Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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highly inequitable. For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material. Grades have other problems: They are demotivating, they don’t actually measure learning and they increase students’ stress.
✏️ The case against grading: you’re punished for not being knowledgeable from the get-go, you’re demotivated, it doesn’t actually measure learning, and it just adds stress. Also, grading is basically looking at a person’s background; kids with educational privilege are already prepared to write good papers, while others never had the instruction and opportunity to be taught/enabled to do so. Grading forces kids to focus on the grade itself, ignoring any of the actual comments.
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I do not grade individual assignments. Instead, I give students extensive feedback and ample opportunity to revise. At the end of the semester they submit a portfolio of revised work, along with an essay reflecting on and evaluating their learning.
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develop their own goals for the course, at helping them to reflect, and at guiding them to think about assessment in terms of their own development rather than following a rubric.
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I’ve found that students need time to reflect on their own goals for the class at the outset, at a midpoint, and again at the end of the semester, so they can actually see how they’ve developed.