Sharona: Yeah. And that can be in any discipline. I mean, whether you are in math or engineering or English or a, a language class or even some art classes, there’s, there tends to be some way of doing this. And we’re including all things that go into that grade, whether they be syllabus, assignments, homework assignments, exams, quizzes, essays, projects, anything you name it, anything that goes into that final grade calculation.

Bosley: Yeah, and just kind of an interesting point, thinking back on my own experience as a student, I never had a class that wasn’t this. I, I did have a few classes that were, um, graded on a curve, some of my higher level, um, college classes, but they, that curve was still based on points and averages. It just, you said a bell curve to define the, the final wrap up. But all of my classes that I ever experienced as a student, was some form of this.

Sharona: So I would say that the exception for me that comes to mind were my arts classes. So I was in marching band in high school. I have zero recollection of any points or percentages. Of course, this was pre-learning management systems days, so I don’t know how my grade was calculated. I think that if you showed up and performed and did your stuff, you got an A similarly for my drama classes. So I’d say the one that broke that the most for me were my arts classes.

Bosley: All right, so then if this is so common and mathematically and with a computer so easy to calculate, what’s the problem? Why are we here?

Bosley: Well, and that’s the interesting thing, because it depends on who it came from.

I mean, I’ll, I’ll be very honest and I, without naming names, if I’m teaching, let’s say an Algebra two class in my high school and I’m looking at a student that from teacher A has a B, and from teacher B has an A, those are two very different grades. Those might like that, that B might actually be a much higher, I might consider that student much more, um, better prepared and and much more ready for algebra two than the student that actually had the higher grade.

Sharona: So that’s interesting because that is a contextual difference for us because for me, I don’t know my fellow faculty members well enough, most of them, to really know what the distinction might be.

But

Bosley: that’s also interesting because. Let’s back up. What is the purpose of grade of these final, uh, multi-level grades supposed to be?

Sharona: So we’ve asked this question to a lot of the faculty we’ve worked with a lot, and typically most people will say, some form of a student who got a B, and notice that we’re not saying B student that’s a totally different thing, we don’t like that labeling. So a student who received a B in a course, in theory, should know probably 80% or more of the material at a, what you might call a proficient level, they should be able to do 80 to 89% of the material at a level of proficiency that prepares them to take the next class because our classes are also acknowledging our discipline. Our classes are hierarchical, many of them.

Bosley: Yeah.

Like you said, we’ve actually in, in our trainings, um, over the last several years, we’ve asked this question quite a bit and I think the most like standard kind of generic answer we get is that these grades are supposed to communicate some sort of achievement, um, that the students have achieved towards reaching the goal of a class.

Sharona: Some amount of learning, in other words.

Bosley: Yeah. Yeah. Some amount of learning.

Sharona: So then what’s the next question we usually ask?

Bosley: Does your grades do that?

Sharona: Or do the grades you see? Do you?

Bosley: Well, no. Usually we ask the first one.

Sharona: Okay.

Bosley: Does, does your grades, you know, reach that purpose? And almost uniformly everyone says, yes, my, my, my B means this student is, you know, knows this much of material. What’s interesting is the next question that you were just alluding to that we ask.

Sharona: Right? So the next question we asked is, can you rely on the previous grade? So when you look at a whole set of students who got B’s in the previous class, can you rely on them knowing 80% or more of the material from the previous class? And what do people say?

Bosley: And again, almost unanimously, okay, I’m gonna edit that

Sharona: unanimously.

Bosley: Um, and universally across the different disciplines we’ve asked that. No.

Sharona: Exactly. So,

Bosley: so we all think it, we all think our grades do exactly what they’re supposed to do, but nobody elses do.

Sharona: Exactly. So that’s an issue. So then we, in our trainings, we like to do this little exercise because we thought, well, you know, maybe we’re all just sort of being, I don’t know, smug or, or, or maybe we’re being unfair to our fellow instructors. So especially when we’re working with math instructors, because, you know, we like our, our mathematical systems and our points and our percentages, we will give faculty a problem, uh, and we’ll give them some sample student work and we’ll say, Hey, grade this problem out of 10 points, and we give the same problem, a couple different versions of student work and on each version of student work. What’s the range of scores that we typically get?

Bosley: Well, and just out of a 10 point range, usually we get at least a seven point range, and there has been sometimes where we will have eight or nine point range, right?

Sharona: So we’ll get anywhere from two points to nine points. Yeah, on the same problem, same work,

Bosley: same mistakes

Sharona: on a, on a problem that’s pretty straightforward mathematically, for most mathematicians, they’ll understand the problem.

Bosley: And this kind of highlights one of the first big issues with traditional grading. And, um, in fact, if you ever read the paper by, uh, Dr. Thomas Guskey, which if you haven’t, oh my gosh, you need to read everything

Sharona: and we will put the link in the show notes.

Bosley: and again, you and I have done a informal version of this with literally hundreds of different, um, educators at this point, if not close to a thousand. And we continue to get the same results.

Sharona: Right? So, so even when we say we expect 80% of the knowledge to be learned, and you take instructors with the same, within the same discipline, with the same disciplinary knowledge, give them the same problem and give them the same student work. You’re gonna get this range and you’re gonna get this range even if you spend time as a team coming up with what they call, you know, normed grading, different than grading to a norm, so it’s not grading on a normal curve, but coming up with an agreement of how to grade, you still get a wide variation of grading on an individual problem.

Bosley: And here’s the, here’s the first big issue with traditional grading. If it starts off with points and the exact same student is getting an eight in your class and a six in mine, that’s a two-letter grade difference right there. I mean, that’s a 20 20% difference.

Sharona: Well, before we go to the the grade difference, cuz that can be accommodated in mathematics, but, but the point being, yes, eight out of 10 and six out of 10 are very different values mathematically. Right? Yeah. Um, then on top of that, so, so now we have individual problems, individual assignments being graded differently. Now we’re gonna load on top of this a hundred degrees of precision in the form of percentages. Yeah. So, so let’s think about this for a second. A hundred percentage points where, supposedly 100% is different than a 99%, which is different than a 98%, which is different than a 97%

Bosley: and so on and so on.

Sharona: And then we’re gonna go to 97.5 and 97.4 because mathematically we can get infinitely precise on the mathematics. But we’re trying to say that the quality of work a student does with a one percentage point difference is somehow different. And yet, Studies have shown that human beings are, have a hard time distinguishing anything more than about five levels of difference.

And, and

Bosley: this, again, this is not us saying that this is actually, um, research that’s been done by multiple people, multiple times, and not just with educators. Like they, they’ve done this with all kinds of professionals, carpenters, um, they’ve, you. They’ve taken people in whatever field of excellence they have, whatever profession they’re in, and try to have them, without precise tools, to come up with, you know, being all these different levels of separation and yeah, e even in the most, um, hands-on professions, about 13 was where they found like anything over 13 the accuracy just plummets.

Sharona: And, and for most of ’em it’s more like five.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: So, so now we have a hundred point scale where we’re supposedly doing a hundred levels of accuracy. So we’re supposed to be able to differentiate students at least a hundred levels.

And now we’re gonna take 60 of those 100 levels and call that failing.

Bosley: So, yeah, that, that’s gonna get into our, our second big issue with traditional grading is that most traditional grading, um, zero to 59, sometimes maybe a little lower, but somewhere in that range is failing. So anywhere from over half to almost two thirds of the scale is failing.

Sharona: And, and the next 10 points is, marginally successful but not considered successful enough to proceed, at least in higher education. So in higher education, most of the time a prerequisite course has to be like a C or a C minus. And again, that varies from

well, and then on top of that, it varies from institution to institution now too. So that’s a whole nother thing. Yeah. But so now we’ve got something that on its face looks like it’s skewed towards failure.

Bosley: Well, it doesn’t look, it is. I mean, when you’ve got a hundred points possible and anywhere from, you know, 55 to 65 of those a hundred points would be considered failing. You’ve got a, you’ve got a large left skew, right?

Sharona: And then now we’re gonna really put the top on it is, now we’re gonna look at the mathematics, because if there are, let’s go back to our 10 point problem, right? The difference between eight out of 10 points and six out of 10 points is really, 80 out of a hundred to 60 out of a hundred. Yeah. When you go to percentages,

Bosley: yeah. It’s 20 points different. That’s a difference between a B and a D.

Sharona: Right.

Bosley: Between a passing and most times DS are considered non passing.

Bosley: Yeah.

Sharona: So you’ve taken a simple "arithmetic" mistake or a spelling mistake or a grammar mistake, and you’ve knocked it from a hundred percent down to 75% or a hundred percent down to 50%. So the, the layers and layers and layers of the mathematics here, honestly, it drives me insane.

Bosley: Exactly. And this, this whole idea of you know, 60 degrees of, of failure or something really, you know, like that. We don’t see that anywhere else. Like it it’s interesting. I, I was looking up, um, some of the actual mathematics behind, let’s, let’s take a test both of you and I have had to take the gre mm-hmm. You know, the graduate, um,

Sharona: record exam

Bosley: records exam. If you got 50% on that test right. Did you fail?

Sharona: No

Bosley: Actually, if you got 50% of it right, you got half the test right? You did better than 60% of the people that’s ever taken the test.

Sharona: Oh, wow.

Bosley: That’s the actual statistics involved. Do you, is that 50% failing? No, it’s not anywhere near failing, because again, you’ve outscored 60% of the people that have ever taken it. So this idea of, you know, 50, 60 degrees of failure, I, we, the only time we see, see it is here in the these letter grade, um, computations. So there’s, there’s issue number two. Now, another issue that’s related to that. Before you started any of this, what happens when a student doesn’t turn something in?

Sharona: Well, many instructors are going to give a student a zero.

Bosley: Of course, because they didn’t turn it in. What else are they going to do?

Sharona: Which makes sense, there’s no evidence of learning. I. So even in our systems. They don’t get any credit, so to speak. They don’t get any evidence of learning, they haven’t shown us anything.

Bosley: But what’s the problem with that, with traditional grading?

Sharona: So the problem with that is the mathematics again, because if you get, say zero out of 10 and your next assignment, you get 10 out of 10 and you add those together, you’ve got 10 out of 20. You’re at 50%. So you had one no-show and one perfect.

Bosley: Okay? But that…

Sharona: and you’re failing.

Bosley: Okay? But that, that seems reasonable. You get another one. You get another perfect. So now you have two perfects and a missing one.

Sharona: So now you’re 20 out of 30, you’re at 67%. You’re still in a D range,

Bosley: you’re still …okay. We get three perfects in a row.

Sharona: So now you’re 30 out of 40, you’re 75%, you’re a C. But you’ve had three perfect assignments and one nothing.

Bosley: Okay. How about a fourth one?

Sharona: Okay, so now we’re 40 out of 50. We’re at 90%,

Bosley: no,

Sharona: 40, 80%. Sorry, I can’t even do the math.

Bosley: We’re we’re a B minus with four out of five perfect assignments. Mathematically, we are at a B minus. How many more is it going to take to get back to an A?

Sharona: I think you have to get to nine out of 10, don’t you?

Bosley: Yeah, that’s 10 assignments. You get nine perfects to make up for that one zero. That doesn’t make sense. Like the this.

Sharona: Well, and the zero was not that you got everything wrong. The zero was a complete and total lack of information. So, exactly. So the kid was sick. Or the, yeah, the student had a computer malfunction and a crash or, or just, or life missed. Yeah, life happened. Or they just missed it. They just missed it. Or what if it comes at the end? What if you have six perfect assignments first and then they missed one on the same content even?

Bosley: It doesn’t matter where it ca, if it came at the beginning, the middle, or the end, mathematically, it’s still 50 out of 60.

Sharona: Right. So, well, that’s problem number three then, right?

Bosley: Yeah. There, there’s the problem number three, this unbelievable, um, punishment. From a single assignment and again, another great article that we’ll link in our notes. Um, case Against The Zero is another one. No, this one’s not by Thomas Guskey. Even though it sounds very similar to

Sharona: Right.

Bosley: His A Case against the Percentage, but I think it was intentionally done that way because they, both of these articles do play off of each other really well to show some of these issues that we’re talking about and how in combination with them, this is a death sentence to a student’s grade

Sharona: Right. Now, I will be honest with you though, Boz, um, you know, I’ve heard of a lot of people say, well, you know what, we just, let’s just, uh, cut off the lowest anyone gets is a 50, 50%. They get 50% of the points, whether they do it or not. I, personally, I’m a little uncomfortable with that, but not because I mind giving students points. It’s because you’ve now clouded your grade book. Because what’s the difference between a student who got it half correct and a student who didn’t turn it in and has a 50? Like that 50 doesn’t mean anything, so that you fixed potentially, in theory, some of the mathematics.

Bosley: Yeah. With the sixty levels of failure.

Sharona: But you clouded the communication

Bosley: Exactly.

Sharona: So, so what’s another option for that one?

Bosley: Well, even before we get to the options. Okay, let’s continue with the issues. Because these are not the only issues?

Sharona: Right.

Bosley: There is still another really big issue, at least that I have, with traditional grading.

Sharona: Okay.

Bosley: And that is the actual use of the average. So from a statistical standpoint, what is the purpose of an average?

Sharona: So if I get this wrong, I think you’re going to throw something at me since we both teach statistics. So the average is a measure of center.

Bosley: Exactly. It is a measure of center. It’s one of our descriptive statistics that is, um, describing the center of a set of data. I don’t know about you, I don’t care what my students are doing in the middle of a semester. My grade at the end. If it’s supposed to, to show, um, communication of the student’s achievement towards a goal of my class, I don’t want to know what they were doing in the middle. Like that, that does me no good. So, and what one of our other good friends actually, um, wrote a blog about this, when, when a number’s not a number, um, Again, Robert Talbert and

Sharona: yeah, you’re going to, you’re going to hear his name a lot, y’all.

Bosley: Yes, you are. And he hopefully will be one of our early guests as well.

Sharona: Exactly.

Bosley: So we just highlighted like four really big issues with, with traditional grading.

Sharona: Well, and then I’m going to add another one.

Bosley: Oh yeah, we’ve got a few more we could add.

Sharona: We have a few more, but here’s another one. Every single one of these grades, almost all the time, Is dependent on a student turning in this material on time, however you define on time. So the biggest sort of unwritten or unknown rule that overlays all of this is being compliant with deadlines. Because I know very few instructors who aren’t at least going to take a few points off for being late.

Bosley: Oh, we’ve got to teach our students, you know, um, responsibility. So we have to, right. We, you know, we have to take things off.

Sharona: So in a way, 90% of your grade is just, can they turn things in on time? So that leaves your content very, very low on the totem pole in terms of grades . Well, that kind of sucks.

Bosley: Yeah. And that if we’re going back to what we are saying the purpose of these multi-level grades. Is it really showing the students’, you know, um, understanding and growth towards an achieve achievement of our class? Or is it showing how well they can turn things in on time, how well they can do compliance stuff.

Sharona: Now there’s another, before we get off the subject of the mathematics of the grades. There’s another whole category, and that is the weighted averages, the, the different groups.

Bosley: Okay, so let’s, let’s go in, um, pretend land and let’s pretend all the other issues that we’ve just mentioned didn’t exist. We all can look at the exact same assignment. Grade it the exact same way. We all have, you know, an equal amount of degrees of, um, failure and success. That averages actually measured the end and not the middle…

Sharona: which they don’t.

Bosley: Yes. So we’re, we’re living in, in, we’re living in an imaginary land.

Sharona: Imaginary land…

Bosley: and all of these other problems don’t exist.

Sharona: Okay.

Bosley: There’s one more big one. And it’s what you were just saying.

Sharona: Yeah. Weighting by groups of assignments.

Bosley: Which outside of maybe elementary and some middle school, at least in mathematics, I have never seen someone not do.

Sharona: Exactly.

Bosley: So what, what do you, what do we mean by these weighted categories?

Sharona: Uh, so you’ve got your homework that’s going to be maybe about 10%, 5%, 15%. You’re going to have your participation grades, your quiz grades, your unit exams, your final exam, your midterms.

Bosley: Yeah. So it’s, it’s however and however many of these categories and, you know, whether it’s, I, I’m, you know, I, I, when I did traditional grading, I had a, a strong emphasis on classroom participation. I really believe, you know, I tried to do collaborative learning and active learning, so I had a lot of points on my in-class, um, category. Not as much on the homework. Some on, you know, some on the test, but, if you and I, same class, and you’re reversing that, you’re very much, I want to see it on the test. I want to see those end results. So my grades are based, you know, really heavily on these tests. Is that really gonna make that much of a difference?

Sharona: Well, when we’ve done the math, which we have done in several of our presentations, We get the same student from an F to a B just by changing the weighting system.

Bosley: And not, we’re not talking drastic changes, we’re not saying, you know, oh, person A has a hundred percent in um, participation, and teacher B has, you know, 90% in tests

Sharona: No, switching homework from 10% to 25% or 10% to 20% even, uh, switching midterms from 30% to 40%, down to 20%, we can really, we can really skew these grades very, very rapidly.

Bosley: Exactly. And I mean, again, like you said, we’ve done it with, with very minimal changes and things that weve actually seen for from our other colleagues or even what we might have done. And it makes a difference between a B and a D.

Sharona: So couldn’t we just fix that though, by all agreeing on the same weights of percentages? What’s wrong with that?

Bosley: I thought I was living in la la land.

Sharona: Well, I actually do have a problem even with that. Let’s, let’s, let’s go to double imaginary land and say that we can agree on all of this. Now you have a student who, and especially in college, right, you have a student working a lot of hours taking a very heavy course load, but for whom a specific content area comes easy and it’s really easy for them to show it on an exam. Does not have time to do homework.

Bosley: That was me that, that you described me as a college student working, you know, close to full-time, at least in math classes. Didn’t need to do a lot of the homework to be able to do it on the test. Not that I’m bragging, it’s just how it was.

Sharona: Right. Then you have another student for whom timed exams are extremely stressful. So it’s not like they do poorly, but they don’t do quite as well, but they are excellent at presenting content in class. Like you have oral presentations and they’re just top notch. It’s clear they understand the material. Well, if we don’t weight that as heavily…

Bosley: Yeah, depending on which, you know what, whatever imaginary universal weighting system we, we went with, one of, one of these two imaginary students is going to be very much benefited from it and one is gonna be very much harmed, even though they might have the exact same level of understanding of the material, just one of ’em can do it on a test, one of them, you know..

Sharona: Has to do it verbally and presenting on the board, and so, you know, the issue then becomes if we claim that these grades are measuring learning, none of the stuff that we’ve discussed has anything to do with their learning.

Bosley: No. And now we step back out of imaginary land and put all of these things together. And it goes back to my original answer about when you asked me what I, when I look at a student’s previous grades, what does it mean? Almost meant nothing to me. It meant more about looking at who gave it to them, because that actually told me more because the grades, the letter grades didn’t tell me anything. Didn’t tell me anything about the students’, you know, learning or understanding.

Sharona: I, I love that. So Ken O’Connor, another person who’s done a lot of writing in this area, has a, a great problem. He shows that we use a lot The Parachute packing problem.

Bosley: Parachute package. Yep.

Sharona: And there’s three students. And we’ll again, we’ll link an image in the show notes, but there’s three students, one student starts off really well able to pack a parachute, deteriorates through the whole semester. That’s student A. Student B, starts off very low, never packed a parachute before probably, gets better, better, better, better. And student three is very inconsistent. Up and down and up and down, and up and down. Mathematically. All three of these students end up with a 70. But it’s very clear there’s only one student that you actually want packing a parachute that you’re gonna have to jump out of a plane with. Now let’s be clear, I will not jump out of a plane. So there’s, I’m assuming you’re even more firm on the parachute packer.

Bosley: Yeah. But this, this problem is interesting because again, and, you know, giving props where they, where it’s deserved. This is something that, um, Ken O’Connor has done in some of his books, um, presenting this we have, again, asked hundreds of teachers, have we ever gotten anyone that didn’t say the student that started off low, made consistent, um, progress, and then ended at a consistently high rate?

Sharona: Never.

Bosley: Never.

Sharona: So, okay. So I think that’s like five problems now with traditional grading. I’m going to give you another one.

Bosley: Okay.

Sharona: We know, and we’re going to talk about this more in a future episode, that the way human beings learn is from making mistakes. Okay.

Bosley: Yeah. What? What is it that I always say Math actually stands for?

Sharona: Math allows thinking, no mistakes allow thinking to happen to happen. See it. I just made one. But so, yeah, so, so if mistakes are how people learn, how does traditional grading, what does it do with mistakes?

Bosley: Exactly. It continues to punish these early mistakes and really unfairly so, especially if the student is learning from those mistakes, which is how every learning science says we learn, we make mistakes. We’ve, you know, grown from those mistakes, that’s how we learn. It’s still punishing them. And that is, you know, in our last episode, our first episode when I was talking about how grading was actually undermining a lot of my pedagogical practices and beliefs, because I’ve always believed this, that mistakes allow thinking to happen. That we grow from our mistakes. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not actually trying hard enough.

Sharona: Right. But the problem with our traditional grading Is there’s no point to learning from our mistakes, because most of the time, once we do a quiz or an exam, you never come back to that content, that content’s done. You never have a chance to repair it, so why would you learn from your mistake?

Bosley: Yep. And not only that, but I, I don’t know about you, but I had a couple classes in colleges when I was doing my undergrad that I just gave up on because after a single test, my grade was already to the point where I couldn’t do better than a c. And I was just like, I, I can’t deal with that.

Sharona: Well, and that, and that speaks to the psychology of the whole class too, right? What, I mean, what’s the very first assignment that most students have to turn in, in any class, anywhere. Everywhere.

Bosley: Some sort of syllabus compliance.

Sharona: Right. Did you get, certainly in, in, when I, you know, I have two kids that are now in college. When they were in high school, I had to spend all over the first week of class signing every syllabus that came home because they had to turn in the little piece of paper. So you start out your semester with five out of five for turning in your parent’s signature on time, so you’re at a hundred percent and the rest of the semester what happens?

Bosley: If you’re lucky, you’re staying at a hundred percent, which I don’t know too many people that do, normally you’re going down.

Sharona: You’re going ,down, and if you’re lucky, you don’t slip too far. So you spend the entire semester attempting not to slip. Very negative psychology, very negative perspective. And it leads to some really kind of nasty, yucky behaviors. Not like, not people being nasty, but the behaviors just feel terrible.

Bosley: Well, and it also leads to a conversation that I think any educator, if you have taught for more than five minutes, have had this conversation with the student. You get close to one of these grading periods, and what does the student come in and say?

Sharona: How can I get some more points?

Bosley: Exactly Nothing about what I, you know, it’s nothing about what you’ve learned. It’s all about how do I get some extra credit? How can I get more points to go from this letter grade to the next letter grade? So.

Sharona: And then if you tell the student, well you can’t, then they hate you. Um, and, and, and it’s, it’s a very uncomfortable position because I would like to be a coach to my students. I’d like to be a mentor. But instead, I feel like a miser. I feel like I have these pocket fulls of points, coins, and I have to be like, well, one for you, but none for you. And it’s no fun. Like, and I can’t just like hand them out just willy-nilly because

Bosley: Oh, cause then your class isn’t rigorous enough.

Sharona: Exactly. And, and I have this hypothesis in my head, because remember, I also still believe that my grades actually mean something.

Bosley: Exactly.

It was just, you know, and God, the amount of time, again, I’m a mathematician, so I actually enjoyed hand calculating my weighted averages, except when they didn’t come out the way I wanted them to. And the amount of times I calculated, okay, I just need to get eight more points on this one thing, or eight out of 10 points to bring my gpa. Oh yeah, it’s just, it’s nasty. I just don’t even want to think about it anymore. It’s just really gross.

Bosley: So if we’ve got all these issues with the calculation from beginning, of course, to when we have to give this multi-level grade, going back to our original thing, does traditional grading meet the purpose that most people say is the, that end letter grade? Is this actually showing some sort of achievement that a student has made towards progressing towards the goals of that class.

Sharona: And I would say even if it does, which I don’t grant that it does, I as an instructor couldn’t tell you what achievement it was. Like if a student came back and said, hey, I got a B in your class, what did I learn? I had no record. I could tell you you got a 90% on the first exam and 80% on the second exam, and 85% on the final. But if you asked me did this calculus student know how to do sequences and series, I have no clue.

Bosley: Yeah, you’d have to go, actually go back to your grade book, see which you know, which assignments they did well and which ones they didn’t go back, find those actual assignments. Oh, you know that that topic was on midterm one and a little bit on the final and yeah, that…

Sharona: Well, and then, and then let’s take another point of it, which I know I’ve told you. You know, I am teaching in a discipline that when I teach in calculus, they’ve had. 13, 14 years of math education coming to me. So what if they didn’t have a great background? We know we have a lot of under-resourced schools. We know we have a lot of students who don’t have support at home. So if they’re coming to me and they don’t have certain arithmetic skills or certain algebra skills, am I supposed to not let them pass my calculus course? Because they didn’t know their algebra? Well, there’s plenty of people say, absolutely, absolutely. If they can’t do algebra, they shouldn’t be passing calculus. But we know who that hits. We know what types of students that that disproportionately affects, and that’s going to be students from under-resourced communities and under-resourced schools. So now you’re going to layer in some level of equity or desire for equity and diversity, and I didn’t feel good as a calculus instructor, if they knew the calculus, why was I grading them on the holes in their background? That felt terrible, but it also felt terrible to let them go on and, and to give them a false sense of their own achievement. Because if I pass them out of calculus two and they can’t do algebra…

Bosley: yeah, they’re not going to be able to be successful in whatever math class that’s following because those algebra, algebra skills are so fundamental to anything along the, you know, along the calc line or related to anything about calculus.

Sharona: And even in other disciplines. I mean, we tend to talk a lot from math, but I also happen to be a pretty darn good writer. I have an MBA in marketing, and I spent quite a few years in the advertising industry. An English teacher also grapples with these things, even though in theory, you know, your literature class might be, not be content-wise dependent on your historical nonfiction class or whatever, but at the end of the day, in English or social science or any of these disciplines, you have certain things that you want to make sure students can do as they progress through their educational journey and they, they struggle with the same things.

Bosley: Yep. So we’ve really explored kind of these, these issues with traditional grading and why a, they’ve got some definite equitable issues, but more importantly they don’t do the job they’re supposed to do. And again, there are some great readings out there that can, that show more of the research and can do this, you know, a lot more equitable or a lot more eloquently than maybe we have, and I encourage you guys to go out there and read some of these. We’ll link some of them in our show notes, but this is kind of bringing us to the whole point of this podcast and what we’re going to try to do. So from this as a background, and this is our base, our next episodes is really going to be exploring, okay, if this doesn’t work, if this isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do, how do we do it different? What is a different way? Cuz again, like we were saying earlier, you maybe had a couple of classes with your band. I know I have, you know, a high school, a bachelor’s degree, master’s degrees. I experienced no classes that weren’t graded this way. And I’m not saying all of my classes were bad. I had some great instructors.

Sharona: Right. So, so it seems like, and again, I want to just shout out to assuming you need a final multi-level grade, because there’s a lot of ways to get from point A to point B if you have to give a final multi-level grade, we want a system that measures, to the best that it can be measured, what students learn. Now, even that much is a little bit up for debate because you know, are they learning content? Are they learning how to learn? Are they learning how to write? Are they learning? Are they growing? There’s lots of different things you can measure and there’s lots of things you can define for your class, but whatever that definition is, how are you going to define success in a class and how are you going to measure it. And measure it for the purpose of a final multilevel grade.

Secondly, how does your system encourage students to do the activities and to demonstrate what it is you’re defining as success? You know, we want to use the science of learning that has developed over the last 40 years in our favor instead of trying to fight against it. So I was gonna say, as we wrap this up, Boz, what has changed the most for you? Let’s, let’s do a little bit of inspiration. So we’ve made this change. Like we, we, we don’t live in this world anymore. What has been your experience with the shift? What do you get out of it?

Bosley: So, and, and I’ll actually go back to the very first time I did it, which I think we mentioned in the last episode. It was not good. It was a disaster. We, we, we jumped off on this together. We did the best we could, but we made a ton of mistakes. But even with these mistakes, at the end of that first semester, the students came to me and talked to me, not about how many points, you know, can I get extra points? How many more points do I need to get a B? The conversations were, what do I need to to show you? I’ve learned about descriptive statistics. What do I need, what else do I need to show about inferential statistics? It was about the math, it was about the actual course, and that the first time that happened completely changed my outlook and again, every single person that came to me that semester, those were the conversations we were having. It wasn’t Mr. How can I get more points? Can I have some extra credit to do this? To get more points? I just need five more points. It became about the math, and that’s been the most rewarding thing to me. And that’s why even after that first year where we had no kind of lifelines, we had nowhere to we, you know, like I said, we had read a few books and we were trying to put this together the best we could, but it was bad.

Sharona: Yeah, it was bad.

Bosley: And yet I have never even thought about looking back because of those end of semester conversations.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, and I would say that for me, I’m going to echo what you said. Number one, I get to talk about math. I’ve never gotten to talk about math with my students. And I’m in math because I like math. You know,

Bosley: we’re weird that way.

Bosley: Let’s talk about the A.

Sharona: Let’s talk about you getting an A. And again, there are definitely are places to say, well, even A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s are problematic. But for today, the environment we live in, I get to say to every student, and I have had, for the first time in my career, classes where 100% of the people passed. And let me tell you, they passed because they know the knowledge. The other thing I get to do, I don’t have to accept crap algebra anymore. I don’t have to, I can go back to my students and say, I know this is a calculus class, you still need to get your algebra right. And that’s okay.

Bosley: Yeah. See, and that’s been one of the funniest things. A lot of the complaints we’ve heard, and we’ll get much more into the complaints and pushbacks and, and any kind of alternate, um, grading system is about the rigor. We’ve had these conversations, both of our rigors in all of our classes is so much higher now.

Sharona: So much higher.

Bosley: Because we, you know, we can give this back to our students to have them learn from those mistakes and not just can we, you know, we demand it. And I would,

Sharona: I would, the only thing I’m going to, other people say we’re not rigorous, we don’t like the word rigor rigorous for courses.

Bosley: Oh, that’s a whole nother conversation.

Sharona: We’re going to say the accuracy of our students’ mathematics is what’s much higher. Yeah. So I’m just going to, since we know that otherwise some of our colleagues are going to get over us. So the word rigor, we’re going to have a whole episode probably on that one. But you know, we’re able to demand a higher standard of completion, communication, and accuracy, which is. Amazing. I just love that.

Bosley: So that’s, that’s the journey that we’re hoping to take you on with further episodes. So please continue to join us as we start diving into how do we do this? If we can’t do it with traditional grading, how do we do it? What, what is the way to actually get grades to mean what they’re supposed to mean?

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website. http://www.thecreatingpod.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 PO Podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.