Recap: Reforming Grading at the University of Mississippi
Last week, we kicked off our spring semester workshops with a presentation from CETL director Josh Eyler on the topic of “Reforming Grading at the University of Mississippi.”
Josh began by recounting some problems with traditional grading, drawn from research for his book Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It. Among other things, grades can…
Affect intrinsic motivation
Inhibit risk-taking and creativity
Cultivate an environment that incentivizes cheating
Provide misleading or inaccurate measures of student learning
Mirror and magnify inequities
Be used for surveillance and punishment
Contribute to the ongoing student mental health crisis
Fortunately, many recent grade reform initiatives have been developed to mitigate these harmful effects. But most reform efforts, in higher ed anyway, are individual rather than systemic. That is: they focus on changing classroom practices but rarely go beyond that to make larger changes to our practices or policies at an institutional level.
So, last week’s session asked participants to talk with each other about the barriers to grade reform that exist on our own campus. Then, they played a “choose your own adventure” game to direct the course of the workshop.
First, Josh asked everyone to choose which of three sentiments below they thought best represented the the biggest barrier to grading reform at UM:
“Why is this even an issue in the first place?”
“What about rigor/academic standards?”
“What about grad school/law school/med school?”
The crowd was pretty evenly split between B and C.
To address the first concern, about academic standards, Josh shared research from an academic article entitled “A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure.” He made the point that we need to disentangle the notion of rigor from grades. It’s course feedback and assignment design that enhance rigor and demonstrate the attainment of standards, not grades themselves. In fact, to share one choice quotation from the article,
“Although measurement experts and professional developers may wish that grades were unadulterated measures of what students have learned and are able to do, strong evidence indicates that they are not.”
To address the second concern, about students’ prospects in graduate and professional schools, Josh shared some information about students who graduate from gradeless colleges, like Evergreen State or New College of Florida. It turns out that these students aren’t at a disadvantage when applying to graduate and professional programs. In fact, New College of Florida, which exclusively uses narrative transcripts, produces more students who go on to STEM-related graduate programs than any college of a comparable size in the US.
For the second round of “choose your own adventure,” Josh asked participants to vote on which of these three options they thought best represented the the biggest secondary barrier to grading reform at UM:
Faculty resistance
“We have accreditation requirements for our discipline and/or a major certification exam.”
“What about grade inflation?”
Participants overwhelmingly chose option A. To address faculty resistance, Josh advocated for leading with grading research that emerges directly from the disciplines. He cited, for example, the 2014 article “Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently),” written by biologists Kimberly Tanner and Jeffrey Schinske, as something he would share with Biology departments or other STEM disciplines.
He added that sharing this kind of research provides a good opening to help faculty consider their own grading practices, whether or not those practices align with their philosophy of education, and the degree to which those practices are shaped by their own educational pasts or the expectations of colleagues in their disciplines.
Josh closed by inviting members of the UM community to join an informal working group to think more about the possibilities of grading reform here on our campus. If you’d like to join the working group, fill out the Google form below:
Our next event will be a working session on transparent assignment design: come with an assignment you would like to revise and leave with a new-and-improved assignment description that can help students better understand, and successfully complete, the work of your course. If you’re interested in the workshop, you can register here.