My transition into professional academia has, for the most part, been very smooth. The "three pillars" of academic work - research, teaching, and service - all involve activities that I fundamentally enjoy; and, as a result, my job requires of me few tasks that seem onerous. Yet one point of consistent confusion and perplexity during my first few years as a professor has been...grading.
Before going to college, I thought a lot about grades: not philosophically, but in the more mundane sense that I was always worried about what my transcript would look like, and what effect this might have on my future. When I was an undergrad, and I could exert a bit more control over the selection of courses in which I enrolled, my grades improved. I stopped worrying, and indeed I stopped thinking about grades altogether. This changed a bit when I started grad school in the UK, but only because the cultural practices of grading differ so much across the pond. I went from receiving routine A's to receiving routine 70s, and it took a bit of adjusting for me to realize that this wasn't actually a massive step down. I stayed in the UK for my PhD, and thoughts of grades once again vanished from my life.
But now, as a professor, I have to deal constantly with grades. I spend the beginning of each term instituting grading scales and points-schemes that (I hope) will incentivize students to participate in certain ways in my courses; I spend the bulk of each term experiencing in real-time the results of such schemes; I spend many hours as the term progresses assigning grades; and then I spend the final portion of each term calculating course grades and dealing with grade submission, extensions, and other administrative joys.
But in addition to the fact that I am forced to think about grades through constant exposure to activities related to grading, I am also inclined to think about grades for other reasons. The most pressing reason is ethical, as I consider my relationship with the students in my courses and the impact that my grading practices will have on their futures. Another reason, more practical, is that some casual relationship exists between the structures and grading schemes I institute and the experience of my courses--and I would like to make those course-experiences as positive as possible for everyone, including myself.
All of this has led me to experiment a fair amount with different styles of grading in my courses. Now, as the Winter 2022 semester approaches and I put the finishing touches on yet another syllabus, I decided to reflect about some of these experiments, from previous terms and the coming term.
Initial reflections: what do grades accomplish?
Although this is not the place for me to sketch a comprehensive theory of grading, there are a few premises on which all of my experiments depend. Some of these have little to do with grades as such: for instance, I believe that students are people, that they are as intelligent and rational as I am, and that they are the best judges--certainly better than I could be--of how their own time should be used. I also believe that students are individuals and that learning takes place through creative processes that occur within individual minds. These background beliefs, broadly libertarian, lead me to avoid exams or tests, or any other method of assessment that would require all of the students to do the same activity, answer the same questions, or "prove" that they've acquired the same bit of knowledge. Instead, I try to minimize course requirements and come up instead with assignments that offer the highest possible degree of flexibility. (This is delicate, because flexibility for the students often translates into administrative demands on me--and one corollary to my belief that the students are people is that professors, too, are people, and thus deserving of flexibility and freedom.)
Other premises are explicitly about grades themselves: for instance, that grading as it is generally practiced often seeks to accomplish multiple different (and often conflicting) aims, including 1) signaling students' level of accomplishment or competence to the outside world; 2) providing direct feedback to the students; 3) ranking students into hierarchies of achievement; and 4) enforcing disciplinary practices. It seems intuitively obvious to me that these four aims should not all be bundled together; thus, many of my experiments and explorations are aimed at un-bundling them, and attempting to find ways to accomplish each of those aims (to whatever extent I wish to accomplish them) more coherently, explicitly, and fairly.
Of the four uses of grades, the one in which I could find the least wiggle-room was (1) signaling students' accomplishments and competency to the outside world. Grading practices are culture-wide, and if I alone decided to use grades in a radically unique way, this would certainly be misunderstood by future admissions committees and outside evaluative bodies, and this would have negative consequences for my students. By contrast, (2) and (4) could be accomplished within my courses using different means (say, by giving substantive verbal feedback).
Undergraduate grading
Thus, my first order of business when I began to design courses was to lower the burden on grades. I began by removing disciplinary measures from my grading schemes. When I was a student, it was normal for late work to lose 10% of its mark for each day (or hour, or any other arbitrary unit of time) that passed after the due-date. Ditto for errors of spacing, formatting, font-size, and so forth. I did away with this, announcing in my syllabuses that grades would reflect only the content of assignments, not the circumstances of their submission.
This meant, in practice, that I had done away with my most effective means for enforcing deadlines. In all but one of my courses, this has been a success, and students did not take advantage of my flexibility. Of course, some students submitted their work very late--but allowance for late submissions is part of my being convinced that the students understand their own interests and schedules better than I do. This flexibility became a problem only in the large (60-student) course I taught in Fall 2021, when a very high volume of late submissions made it difficult for me and the TAs to keep up with grading. I will teach this course again in Fall 2022, and one solution may be to set a final deadline for late submissions: for instance, to say that I will not use grades to enforce deadlines, but that any student who wants late work to be accepted at all must make arrangements with me beforehand. This way I preserve the flexibility (since I would plan to accept all requests for late work) but would prevent students from taking advantage thoughtlessly.
Another experiment, instituted early on, was to do away with grades-as-feedback. In principle, this is simple: just write detailed feedback for each submission. In practice, it is more complex, because it leaves open the question of how to assign grades. My solution was to think of each assignment as being pass-fail (which, incidentally, is how things work in the real world of professional research, where articles either get published or they don't). I approached this (in a 30-student undergrad course) by assigning higher-than-I-would-otherwise-give marks to passable papers (everyone with a decent paper got a B+ or higher), writing extensive feedback to each student, and assigning lower-than-I-otherwise-would marks for bad papers, offering the authors a chance to revise and resubmit. This course, taught online in Fall 2020, was perhaps my most successful experiment in grading: the students uniformly stopped worrying about their grades and started thinking about their ideas--and the result was that the papers became more interesting, more daring, more fun to read, and better as the term went on. Although I had to do a bit of extra work when students resubmitted their papers, it was well worth it..and the number of revisions I requested decreased hugely over the term. (I will also add that for this course, the paper prompts were very open-ended, meaning the students were free to find ideas that interested them and write about this. This also made the papers more enjoyable to grade, since in the best cases it stimulated the students' creativity, and in the worst cases it offered a minimum of at least some variety among the submissions.)
This approach has been a success in approximately five out of the six courses in which I attempted it. The course in which it was least successful was, as mentioned previously, a 60-person course, in which the comparative flexibility resulted in some submission-related chaos as the term progressed. Another potential problem in that course was that the students were caught off-guard by my insistence upon letting them follow their own interests when crafting writing assignments. Some didn't understand how to select a topic, and were reluctant to ask for help; others used the lack of disciplinary grading as an excuse to ignore the deadlines and let work pile up over the term. Others, of course, thrived, and wrote a series of brilliant and incisive papers. I don't count this experiment as a complete failure, since many students did ultimately report that they enjoyed the course and the assignment structures; however, I will modify the policies before I teach this course again.
Grading in graduate seminars
As of January 2022, I've taught three graduate seminars as McGill, and will be teaching my fourth during the coming term. The challenges presented by grading in grad seminars are different from those I encountered while teaching undergrads. On the one hand, graduate students generally receive As in seminars (or at worst, A-); thus, grading is relatively unimportant as signal, feedback, or ranking. On the other hand, the point structures and nature of assignments in graduate seminars still influence the course experience, and in some cases matter even more than they do in undergraduate courses, since so much of the professional initiation that occurs in grad seminars depends on individual reading and writing practices.
I've generally been bolder about experimenting with grading systems in grad seminars than in undergrad courses: first, because, as I've already said, everyone ultimately gets an A, which means the stakes are lower if my experiment goes awry; and second, because if things do go awry, grad students are more likely than undergrads to be sympathetic and professionally interested when I lay out the rationale for my experimentation.
For the first two grad seminars I taught, my grading experimentation (such as it was) involved similar parameters to those used in my undergrad courses: I didn't use grades to enforce deadlines, but I nonetheless scheduled assignments, gave each a point-value, and demanded that the students complete the work for credit in the course.
Grading, scoring, and board games
In Winter 2021, however, I began to experiment more radically. For my seminar that term, I hit upon the idea (stimulated by reading Thi Nguyen's new book Games: Agency as Art) of developing a points-based grading system resembling the scoring systems of board games. In general, in many of the board games I enjoy, players win by accumulating points--but the specific ways in which they accumulate points are left largely up to them. In the Ticket to Ride games (favorites while I was a PhD student), you can accumulate points by completing "routes", or by laying track aimlessly, or by building stations, etc. Each player works largely independently (though within a structure that emerges as a result of the other players' actions), accumulating points in any way and at any pace that seems advantageous.
I tried applying this ideal to my course. Rather than establish a series of required assignments, I offered a menu of possible assignments, each of which was attached to a point value. Give an in-class presentation for 3 points; write a short argumentative opinion piece and distribute it to the class for 4 points; write a response to an in-class colleague for 4 points; write a term-paper for 10 points; and so forth. I imposed no deadlines, but simply told the students that they needed to accumulate 29 points by the end of the term in order to receive an A in the course. They could write three term papers; they could write one term paper and give seven in-class presentations; etc. I created a simple spreadsheet to keep track of the students' scores as they wracked up points...and the course's grading scheme became a board game.
As with any radical experiment within a course, the results were very mixed. Some students thrived on the points system, since they were able to organize their time more thoughtfully (for instance, they could sign up for presentations or submit written work during weeks when they didn't have lots of work to do for their other seminars where stricter deadlines were imposed). For other students, the points system provided too much freedom, and left them feeling unmotivated, since they didn't have deadlines to work towards. I have not yet hit upon a solution to this problem. It is not clear whether the right approach is to try the board-game system again, and simply present it in a different way at the beginning of the term, to prepare students to succeed with it, or whether the system itself must be tweaked to provide a slightly more rigid framework.
Winter 2022: writing, research, and teaching skills
For the coming term, I have split the coursework into two different categories. One category, involving in-class presentations, responses, and other standalone assignments, will follow the board-game system, with no due dates, and the expectation that the students will accumulate some quantity of points by the end of the term. (More about this category below.) The other category, culminating in the submission of a term-paper, will introduce a new system, inspired by the writing habits that I hope to help the students develop. Rather than leave a term paper until the end of the semester, I have broken down the paper into individual components (thesis statements, outline, introductory section, body paragraphs, etc), which the students will complete progressively as the term unfolds.
By distributing this writing project over the entire term, I hope to both instill good writing habits in the participants and give them frequent but low-stakes goals to meet, so that the lack of deadlines in the board-game components of the course will not be demoralizing. I hope, if all goes well, that this will help to quell my own existential confusion about the nature of grad seminars and what exactly students are meant to take away from these courses. Having spent my entire graduate-student career in the UK, I never took a seminar during my PhD studies; thus, I lack recent models for how such courses can be taught and what they are intended to convey. In my other seminars, the discussions have been interesting (to me, at least), but I've never quite known why we should discuss these topics, particularly when the topics or the reading lists follow my own idiosyncratic interests rather than the research programs of the students. I recognize that there is an element of intellectual apprenticeship to the grad seminar: the students come to understand how I see my way through an academic issue, or how I compile a reading list, and perhaps, through a bit of effort along the way, might develop skills resembling mine.
In the current term's seminar, the freestanding assignments involving presentations and readings have also been tweaked slightly in the hopes of increasing their practical utility. The writing assignment is designed to instill good habits; but I have angled the other projects, too, towards professional skills. Rather than coming up with an exhaustive reading list, I have left open slots on the reading list which the students themselves can (for points, of course) fill in. If all goes well, this will give them a chance to exercise the skills of hunting down sources and navigating the dual constraints of finding sources that match their own interests and that match other scholars' (i.e. their classmates') interests. The in-class presentations, too, will not be devoted simply to the summarizing of texts and analysis of arguments, but to presentations of the kind they might someday give in an upper-level undergraduate course. This will allow them to test out pedagogical styles while also engaging with a range of scholarly sources.
I will continue to reflect on this system's success (and the challenges it presents) as the term continues! One major variable is the fact that, owing to the new Covid surge, the first few class sessions will be moved online. My Winter 2021 seminar was held over Zoom, and I found the online format to be a challenge, given that it sometimes impedes free-flowing discussion.
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