The Grading Podcast

90 – Caroline and Francoise

===

Caroline: And that report states that there are two, and we really agree with that, two reasons or two finalities for assessment. One of them is help learning or sustain learning, accompany students throughout their learning, giving feedback. And the other one is to give a proper portrait of the competency or the abilities, or the skills or the knowledge at the end of a term, for example. But never the two purposes of evaluation or assessment are ranking students or placing students on bell curve or selecting students for higher education.

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 will look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

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

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the 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 really, really enjoying the fact that it is over 70 degrees today in California. Being in New York last week, it was cold, and now I’m looking out my windows and it’s sunny and it’s warm, and I was talking to my son and it’s snowing in Green Bay, so I am definitely enjoying that.

How are you doing today?

Boz: I’m doing all right. We’re getting in full blown, like, test prep at my high schools. So that’s always a busy time, but yeah, I’m doing well.

Sharona: That’s great. And we have two people with us in the virtual studio today. And actually, Frank, I’m gonna have you say your name just ’cause I don’t wanna mess it up.

So would you introduce your name and then I’ll say who you are.

François: Thank you sharona. I’m François Arseneault-Hubert.

Sharona: Exactly. Which is why I wasn’t going to say that. And also we have Caroline Cormier in with us today, and Frank and Caroline are both from I’m going to spell it out ’cause I don’t know how you pronounce this, but it’s CEGEP André-Laurendeau.

Caroline: Yeah. That’s nice.

Sharona: Close.

Caroline: No, it’s very close.

So I love that. And Caroline also teaches chemistry at the same place, that I’m not even going to attempt to avoid butchering. And works a lot in ed research. Various topics such as inverted classrooms or oral scientific communication and laboratory autonomy. She’s also a scientific commentator on a radio show called Yeah, that, which is a French language radio network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

So welcome, Frank and Caroline.

Caroline: Thank you very much for the invitation.

François: Thank you very much.

Boz: So one of the things that we always like to ask our new guest is your origin stories. How did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading? I’ll let either one of you go first. So.

François: Yeah. I think that like a lot of people, it was the great online pivot that did it.

So I was looking for some way to alleviate that stress and anxiety before the start of the next semester. And I had this idea about well, I, I had heard about team exams. So I thought, yeah, maybe if, if students had team exams at the end of the semester, they would feel less stress and anxiety.

So I was looking for it through some blogs and writings on the internet. And at some point I had something that was really interesting. It has a nice procedure for going through team exams, but there was this comment at the end by someone named Joe Feldman and he wrote something like, well, if you really wanna help the students and you want something that you gotta assess accurately, don’t do team exams, just do retakes.

And then whoa, retakes. That’s nice. I can actually do that? So I read the prologue to his book and I actually sent him an email in which I went into some details about how it couldn’t work and my situation and basically that’s not what he replied to me, but he said, read the book.

Sharona: Well, so you just said two funny things. First of all, you said retakes, and one thing I didn’t mention is for six hours today I was sitting in a room proctoring a retake. So the timing was great, but yes, we love Joe, Joe Feldman, grading for equity book. Yeah. And Caroline.

Caroline: Yeah, my, for my part it converges with what François is doing because now we teach together. Actually we do the same kind of things, but it came from somewhere else.

And since we’ve been working together for a long time, François and I, we knew each other since since my graduate studies when I did my PhD. He was an intern in our CEGEP And you actually call them CEGEP, right? The acronym where we teach. Okay. It’s only called CEGEP. Okay. CEGEP

Sharona: I should have asked that before we started recording.

Caroline: So we are in the same department and we teach the same courses, but not exactly the same. Each semester we change courses and all of that. And one of my colleagues read a paper, a really small piece in a journal from the American Chemical Society. The journal is chemical and an engineering news.

It’s not something about education at all. But there was something there about Linda B. Nilsen, Specifications Grading, and he thought, well, we can try that in chemistry in our CEGEP. And that was about at the same time that François was writing with Joe Feldman and all of that. But it really came from two different perspectives, but it converged.

And one reason for my part where, for example, I would not have attempted team exams was because one of my preoccupations, what was really to be able to certify learning from every individual. I wanted to be really fidelity in my assessment. But as François, I noticed, and not even before Covid, right, that our students are so anxious about assessment.

It’s something that is really bad for the classroom climate, it’s bad for them. It’s bad for , their mental health. But we never thought that there was something else that existed. We, because it’s a paradigm, right? Everyone assess the same way and we don’t think that there’s something else existing.

And since they work more, they learn more. And we are conducting a research program now around that, around our implementation. And that’s what the students say. I learned better in that type of environment. And I remember my chemistry subject really much more than the other topics because in our CEGEP, the science program, the courses are that way only in chemistry.

So students can see the difference and they really, really enjoy that because they feel that they learn more. And science students, they want to learn. So that’s, that’s a reason why I would continue, right? I will never stop. I will never go back. It’s impossible for me.

Boz: So a couple things before Sharona you ask your next question.

I’ve gotta say like, you guys couldn’t have picked two better authors to kind of get into this with. I mean you wanna put a what we would call a Mount Rushmore here, like the absolute greats, like that’s two of the four on almost anyone’s list. But you said something Frank that just, it cracked me up because of how many times we’ve heard this, and this is part of the reason we ask these origin questions, is to see the similarities in some of the differences.

But there are so many more similarities in these stories, and one of them is that almost shock that you had with the second chance gradings of, wow, I can do this? Like, some of the traditional practices are so ingrained that Yeah, it’s almost like you gotta get permission from someone to feel like you can do anything different.

But the other one is the one that I, and I know Sharona, you were laughing too. How many people have we talked to they’re like, oh, that, that sounds like a great idea. And I can see how that would work in every other subject, but mine. So but actually writing to Feldman to say that and getting response from, oh, that, that is really cool.

Sharona: So, yeah. So I do, I have two questions. Well, I have a question and then I wanna talk about what caused us to wanna bring you on, which is that research project. But, so could someone explain to me, CEGEP, what is it? You know, that’s a term we don’t know. And I know that the Canadian system is sometimes a little bit different, and both of you are from the French speaking areas of Canada, so it might even be more different, I don’t know. So

Caroline: yes, it’s,

Sharona: what is CEGEP? How does it work? In general?

Caroline: It’s really unique in Canada. It’s let’s say students, they enter in elementary school at six in Quebec, as in any other place. They go from from elementary school to high school. And then the grade 12, it’s actually first year of CEGEP.

So when they finish their five years of high school, students have to go and it’s actually mandatory if they want to go to university after, they go to CEGEP. So you can go to CEGEP for either a two year program or a three year program. The two year program, it’s called the pre university. And all students in Quebec have to do that pre u education to get the diploma.

And you are admitted to university based on the diploma that you got in CEGEP. The programs, the curriculum are the same across the province in that pre u program. You have either a science or language or humanities. These programs are developed by the government and they are exactly the same.

In the 60 schools that are the 60 CEGEPs most of them are public, the vast majority of CEGEPs are public schools, and the education is totally free. A couple of them are private schools and with a fee admission in scholarly fee. The other part of CEGEP and that’s really interesting, you have the pre u students that are there for two years, and the technical programs are also taught in the same school, in the same establishments.

But now the effect of those decades of CEGEP had actually changed the ratio. And now Quebecers have more higher education than the rest of Canada because of that pre u slash technical option in the CEGEP.

Sharona: So, yes. Can I just clarify? So the pre u occupies what in the US would be the 12th grade and the first year of college, or the 12th grade and an extra year.

And then the technical, are those the three year programs?

Caroline: Yes.

Sharona: And the technical side, those are essentially intended to be terminal degrees. Like mostly the people who do the technical side are not intending to go on to university?

Caroline: No, no. They can still go to university to further their education.

But for example, nurses in Quebec have a technical degree from CEGEPs. Architectural technicians or engineering technicians have all their education in CEGEP. And that’s interesting because the curriculum that are provided in CEGEP, you have both your specific education in the program or the topics that you study and four other domains that everyone studies.

Being you are a technician, a nurse, or a pre-med student. You do French as a first language literature. You do English as a second language, physical education and philosophy. And all students, regardless of what they want to do in their careers, do all of that. General education.

Boz: So you, you said this curriculum is the same overall, 60 something schools. Are these schools just in Quebec or are these spread out through Canada?

Caroline: No, it’s only in Quebec. It’s only in Quebec.

Boz: Okay.

Caroline: Yeah. It’s really, really unique.

François: So if there are some Canadians from outside of Quebec that are listening, they might be surprised.

Caroline: Yes.

François: Yeah. They might learn something about Quebec.

Boz: Yeah. ’cause you guys, I think you guys are our third or fourth Canadian guest, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard anything like this and it sounds really interesting.

Sharona: But you are definitely our first francophone guests, so, yeah. That’s probably why we haven’t heard of it.

Caroline: It’s great because it, we feel like, go ahead. There’s a community of teachers, right? Because we teach the same curriculum regardless of where we are in Quebec. So we can talk about chemistry education with people from very far away from us, but we teach, we have the same type of students.

We have the same type of questions and difficulties in teaching because we teach, all of us teach the same thing.

Boz: So if you guys have the same curriculum, do you guys have the same or similar assessments across all of the institutions?

Caroline: No. Assessment is defined by the departments and even more the defined by the teachers themselves.

Sharona: Okay, so we got to know you speaking, going back to assessment, we found out about you through one of our favorite resources, which is the Grading for Growth blog and

François: same

Sharona: a few a couple months ago, back in December, you published a post called Workshops and a Community of Practice in Quebec for knowledge transfer. So making alternative grading practices known in post-secondary Francophone Quebec.

So I wanted to ask you about what was the impetus to write that article, and could you maybe summarize a little bit what it is about?

François: Well the impetus actually came from Robert and Dave. Yes. Robert wrote to Caroline because he was at a conference that Caroline was at two conference from the AQPC, which is our pedagogical association of CEGEPs teacher. Mm-hmm.

Caroline: We actually met with him in June last year. And when we had a few minutes with him and when we said that we read his book and we tried to implement things that he was, he was talking about the four pillars and all of that, and he told us, well, you should maybe try and put something in the blog.

And I told that to François, and François was, he was a huge fan, so he was really impressed. Because François was not there. So he, he was the biggest fan, but he was he was not there at the conference. But go ahead, François, with the with the, the paper, the.

François: Yeah, so, so we exchanged a couple of emails discussing possible ideas for the, for the blog post.

And we settled on that idea of knowledge transfer because a lot of the blog posts are about different implementations of alternative grading practices. But what we’re trying to do here in the province of Quebec is unique in some regards, if only because of the language.

All these resources are there. If you want to start alternative grading, and you can read English, no problem. You start reading, you start listening to the grading podcast. But if you’re a francophone, what do you do? So that’s where we stepped in, and in this blog post we, we narrate that story.

We, and we, we talk about two things that we do, which is workshops and a community of practice.

Caroline: So the time that we have to do that, because we are teachers, and teachers usually don’t have time to do knowledge transfer, we have the opportunity of doing so because we actually have a research project.

So we have a grant, and that grant gives us a bit of time to do research activities, but also research knowledge transfer. So that’s what we started. And it’s something really simple. We just, the first time we presented something about alternative grading in a conference we have so many questions from teachers that have never heard of that before and were asking us, well, how can I do that? Will my dean be happy with that? Is it possible? Yes. But there is this thing that we call the R score.

Boz: Mm-hmm.

Caroline: It’s basically a number made for students to be ranked across, across all of the CEGEPs.

And that R score allows you, or

François: denies you,

Caroline: denies you the right to, for example, become a doctor, for example. So teachers had so many questions about all of that, that we started something that was really small. It’s in Microsoft teams. We meet with these teachers once a month to discuss what we, at the start, it was what we were doing, but now it’s more and more what they are doing because these teachers have tried and implemented things. And it’s not only science and math teachers. We have teachers from all the disciplines that are taught in CEGEP. We have a few high school teachers as well, and more and more university pedagogical counselors and teachers as well. Educators as well.

So and two people from outside of Quebec, and I don’t know why, I don’t know how they’ve heard of us, but one person from France and one person from Ontario, so that’s nice. We have a 30, 40 people every month meeting with us and we are just discussing all of these issues and what we like about the alternative grading and how to do that.

So that’s. It’s not knowledge transfer as it’s not our knowledge, but it’s still knowledge transfer from other sources. So we help teachers come into contact with the literature. Sometimes these teachers don’t have time or interest in reading the things that are written in English.

Boz: So is this like a multi-location, multi-discipline FLC where you guys are just coming together and discussing issues that one person might have and solutions that someone else might have and Oh my God, that is so cool.

Caroline: Yes. Yes. It’s, it’s very nice. Last time 2, 2, 3 weeks ago, we documented and, we take notes. At the start we didn’t take notes, but it’s so rich that now we document everything that’s going on there and we, we asked the people there, what are the reasons why they started that? What’s the little flame at start, the reason that their profound motivation in doing so and what are the problems that they encounter?

So we have multiple perspectives from multiple disciplines. So it’s really interesting. Yes.

Boz: Oh my God. I can just imagine because that’s another really common thread, especially for those educators that have been doing this for a little while, that when we started, because whatever resources that were out there were very far and few between and just not a lot that people knew about.

We all screwed up our first times. If you’ve never listened to Robert Talbert talk about some of his early mistakes or Sharona and I both made multiple early mistakes. But man, to have this incredible resource to where people can come together and in the middle of making these kind of mistakes and going, oh yeah, I’ve got this support that can give me advice on, okay, this is the problem I’m having.

Caroline: Yes. And we hear what teachers are lacking in their own in their own institutions because it’s so new.

Mm-hmm. It is. It’s even newer here in Quebec than it is in the United States. I think so in the institutions, even the pedagogical counselors, they are aware that alternative grading exists, but they cannot help or they are just starting to be able to help teachers that want to implement it.

And it’s not part of any formal education yet in university. We don’t have courses on that. Not yet, but they are university teachers that are interested. And I think it might come into the programs, but one of the mistakes, and I don’t even know if it’s a mistake, but it’s something that I used to do, but I don’t do anymore. And there’s a reason for that. I, I split my course in learning outcomes, and I assess each outcome multiple times during the semester. I used to provide not the grade, but the feedback on that outcome as a dichotomy, right? It’s either in learning or acquired, and now I’m not doing that anymore.

I’m using the four levels of achievement. And my students told me that actually they prefer that because they see the learning, their progression. They feel that they are working towards a goal rather than being stopped at the level. Even if I told them, yes, I know that you are progressing, if their status did not progress, they didn’t see the progression.

So I don’t even know if it’s a mistake or not, but I really rather have those four levels than the dichotomy that I used to have in the first implementations that I tried. And that’s something that I tell the teachers that are trying to do the same and they have the question, should I do two levels or four levels or 10. So I can tell them that 10, it’s too much.

And I can tell them for reasons and statistics and all of that, but I can also share my experience with the two systems and why I prefer the four level system rather than the two level system. And some of the teachers actually told me that that was, it’s a little nugget of knowledge, but it was really helpful for them in their classroom.

So I’m really happy to be able to help the teachers

Sharona: see, and IU and I use a three level. Primarily. Oh.

Boz: Yeah. But, but we’ve done, I mean, I, I don’t know if you’ve, yeah. You have done a, a two levels before with your

Sharona: so

Boz: your math history class, but

Sharona: Right. So what I do is when I, when I am not strictly standards based, so I have a class that’s a mix of standards and specifications.

So the standards, the learning outcomes are always on a three level. But a project might have elements that are two levels because it’s either it’s there or it’s not there, right? Mm-hmm. So either you included an appropriate introduction or you didn’t, or you included this piece, or you didn’t, or your math is correct or it’s not correct.

So there’s times when I use a two level, but really only on projects that are revisable. Like all of my two level things can be kicked back to be fixed. So if it’s an actual assessment that you would have to retake brand new. It’s a three level. And the only reason I do a three level is because in my instance, the top two levels, if I were gonna do four, I would have two levels that are considered acceptable, like a good and a great, and I’d have two levels that are not I, in my context, I don’t do good versus great.

So my three levels have sort of a beginning, a developing, and then a good enough, essentially. I just don’t have that fourth level, which is great.

Boz: But yeah, I’ve experimented with multi different types of rubrics, but you know that having a group to have talked that over with, ’cause that was one of the big mistakes that Sharona you and I made the first time we tried to do it is not just the rubrics itself, but kind of what to do with those rubrics and how to calculate what those rubrics actually meant and trying to still do math when we really shouldn’t be using math.

Sharona: Yes. In fact, that’s another one thing I’m wondering, and I don’t know if you guys know the answers, but Bosley and I give this talk now called grading on the misuse of mathematics in the measurement of student learning.

And in that talk I go into the history of how the multi-level grading scale, the zero to 100, and the A-B-C-D-F came about in the United States and it traces back to Harvard. I don’t know if in Quebec specifically, but Canada in general, if the history was the same. Were you guys being influenced by the same institutions that really have been driving us for the last 250 years, which is Oh, yes. The big elite Ivys.

Caroline: It’s

François: definitely,

Caroline: it’s exactly the same. It’s, it’s, it’s copied from from the, the US I’m pretty sure. I, I’ve not, I, I, I haven’t studied that, but I’m sure that it’s copied from me.

Sharona: So what I should do is I should send you slides and you guys can translate them into French and you can give the talk in French, the way we do it in English.

But yeah, it’s a really interesting talk because what we have found is that even when people are ready to do alternative grading, if they don’t really understand what’s wrong with the math of the points and percentages, they’re likely to recreate the problems.

Boz: Or at least some of them.

Sharona: Some of them. So we actually, we start with how you grade an individual assessment. And then we go to category weighting and then we go to discussion of averages, and then we talk about rolling up to a final letter grade and you know, all of the things. So we really hit the math at multiple levels and by the end, everybody’s head is spinning because none of the math means anything. It’s all fake.

Caroline: So I think, I think we should return the invitation. And have you actually come and talk to

François: Yes,

Caroline: our CEGEP colleagues. I’m pretty sure that, because that’s one of the messages that we try to convey to them. But we don’t have tho those slides. If we could come and tell them.

Sharona: Well, I’m happy to do it, but if it needs to be in French, I’m sorry, I could maybe do it in Hebrew with a lot of work. But French, I’ve never studied.

Boz: Well, you, you know what, that’s what we need to do is set up a trade where you guys come to our grading conference and talk about this group, this support group that you guys have. ’cause that is really the most incredible thing I’ve heard. And then we’ll go over up north to you guys and do our misuse of mathematics.

Caroline: Okay. I accept that deal. Yeah. I think we will both I think I, I will benefit it from it more than you. So that’s the reason why I accept the deal.

François: Because we, we know that the misuse of mathematics is an issue and we, we mention it, but we never went into details.

Actually, we have a, we have a punchline that I’d like to share with you about it. We, we call it the 50 shades of failure.

Sharona: Yes, a hundred percent. Yes. So now I wanted to call out, I was looking at the blog post, speaking of that exact thing, the 50 shades of failure you say in your blog post, at the invitation of members, we have dared to touch on more political issues like the equity drive towards alternative grading.

Can you say a little bit, and that comes right after talking about you have an administrative requirement of a zero to 100% course grade. So how has that sort of played out those two conversations?

François: Well, I think that a huge part of it is that we were fearful to talk about equity because this administrative requirement of the zero to a hundred grade and the fact that we have this Caroline mentioned it, the R score.

The R score that selects which students can go on to which program in university. So basically pits every student against everyone else for in a grades competition in CEGEP. This is permeating every CEGEPs teacher way of understanding what is the role and what is the function of grades.

And, and before we started questioning the role of grades, I mean, Caroline and I and our colleagues, we were somewhat convinced that yes, grades should provide a selection. With a grade I should be able to tell if this student is better than this student and compared with all the other student in the class.

So whenever we talk about equity and grading in Quebec at the CEGEP level, we know we’re facing that hurdle. And we were worrying that going upfront against these ideas would deter some people that otherwise would be interested in some other benefits of alternative grading. So we had to gather some courage before we started talking openly about it.

And what we found, and I’ll let Caroline say more about is, I think is actually the teachers we were talking to were eagerly waiting for us to talk about these reasons, these equity reasons.

Caroline: So we start each hour of our workshops or presentation in a conference or anything that when some someone asks us to come and talk to the teachers, we always start with the same thing.

We have the teachers have a discussion between them to find out between themselves what are the two finalities or the two reasons of assessment. Because there was a report that was published by the government, actually by a branch is

François: Superior Council for Education.

Two reasons or two finalities for assessment. One of them is help learning or sustain learning accompany students throughout their learning and giving feedback. And the other one is to give a proper portrait of the competency or the abilities, or the skills or the knowledge at the end of a term, for example. But never the two purposes of evaluation or assessment are ranking students or placing students on the bell curve or selecting students for higher education.

It’s not a finality, it’s not a reason for assessment. It is an instrumentalization of assessment and it’s certainly not useful neither for the teachers nor the students themselves while they are doing their studies. It’s the reason why they are anxious. It’s because they feel that they are in competition between each other.

And for a teacher, for my part, I really don’t need my students to be ranked in my classroom. I just want to accompany them towards their learning and giving them feedback and having them ask me questions and furthering their education. And that’s the only thing that I need. I certainly don’t need neither parents, we don’t have really parents because our students are adults, right? They enter CEGEP at 17 year of age. But I don’t need anyone to tell me you have to rank your students and the way you provide grades it’s not good because we cannot have the students selected for something.

It’s not a good way of envisioning what is assessment. There are other ways of selecting people. Assessment should not be, that should not be the reason for assessment. So we start with that. And now we talk with science teachers, right? We talk with teachers that teach these high achieving students that want to be ranked between between them.

So these teachers say to us, well, if one student, for example, attain the outcome before the others, doesn’t that person merit or deserve to have a better grade than the other? And when we say, no, we don’t think that that person deserves more because probably that person had many, many more opportunities in their family because of their socioeconomic status, because of their first language or anything. They already have things in their pockets that should not be transferred into systematic discrimination or inequity.

So no. At the end of the semester, yes, because it’s in the law, I have to provide a grade on a scale from zero to 100. It’s actually in the law in Quebec, but before that, everyone deserves the same chances. And that’s what we do.

Boz: So I’ve got a question ’cause you’ve mentioned it twice now, and I’m really curious how this is calculated. You’ve mentioned this R score? Yeah. R score. I almost called it R squared ’cause my statistics uhhuh, but this R score I is like, can you explain how that’s calculated or briefly what that is?

François: Yes. I would dare say it’s a glorified Z score.

Boz: Okay.

François: So a Z score is standardized standard measurement. Yes. Yeah. Standard. It’s a standardized measurement and it’s a standardized measurement of a rank, so based on your grade versus the average and the standard deviation.

But then the R score, you take Z score and you adjust it with the strength of the group. There’s an indices. They calculate the strength of the group based on the grades that the students that are making up the group had in high school. And so if you are in a group with a lot of, let me use quotation mark, “strong students”, then your Z-score is gonna have a bonus and your Z-score plus that bonus makes your R score basically.

And, and you have an R score for every class you’re taking over all of the two or three years of CEGEP and then it’s averaged

Boz: o Okay. So let, let me see if I get that correct. So let’s say you and I are both students in a chemistry class. And you and I basically are identical in our understanding, in our learnings and in our performance on any and all assessments.

But your class or your group overall is better than mine than you’re gonna have a higher score than I do because your group is better, even though individually you and I are practically the same.

François: Well, it it depends. And it’s actually one of the reasons the R score is designed the way it is designed. Because if I’m in a stronger group, it’s plausible that my Z score won’t be as high as yours because you’ll distinguish yourself from the average of your class more than I will. And that’s where the correction factor, that the strength of the group comes in. And so because of this, the R score is touted by the people who made it up, it’s touted as an equitable way of selecting students. That’s the way the R score is written about in official documents and in the press and the media. It is defined as an equitable way of selecting students. And that’s where I really, I do not agree. Not at all. Because the fact of selecting student is in and of itself, not equitable.

Sharona: Well, okay. I just, I’m so, okay. So first of all, if they are using the average and standard deviation, do they understand it was designed by racists? Like it was created by people whose intention was to prove that certain demographic groups are inherently, innately better, more intelligent than other groups, and that it has been proven to be completely false?

That’s number one. Number two, when I do this grading is the misuse of mathematics. And now you’re layering, like I already can make people want to throw up once I get through with my talk. ’cause the math is so bad. Mm-hmm. And now you’re gonna layer even more math on top of this.

Boz: Well, Sharona, do you realize what this is? This is the exact same thing that, that the one article we were talking about two episodes ago.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: That the, the one that was that’s exactly what this is.

Sharona: I, I understand. So there.

Boz: They, they never called it out as the R score, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Sharona: Well, sort of.

Boz: No, no, no. Not sort of It is exactly.

Sharona: No, there was one extra thing that that article was doing is you got, well, no, maybe not. So the big thing is they were like, we need to correct. Mm-hmm. For the math that’s wrong with the grading systems.

Boz: No, no, no. It was correcting for the differences of grading difficulties by the professors. Right. So that’s exactly what this is saying.

Correcting the Z-score by giving bonuses to groups that had high groups. So their Z-score was artificially low. No, this is right.

Sharona: But they were doing those high groups, the exact same thing, but they were not doing those high groups based on the grading of the individual classes. They were doing it based on their high school scores.

Boz: Yeah, I know it. So it’s even worse. The statistical process of what they were doing is exactly what this is.

Sharona: Okay. I think I need to go add something to my presentation.

Boz: So Yeah, we, we did so bad. We did an episode two episodes ago where we were talking about some of the different grading deficiencies, and there was one that one article that we were looking at that was suggesting every class, every individual class get graded and have this, they didn’t call it the R score correction, but it’s exactly the same thing.

Sharona: So when you have these conversations with administrators, do any of them push back?

François: Oh, yes.

Sharona: Okay. And the next time you do, I just have a favor, because you guys have like are you big into like the Michelin rankings and things because of the French culture? Do you ever, do you ever think about like three star restaurants and two star restaurants and that kind of stuff?

François: Oh, yes. Yes.

Sharona: Okay, sure. Ask them if they think that they should adjust the Michelin rankings, and maybe they’ll understand that that is what they are doing. Because math in grading is qualitative data that we are treating as quantitative. Ask them if they wanna average a two star restaurant and a three star restaurant to get a two and a half star restaurant.

François: Good one.

Caroline: It’s much more difficult to change that, that R score, because it’s not calculated by the CEGEPs. It is actually calculated by the universities. So universities collect grades from CEGEP students and there’s this organism that calculates all of the R scores for all students because it’s used by university.

Boz: Right.

Caroline: So even if I talk with my administration or even the Federacione de CEGEP, right? It’s calculated outside of CEGEP it’s really an instrumentalization of my work.

Boz: Mm-hmm.

Caroline: My work as a teacher is used to prove, to create something that is used against my students. And I don’t have any control on that.

Sharona: Right. So let me ask you this question then. What does your final, just going back down to the individual class level, so before you get an R score or a Z score, anything like that, what do you give your students at the end of the term? Is it an A, B, C, D? Is it a a point value on a hundred? What, what do you personally give your students?

Caroline: It’s point value on a 100 scale, and that’s because it’s in the law and okay, we have a law, but.

Sharona: So. So if you gave all of your students a hundred, let’s say all of them met all your learning targets and you gave them all a hundred, what would happen to the students in that case?

Caroline: I’m not sure. I think it’s impossible to calculate an R score if all of all students have the same grade. Yeah. I think .

Boz: Because there’s no standard deviation. Mm-hmm. You can’t calculate a Z score if there’s no deviation.

Sharona: So I’ve never had a class that had all A’s, but I have had all passes. So can you do something like giving them a hundred is your A’s and 90 is your B’S and 80 is your C’s and those are the only scores you ever give them is 100, 90, 80.

I mean, is that where, where you go? Or

Caroline: François tried that

Sharona: Uhhuh.

François: Yeah, I did that.

Sharona: And how’d it go?

Caroline: Not good.

Sharona: Not good?

Caroline: Well, not with the students. Right?

François: Actually a lot of the students liked it. Some less. Because they thought that they would deserve a grade that was somewhere in between some of those grades that I had defined.

But I was lucky I didn’t hear anything from the principal or the administration. So that went well.

Caroline: I know teachers and I won’t say at which CEGEP, just for them to be incognito if they want to, they split their classes with the agreement of the administration. They split their class into, let’s say five or seven groups with all of these smaller groups in the list with only four, three or four students per list.

And that’s a way of having no R score calculated. Because if there’s less than five students in a group, it’s in the system. You don’t have an R score. So he tried to have no R score calculated for his students, but it’s a pilot project and we don’t see it being possible for all of the students all over the place because university do use the R score.

Less and less. And a few years back a med student was only selected on the basis of his or her R score, but not anymore. It only counts for a percentage of the package of the things that person is supposed to demonstrate, to be able to be selected as a med student. There are interviews and things like that, but still the R score counts for maybe 25 to 30% of their admission.

Boz: It, it’s still a significant amount.

Caroline: Yes, it’s large. Yes.

François: And it is an issue. It crops up every time that we talk of alternative grading to someone new and he’s gonna go, this person’s gonna ask, well, how is it gonna affect the R score? And then what is my principal or my dean gonna say about how it’s going to affect the R score?

So we haven’t had the galls to really take this matter upfront to a principal or to a political level. But what we’re doing right now is that we can check that actually we can use alternative grading and many different alternative grading schemes, be it standard based grading or specifications rating, and translate the learning outcomes into a percentage grade at the end of the semester.

And the impact on the predicted R score is close to null. So at least, well we’re not fighting it at a political level, but at least we can reassure our members and tell them it won’t be an issue right now. Yeah. So we can talk about alternate grading and you don’t need to worry about the R score.

Caroline: Some teachers also, oh, sorry.

Boz: Oh, I was just, I was gonna say, I could see if I was a educator in that system though, and I was somewhat reluctant to try this, I could see how this whole argument is a really easy excuse not to try anything different.

Sharona: Yeah. Well, we, you know, we ask a lot of these questions as well because, you know, we do state that the historical purpose of grades is actually ranking and scoring. So you say it’s instrumentation, but in reality, when they were designed, when you look at the history of grading in the us

François: mm-hmm.

Sharona: Their purpose was not to support learning. Their purpose was not to even measure it. Their purpose was to rank and score. So it was originally developed as a tool for ranking and scoring.

So if we’re gonna take that on, and most teachers that we talk to don’t think of it that way anymore. Most teachers think it is a reporting of learning. And so that is a paradigm shift right there. Mm-hmm. But we do acknowledge that it is being used for ranking and scoring and there’s a need to rank and score as long as we have scarcity, such as med school admissions and things like that.

So I’m not unaware of that, and I think it’s reasonable to, if we have to translate to a percentage letter grade, you do a mathematical conversion and you make that transparent. But it does worry me that there’s an extra layer because in my personal classes, many, many, many more of my students get A’s and I have almost no C’s and I have a few F’s.

And so I would wonder what that would do to my average and standard deviation. So since I have a different style of distribution of grades, what would that do to an R score? That would be a question if I were in your system.

Boz: Yeah. Hmm.

Sharona: Caroline, I think I interrupted you in saying something. I don’t know if it’s still relevant.

Caroline: The only thing I wanted to say is not only the teachers when they are first presented with these ideas, say what’s that going to do to the R score? They also say won’t that inflate grades in a way that it’s not a good witnessing of learning, because you give more chances to the students, right?

So that’s an easy thing that we can say, no, it’s not, it’s not easier. Our classes are not easier because students can do retakes because we allow ourselves to have higher expectations from the students. So yes, I give them retakes, but you won’t get a passing grade just because you wrote your name right on the copy or things like that.

And I’m actually really, really sure that all of my students, when they complete my course, either with a just passing grade or another grade, I’m sure that these students have attained the learning outcomes that are essential for the rest of the program because all of our courses are linked to each other.

And I was not sure of that before because the passing grade, it’s 60. At 60, some students did not have these basic knowledge of the discipline. But now I’m sure, so it’s really much more comfortable for me.

Boz: See, and that’s a really common argument that we get to about, oh, aren’t you lowering your standards or inflating grades if you’re doing all this stuff and No. Like the expectations I have on my students now are much, much higher.

Mm-hmm. Because I’m giving them structures in place to reach those levels to make those mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and get a chance to correct those mistakes, which is how most learning actually happens. We do something, we get on a bike, we fall down, we hurt our knees. Next time we try not to hurt our knees, and we eventually learn how to ride the bike.

It’s all learning. I mean, so that, that argument is very, very, very common. And yeah, I say the same thing all the time, that not only am I not lowering my grades, I’m actually raising my expectations of my students. Mm-hmm.

François: That’s what’s written in the title of Linda B. Nielsen’s book Raising Standards.

Yep. And also in the Community of practice. And I’ve heard it myself, and I take it as a good sign when I see a student that is chaffing about not getting partial credits. Like Caroline said, you know, I’ve written my name on the paper. I should get some points for that. Why am I not passing? Why am I not having a passing grade?

Well, this is not demonstrate profound understanding, profound mastery of the subject, but you can retake it and I’ll tell you what you need to do again. And we get some pushback from students. And I think that this pushback is healthy. The students are learning something about learning.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: Well, the similarities just amaze me. We talk to different disciplines, different cultures, different languages now. And we all have so many similarities, and then exploring the differences is very interesting. So thank you so much for sharing your experience and your situation. It’s just fascinating to me.

Caroline: Thank you very much.

François: Thank you very much. It was an honor. You know, you are the people that we are listening to, that we’re reading in order to learn and to talk about it, whether within the Francophone world. So I’m very honored to be here.

Boz: Well, me too. Thank you. And, and I, I’m really being honest. I don’t know if either of you have ever come to the grading conference, but I think what you guys have with this growing FLC like community. I really do. I think that is something that really should be shared at the grading conference. I think a lot of people would be interested in how you set up, how you maintain that, because that is one of the things that a lot of groups are missing. Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of people that are trying to do this in silos, are trying to do this with very little support to see and hear how you guys have gotten and grown this and it’s really sounds like it is a professional learning community and really supporting each other. I think that’s huge. I think that’s something that a lot of our participants at the grading conference would love to learn more about.

Sharona: Well, and in particular we’re gonna have, for those of you listening, we’re gonna have some affinity groups this year.

So in some of our more informal spaces at the grading conference, there’ll be opportunities for facilitated conversations, and this might fit really well there. So, Boz, any last thoughts before we sign off? And last questions.

Boz: No, I think we could probably talk for another 30 minutes to an hour easily, but I wanna thank you both for coming on. This has been really fascinating, so thank you both.

Caroline: Thank you.

François: Thanks for having us.

Boz: And I want to thank everyone for joining us, 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 featured 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.