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Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education

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Are you satisfied with your current and traditional grading system? Does it accurately reflect your students’ learning and progress? Can it be gamed? Does it lead to grade-grubbing and friction with your students?The authors of this book – two professors of mathematics with input from colleagues acr…

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Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

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Robert Talbert (author of GRADING FOR GROWTH) : Substack

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Grading for Growth | Robert Talbert | Substack

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Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

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David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but SO GOOD)

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David Clark on TIHE : Arbitrary Limits (more about flexibility in the classroom but SO GOOD)

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, arbitrary limits in our classes with David Clark.

[music]

Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. I am so excited about getting to finally talk to today's guest. I read his blog voraciously, and every time I've hopped on his website, I just devour what I see there. I actually get to talk to David Clark today. David Clark is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University.

He earned his PhD in 2012 at Michigan Technological University. David is a leading proponent of alternative grading in higher education and spreads the word about progressing assessment by co-organizing the annual online grading conference. His book, Grading for Growth, which is co-authored with Robert Talbert, whose side note has been on Teaching in Higher Ed many times, who wrote the forward for my book, and who I also treasure in terms of all that he gives to higher education. I can't wait for that book to come out. It's not out yet as of this recording. David, who's online with me now as I share these words has already agreed to come back and speak about the book.

I'm so excited about that. We all won't have to wait too much longer as of this recording, it's coming out in early 2023. Beyond assessment, David studies discrete mathematics, especially via undergraduate projects and serves on the senior staff for MathPath, a month-long residential enrichment program for middle school students. He's also an avid backpacker and board gamer. David Clark, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:02:13] David Clark: Thank you. It's great to finally be on here.

[00:02:15] Bonni: I went back to your website, which I have gone to many times before. Every time you have something new to give me, and this time I got fascinated by- I think it's maybe the first thing I see on your about page where it says, "I study combinatorics," and I think I may have said it wrong when we spoke earlier. Do you want to pronounce it for us correctly?

[00:02:35] David: You got it. Yes, you got it. Combinatorics. It's combinations almost.

[00:02:39] Bonni: You have a subtitle here on your about page, "The art and science of counting interesting things." David, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, if I were to go get my PhD in this thing, does it come out of the box this simple, or did you have to do some work as a communicator to make it that simple?

[00:03:00] David: Yes, that's something I've worked on is finding a really short way to describe it. I've leaned into the I count things. People will sometimes look at that and say, "Counting? I can count, right?" "Yes," and then that opens a conversation at least because that's where it begins with counting, and that gets more complex from there.

[00:03:18] Bonni: Yes. What I love about it, though, it's not just counting things, but it's counting interesting things. Then the next thing down on your website are some of the interesting things that you've counted, and you also do that in combination with undergraduate research. Would you talk about some of the interesting things we could learn about what you and students have counted together?

[00:03:38] David: Oh, yes, absolutely. I really do all of my disciplinary research nowadays with students. I'm at an institution that really values that, and I just love working with students and introducing them to that. The main type of things I do, I like to use games. You mentioned I'm a board gamer. I like games, I like studying games. I will study things like guessing games. I'm thinking of a number from one to a million, and you can ask me yes or no questions about it. Can you figure out my number? Then here's the counting part. Can you figure out my number in fewer guesses? What's the smallest number of guesses you need?

What if I'm allowed to lie sometimes? What if I'm thinking of two numbers, and I only tell you how many of mine fit your question? All these variations, they're about counting, they're about how numbers work and how they're arranged, and they're really easy to introduce. I think your readers right now can be imagining questions they would ask me, but we can really dig really quite deep during the course of a summer-long project or something.

[00:04:36] Bonni: One of my favorite classes if I combine my masters and my doctorate was actually a prerequisite, not even in the curriculum for those things. I had to go back and take an undergraduate statistics class, never having taken it way back when I first did that. It literally was the best class, again, if I combine all of that, and it was because he made it interesting. So many times I think we fall in love with our disciplines and then forgot maybe why we fell in love with them in the first place, and then realize that other people might fall in love with disciplines for different reasons and might be curious about different things.

Are you finding that you are able to have them curious from the beginning, or do you have to start with something in common, like games? By the way, this guy, he brought in lots of games when he started teaching probabilities that you might play if you went to gamble, and I don't really play those games. I had to learn how the game worked before I could even start to look at the probability, but he did capture just my curiosity, even though I'm not really terribly interested in gambling. You start with something general before students can get curious about something specific or how does that work?

[00:05:49] David: Yes. I think people naturally engage with games. Yes, I think that a general idea like that, I'm thinking of a number from one to a million game. People can engage with that immediately. We begin with that. Then the variations and digging into the, "Let's look at the math about this." It's almost naturally motivated because people care already like, "Oh, yes, I want to be able to solve this. I want to be able to do this." It's the thing that I think is lucky that combinatorics can be expressed that way, but I think it's something that I really value as being able to engage people quickly with these ideas.

It's fantastic that you had a good experience with the statistics class. Because so often, I say I'm a mathematician and people's first reactions is, "Oh, yes, I hate math." "Oh, man, come on. I bet I can make you be interested in something, but you might not know it's math."

[00:06:42] Bonni: Yes, that's the thing. I don't know much about math, [laughs] but I know a decent amount about technology. It seems similar to when people say, "Oh, I'm just not good at technology," and it's like, "It's such a broad field. You couldn't possibly be bad at all of it." To think of it that way as a binary thing, you either are good at math or are not, that's the danger, right?

[00:07:07] David: Some people almost like define math as the things they think they're not good at, and if they're good at it, that's not math or any technology, too. Oh, I can use this, but that's not what I mean. That's not the technology I'm talking about. I think people having positive experiences with math is a good thing, and we all know some math, it is a thing.

[00:07:28] Bonni: I mentioned as I was reading your bio and started to go off script, as we will, how excited I am about your book coming out, and you've already said that you'll come back and share a lot about alternative grading. Today's conversation is actually a little bit- I don't know, is it a cousin of the topic? It's just a tiny slice where we'll touch on that, but I hope we are going to be getting people really curious about the topics, so they'll be really excited about your book when it does come out and our future conversations. Today, we're going to be looking at something called artificial scarcity. First, what is that, David?

[00:08:06] David: When I'm talking about artificial scarcity, we're looking at something that is limited in some way, and it's an arbitrary limit. When I say arbitrary, I don't mean random. I don't mean capricious. Just it's limited in some way that's not inherent to what it is. A non-example of that would be seats in a classroom. There's a hard limit to the number of students you can have seating in a classroom. That's a hard limit, and it's not arbitrary.

[00:08:33] Bonni: Then what is the danger in artificial scarcity and how might we be more intentional in how we choose to embrace it or avoid it in certain cases and in certain classes?

[00:08:49] David: Yes, I think the danger of artificial scarcity is if something is limited- I think a good example of this is thinking of grades as a limited resource. If you think of

There should only be so many As available in a class, or that the class average needs to be within a certain range. That's an artificial limit. There's artificial scarcity of grades. The danger there is then that by enforcing this artificial limit, you are leaving out people who are doing genuinely good work, or you are cutting out something with this limit that is valuable and is worth knowing or seeing or engaging with. Because we're focusing on complying with a limit, it's out, it's gone.

I think that's a really common thing in higher education, and artificial scarcity often shows up. This is really the point of thinking about it. It shows up in things that we don't even think about in considering because they're just here, or they're in the air as automatic things we do in a class or in our teaching or in our grading or something like that. Leaving people out, they risk not showing us the brilliance of our students when they're showing us what they know because we have limited them in an arbitrary way.

[00:10:05] Bonni: Yes. That so much of what I've gleaned from your writing and your work in this area has to do with that intentionality and asking questions. When I first came into teaching in the context of higher education, I get disappointed in myself sometimes because I don't think I asked a lot of questions. It was, "This is how it works. This is what we do." Some of that in a very intentional way, I think the most, I would call it egregious, way that this shows up is what we call grading on a curve. You just described it, but in case anyone hasn't made that connection, and I didn't necessarily think of it because it was like, "Oh, no we have to fight against,-" Oh my gosh, I'm forgetting the expression.

[00:10:51] David: Against grade inflation.

[00:10:52] Bonni: Yes.

[00:10:53] David: Yes. That's a phrase.

[00:10:55] Bonni: Now, I'm more bold. Where I'll say, "That's not really a thing." I'll try not to sound dripping with sarcasm, but you probably have more practice at this than I do. How do you describe that's not really a thing that we need to be concerned about when you're talking to colleagues and probably do it better than I sometimes do?

[00:11:13] David: Yes. I want to start by saying intentionality is a great word right there, just intentionally think about our practice. Thinking about about grades, grading on a curve and grade inflation is a critical one here. The way that I like to think about grade inflation is if I ask someone to say, "What is grade inflation? What do you mean?" Usually the response is, "It's grades getting higher," or, "My average grade getting higher," or something. That's not wrong, but I would say, "I think I would add something to it." Basically, nobody objects to this, which is it's grades getting higher when they don't represent more learning. Because grades getting higher and more learning, cool. That's what we want grades to represent.

When you put it that way, I think it really undercuts what people are thinking about with grade inflation, which is they're thinking that just grades getting higher is somehow letting kids get away with stuff. It's letting our students get away with things that they shouldn't. One of my core beliefs is that if we're going to have grades, then grades need to represent learning. They should represent what students know. As soon as you start thinking of grades that way, that opens the door to the possibility that maybe all of my students really know and understand this or maybe a lot of them do. If they're going to get a grade for that, it should be a high grade.

That would look like grade inflation. If all you're thinking of is just higher grades. As soon as you say, "It's linked to actual learning," and I can point to the things that they've done to demonstrate that learning, it's not grade inflation. It's just awesome. I've got a bunch of students who really understand this well. I think grade inflation is a topic that is not at the front of my mind because the way that I think about what grades mean, they're inherently linked to learning. Inflation is not the question that matters there.

[00:13:04] Bonni: Something I'm going to be changing about myself moving forward is I'm going to start with that question, what do you mean? That's really helpful. I think sometimes the conversations I've had, they want to be protective of the reputation of the school as it comes to employers or to graduate schools. I attempt to, I'm sure, clumsily break down those arguments. Back to what you talked about, if this represented actual more learning, then we wouldn't really have anything to protect. Because what would be students who would be going into these graduate programs or who would be going to work for these employers would be better equipped with more learning. Then it would never come down to, "My goodness gracious. Do you ever give a lot of A in your classes."

[00:13:53] David: I don't want to pretend that grade inflation isn't a thing. I've interviewed a number of instructors usually from really high powered institutions like Ivy Leagues, who are genuinely afraid of not giving high enough grades to their students. That's like the students come in expecting this. There is such a thing as grade inflation there if the reason they're going higher isn't related to what they actually have learned.

[00:14:19] Bonni: Yes. When I have said it, I don't say it quite that way in the sense of I say of all the problems that we have as an institution, this particular- First of all, we should create a shared definition so that what you mentioned is going to be really helpful for me going forward. Also, if it is a problem in the way that someone might be posing that it's a problem, it's going to be so low on the list as opposed to seeing if grades match learning. I know this is a conversation for the future, if we could put grades way over here and just focus on learning, there we go, then now we're really talking at that point.

I want to actually go back just for a moment because I took us on a path right away of artificial scarcity as a bad thing. You point out to us that it's not always a bad thing. Could you talk a little bit about libraries and how libraries have made use of artificial scarcity?

[00:15:11] David: Yes, absolutely. This is really important. Talking about artificial scarcity, it can sound like I'm saying, "Throw out all the limits. Get rid of all the limits." I think libraries are a useful thing to think about because it's something most of us have experience with. A common experience is a due date for a book, or you have to return the book by a certain date. That's a form of artificial scarcity because it arbitrarily limits your access to a book. I can only keep it for so long. It's not like the book burst into flames if I keep it longer than that. It's not this inherent limit. It's just something we've decided, three weeks or whatever.

There's some questions I like to think about here. It's not just thinking, "This is arbitrarily limited, but why? Why is it arbitrarily limited?" I think there's some really good reasons for that. A library, I'm thinking public libraries, their mission is to have access to this information to all of their patrons, not just to one person. Having a deadline, a return date for a book means that more people have access to it. More people can have access to these things. If the date isn't really, really short, then you'll all have a reasonable chance to read and learn from it. It makes sure that the mission of the library can actually be achieved. This is maybe me, I love my library.

I will go there, and I'll start looking around and, "Oh, I'd like to check this one and this one and this one," and just end up with this huge pile of books that is not reasonable for me to actually all read in the next three weeks. Knowing that there's a due date actually makes me a little more careful with the genuinely scarce resource of the number of books that are in the library and the number that people could check out. I'm a little more intentional about, "This is what I actually want to do and read for the next few weeks." Then when I have them at home, knowing that they're due means I don't tend to keep them just sitting on the floor and ignored.

I'll actually engage with them a little more. Those are all useful things. I also want to point out anyone who's ever checked a book out of a library knows that the deadline for returning that book is not a hard deadline. This is not totally a, "You return it now or else." We can renew books. Most libraries will work with you to get the books back in. They'll send you some emails or give you a call or whatever. Different books might have different amounts of time you can check them out for, like newer books that are more popular. They have a shorter date so that more people can see them. Older ones have a longer date.

Those are all ways you add in flexibility that respect why there's a limit in the first place. Like, "Oh, yes, we want people to be able to read our books, but we also want more people to be able to read our books. Let's be flexible in a way that respects that."

[00:17:47] Bonni: We talked about intentionality, the person who leads our library, we have the course reserves. I suspect that lots of places do this where a professor might put their textbook on reserve in the library if a student is unable to purchase that book, at least they can use it for two hours. Those are arbitrary limits where we really should be asking the questions with intentionality because what if we were to break through that barrier and more classes were using open educational resources so that artificial limit could just be released. Anyone, whether you attend our university or anywhere in the world, are just interested in this topic. We really should be asking those questions.

I know librarians have been for some time now asking questions around the ethics of late fees for books and how that may or may not drive the best outcomes and behaviors or arbitrarily affect in a disproportional way the people who you'd most want to be making use of your library. Then I also think about the studies. I've read about late fees for people who pick up their kids from school or daycare or something like that. How they started where they said there was this social contract that said, "Pick up your kids by 5:00," I'm making this up, of course. Then, "Oh, If you're going to be late, then we're going to need to charge you."

Then it just became a- That makes sense. The dollars that I would pay, and then I could not have to get there. They actually made their problems worse by setting up arbitrary fees. I don't know if this is fitting, is this fitting with arbitrary limits in terms of that?

[00:19:24] David: It is. Yes, sometimes limits have unexpected consequences. Actually, I like your mention of open educational resources because it brings up a few things. One of which is it's not always an easier or immediate thing to change these arbitrary limits. Textbook availability is an arbitrary limit. It's definitely something that prohibits or can stop a lot of students from taking a full part in higher education. It does, "I'm going to go make a free textbook," is not an easy, immediate thing to do. I think that's an excellent way to go, but that's a big job to reduce this artificial scarcity, these limitations.

[00:20:04] Bonni: We've been talking about due dates as it relates to library books. Would you talk about due dates as it relates to assignments?

[00:20:13] David: Yes. This is a place where once I started thinking in the language of artificial scarcity that I really started to see a lot of it in my own practice. Due dates for assignments are a totally standard part of education where you say, "Hand this in by such and such a date." That's artificial scarcity. It's limiting the opportunity for the student to show you what you've learned, especially if that's a hard deadline. I'm not going to accept anything after this deadline. The student can still learn things. Students can still know things. They can still complete the assignment successfully, but I'm not going to look at it, and so they're going to get a zero in my grade book.

That's artificial scarcity. I have always been a sucker for, "Sure I'll extend that deadline, whatever." When I start thinking about the artificial scarcity of deadlines, I realized it's the same as with grades. I care about what students have learned. I really want to see what a student knows rather than focusing and doubling down on compliance and saying, "You got to comply with my deadline or else," because that's not about learning. On the other hand, deadlines are there for a reason. Why is there artificial scarcity? Because I got great stuff sometime, and it's a lot easier if I grade it all at once. I'm not trying to say that's not a real thing.

That's the life of educators, thinking about how to organize our time and make it efficient or just doable. For me, thinking about, "I've got this artificial scarcity, but I also have this need to just be able to manage my own time when it comes to grading." Thinking in these terms, I started to use what I called grace day. I got the name from a colleague. You get a little bit of grace. A grace day is just every student has maybe three of them during the course of a semester. It's just an automatic, no questions asked extension on a deadline. I usually said it would be to the next class day because I have things due on class days, and then they can just hand it in.

The result of that would be I knew some students would always be using a grace day, but I knew that they'd be coming in in a certain amount of time. I could plan my schedule around that. I'll grade a bunch of them this day and a bunch of them one class day later. It adds flexibility, and it shows me what students have learned without just forcing them to comply with my arbitrary deadline. That was a way of ameliorate the artificial scarcity a little bit in a way that students could. They didn't need my permission to do it. They didn't need to worry about complying with my rules. They just could say, "Yes, I need the time, and here it goes."

I've gone further than that recently because as soon as there are rules, there's a game to play, if that makes sense. Then it's almost like you're saying with the fees for picking up your kids too late. It's like, "if I'm limiting the number of grace days, then students start playing around with, 'Am I going to use one now, or am I just going to not going to do this assignment? Do I want to save it for later?'" That kind of thing. I have gone not deadline free. I have deadlines on everything still, but I have gone total flexibility on deadlines. I actually just have a form. I got all of these ideas from other people. Nothing here is original to me. I have a form, a student can fill out this Google form, and it just says, "What do you want the new deadline to be for which assignment?"

Then there's a couple questions about, "Do you need any support or help from me or others." I have really been amazed at what comes out of that, that giving students that responsibility and that freedom to say, "I want to set my own limits. I don't want the artificial scarcity of your hard deadline." They use it really responsibly almost for the most part, put it that way. They suggest shorter deadlines than I would have suggested that I would've given them. I have been really happy with the result of that. I see better work. I get to see what students do. I get to see better work if they have just a family emergency, or they didn't sleep well, or they're feeling sick or whatever.

They make smart choices, and I get to see what they did as a result of it. I have about the same amount of difficulty of cases where students are consistently missing deadlines as I would even if I had the hardest deadlines in the world. It's no worse than it has ever been.

[00:24:30] Bonni: That is such an important point. I think we forget about sometimes. To factor into thinking about how we might want to make these kinds of choices with intentionality. I wanted to share way back when I had Annemarie Perez on the show. Because part of the problem that we haven't discussed yet is when you do have rules, there are going to be some portion of students who don't know that they can ask. Just like you, I used to really have super hard- It's got to be in by that time or it's a go, no go kind of thing. Then, yes, of course, if someone comes to you and explains something that has happened, she had a story, I'm not going to tell it again, just such a heavy story to share.

A student experienced such a tragedy, and she only found out way after the fact what it was and thought, "My gosh, if I had known, of course." Talk about grace, all the grace in the world, and the student just didn't know that it was okay to ask. By making these things more open and transparent, we're minimizing the incentive to be dishonest. We're minimizing the incentive, and you talk about this, too, of just turning in shoddy work. It's not really great work. It's just like, "Just throw it in there, so I can see anything I can get out of this game that this is. Let me see if 5% effort might get me 5% of the points," or something like that.

There's so many positives to it. The second thing I wanted to share is that you didn't say this explicitly, but you implied having no deadlines, not such a good thing. You're not saying just free for all entire flexibility, just get to it when you can. Would you talk a little bit more about the benefits of that structure?

[00:26:21] David: Yes. I'm a big believer in structure with flexibility. Yes, you're absolutely right. I very deliberately have deadlines but flexibility within those deadlines. I think when people hear I am flexible with deadlines, they immediately go to thinking there's just no deadlines. It's just a free for all. Humans work well with structure. That's a fundamental human trait is that it helps if we know what expectations are and what we can do and where we can push and where we can't push. For students in particular, in higher education, a lot of our students are coming in, and they are just learning how to structure their own lives outside of a more controlled family environment.

Having clear deadlines, having a clear structure in organization is really helpful. Just like I was talking about, I don't want to focus on students complying with my rules arbitrary or not. That's also something, structure is great until it becomes rigidity and that there's no flexibility, that it's just about complying with my rules and not about why they're there. If I have clear structure and deadlines, that helps people understand what they need to do to help make their own time, work out the way it should to get it done. Then the flexibility recognizes that we're all humans, and just like you were saying about that story, things happen to humans, big and small, and we need to have a little bit of grace to just allow that to work.

Yes, have deadlines. I know people who go totally deadline free, but I think it's more useful to have that structure and have the flexibility around it. Actually, I want to say one more thing, too. You began mentioning making expectations clear but also making the hidden curriculum clear. Knowing what you can ask for and what you can't, that's a huge thing. If a student knows they can ask me for free to extend a deadline, then they're more likely to use that than if I don't say anything. Only the students who have the background or the experience, they're like, "Oh, Yes, I can ask for this. I can request it."

Then the only people who I'm allowing to show me what they've learned beyond the deadline are the ones who already have some advantage and know that they can do that. Making it really clear and explicit, this is my policy, and this is how it's flexible. That's incredibly valuable. If they ask, I'll let them extend however much they want. It's asking for only certain students to benefit from it.

[00:28:52] Bonni: One of the ways that people such as yourself, and I know you give credit where you've learned so much of this from other individuals, whether it is a grace day or some type of a token for resubmitting assignments to get feedback and do those again, you talked about having students fill out some kind of online form. I'm curious then, what does that logistically look like when it comes to the learning management system? Because every recommendation I've ever seen, these forms are filled out, whether it's Microsoft forms or Google forms, it's not something inside of a learning management system. What's the system then to track what that looks like inside of a learning management system?

[00:29:33] David: That's a good question. I am not a huge fan of a lot of learning management systems. We have one that we use. The form I'm talking about, everything I've ever used has been separate from a learning management system, like you say. I set it up, so whenever a student fills it out, it comes to me in an email. Then the way that I track this, I'm recording things in a spreadsheet, so I'm not recording them directly in an LMS. That spreadsheet, wherever the assignment's recorded, I just type a note, "Okay by Thursday night," or whatever. That's recorded for me, and students get a receipt from the form that reminds them that they filled it out and when they said it was going to happen.

In terms of recording it on an LMS, this is an internal problem for how do you do anything that isn't just enter a number in an LMS. I don't think I have a good answer to that, unfortunately. For myself, recording it in my own spreadsheet works pretty well.

[00:30:25] Bonni: Do you keep track of, in that spreadsheet, that they've only used there however many you're allowing at this point? Do you just figure that it's not worth tracking or checking?

[00:30:37] David: Yes. If I have a limited number of, say, grace days, so there's artificial scarcity again, I've artificially limited the number of times that a student can do this. I usually track it. I highlight perhaps with a special color or something. Again, instead of holding them to a hard limit, if a student uses up their grace days really quickly right off the bat, then that's a conversation, "Let's talk about this." This is even true with the unlimited flexibility where I don't limit students to how many times they can request an extension. If I see that they're using it all the time, that's a conversation, too, and interesting stuff comes out of it.

I have a number of students this semester where they're like, "Oh, yes, I work until midnight, and these deadlines are midnight, can I just always hand them in the next morning?"

"Oh yes, totally." You don't need to use this limited resource for something that's a systemic issue. You always are going to have this happen. That's how that conversation often goes. Sometimes it's just, "Oh no, I'm really terrible at managing my time. Even when I know the deadline, I just keep missing this." That's a different conversation. I think the important thing to think about there is that when a student is butting up against these limits, it's important to talk about why. To ask why.

I'm in the job of helping students figure out how to learn things and how to make their own life work the way they want to and figuring out how to organize your time and ask for what you need as part of that.

[00:32:03] Bonni: Something else that comes to mind as you're talking about this, whether it's with deadlines or things like people showing up on time. I used to be pretty punitive about people showing up on time to things. Speaking of those conversations, it was out of that in a conversation with a student many years ago that I recognized my own cultural incompetence at the time of not really fully recognizing, or I certainly knew, but I didn't necessarily have it showing up in this context about the different ways that different cultures look at time. It was a great conversation because she could hold me to count from the family that she is from, from the culture she is from.

This is just not part of that culture. Yet I could say quite candidly and truthfully that in a business context, which is the discipline that I teach in, yes, there are differences in different parts of the world, but, yes, you are going to need to shape yourself a little bit more if you're planning on working here, at least in the United States and the region in which we work, to be able to be more disciplined about showing up on time and fulfilling those commitments. It was fun, though, in the sense that she's educating me and pushing back, I think, in a very healthy way. I'm also educating her, pushing back in a healthy way.

It opens up the opportunity for both parties to learn more about one another and meet in a different place than if you just had this hard cold deadline or rule or that kind of thing, a limit. Then you're not ever able to be able to learn in that two-way, both about what the individual might be experiencing, let alone just the kinds of skills, habits, character that you're trying to build up over time that doesn't happen from a pass or fail experience.

[00:33:48] David: Yes to all of that. I think that having those conversations and actually just listening to what a student tells you is such a valuable thing. I do think often, especially when it comes to due dates and getting in homework, for example, it's just really easy or at least it's easy for me to ascribe to a student what I think is going on. I think they're being lazy about this. I think they should just try harder and start earlier. When you talk with a student, and you believe them, you learn a lot. It's basically never what I think. I've learned that lesson over and over, and it's a thing that I keep learning over and over.

Also related to that is examining I have all of these artificial limits, due dates. Thinking about attendance coming to class. There's all these things that are built into higher education. The thinking about which of them are based on something that matters, it's just always been that way. I'm just doing it the way it's always been. Which of those do I actually want to keep and which ones am I willing to get rid of out of my own practice?

[00:34:54] Bonni: I could keep talking to you for hours and just be getting started. Thank you once again for already agreeing to come back on the podcast. [laughs] I didn't mention this in the beginning, but I invited you to come specifically for an article that you posted on your Grading for Growth blog that you co-author with Robert Talbert, and the title, it'll be in the show notes, Artificial Scarcity. We really only touched on just a few components. It's a very brilliant piece. My first recommendation to people who are listening today is to go read that piece, and sit down and talk about it with colleagues, and start asking questions and wrestling, and really hone in on that intentionality.

Are your intentions showing up in healthy ways for how you have structured things? In what way might you benefit by asking more critical questions of yourself and of other colleagues for how you might be able to facilitate learning and growth over time? The second recommendation I have is that back on Episode 399, that was an episode where I read a piece of satire from McSweeney's. In the recommendations segment, I talked about my nephew, who, at the time, was pursuing a PhD in chemistry. He had given me permission to take a co-authored journal article that he had written and put it into this website that at the time was called Too Long, Didn't Read, as in TLDR. Then I was able to ask him because I, of course, could not understand [laughs] the journal article. The abstract I could, but it was pretty heady for me.

I was, "Is this actually what your journal article was about?" He definitely said, "Yes, that really makes sense." This idea of simplifying our research into easy-to-digest information is one of the reasons David I mentioned early in our conversation today just how much I love your website and how you've made your work of counting interesting things. That's just instantly something that captures my imagination. I was very fascinated by this website, and as I was looking at your website, I was trying to think, "Now what was the name of that website?" It's funny how our brains were because I tried to find it, I couldn't do it.

Then I thought, "You talked about it with Nick and his research, so just go look for his name on your own website because it's got to be linked in there." Sure enough. The name of it has changed. It is no longer called TLDR, it's now called Elicit as an E-L-I-C-I-T. I'll put a link to this in the recommendations elicit.org. It also seems to have evolved, and I didn't have time before David and I started talking today to go and see what happened because I was able to earlier just paste in all of Nick's journal article verbiage, and then get this plain text, plain spoken type of explanation. Then now, it seems it's gone in a different direction, and now I'm just that much more fascinated.

The other day we had been having some conversations as colleagues as to the many reasons that go into why women tend to be paid less than men with the same experience, et cetera. You can go into this website now and just type that, "Why do women make less than men?" You're basically getting, using natural language, a pretty fascinating literature review. I did see in there that of course there's going to be limitations to using artificial intelligence in this way, but rather than just never using artificial intelligence because there might be limitations or by the way, thinking our students won't use artificial intelligence for things like this and writing to go explore more.

I have so much more that I need to get into here. I'm so excited to have something. I am so curious now. I want to learn more about this website and that kind of thing. I'd encourage anybody else who's curious about this to head on over to elicit.org and just see what happens maybe in your field or a field you're curious about, a discipline you're curious about and start to see what happens when you start to type into it. I'm curious about that and recommend that people go check it out.

[00:39:03] David: I need to go check that out myself. I had never heard of that before.

[00:39:07] Bonni: So funny. I was so glad I was able to just pick apart where on earth I had heard about that and find it again, only to see it's really entirely been redesigned. I'm curious about that now. I know you have some things to recommend for us as well, David.

[00:39:23] David: I do. I'm going to do these in decreasing order of relevance to the topic of this episode. Most directly, anybody who heard us talking about grading on a curve, and they wanted to know more, or they're very skeptical, there is a very recent article in the Journal of Chemistry Education by Bowen and Cooper. It's called Grading on a Curve as a Systemic Issue of Equity in Chemistry Education. Almost nothing they say is specific to chemistry, though. They do this fantastic job of looking through the history of grades and where did grading on a curve come from. They list 12 different issues that are all really important that have to do with grading on a curve. Check that out if you possibly can.

It's good, and it also provides good arguments against grading on a curve that you could use with people. That's number one, is this article about grading on a curve. Slightly farther out, I'm going to recommend a book. The book is Grading for Equity. It's by Joe Feldman. It is a book that has really influenced my thinking and has gotten me considering, like, "What is it I do in my own practice?" Especially grading, but in terms of thinking about compliance and enforcing compliance versus flexibility, or focusing on learning versus compliance. Grading for Equity is a book. It's focused on K12, but the lessons from it directly apply to higher education. It has wonderful case studies.

It is very clear and illustrates well the issues with so many types of policies that we have. It gives really good concrete ways to fix them up and to change them in ways that are more equitable. Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman is a book that has influenced me a lot. Then furthest the field, I know that you have had a lot of guests who have recommended board games, and I said I was a board gamer, so I'm going to recommend a board game. One that I just played for the first time recently, and that is called Calico, a board game. Actually, I should have checked out the publisher. Calico, it's this very cute little game. The idea is you're building a quilt. There's little tiles that make a quilt.

They're very colorful. They have lots of patterns, and you have goals about the shapes or the arrangement of patterns or the arrangements of colors or things that you're trying to do, and that's how you score points. Visually, t's just really beautiful. You're making a beautiful pattern on your board. The part that I think is best is that the way you score points in this game or the way you record points, once you've put together one of these shapes or arrangements that fits the goal, a cat shows up and sits on that part of the board. There's a little cat token, and they're all worth different numbers of points, and they all have names, and they're all really cute.

It's exactly what cats do. If you love cats, or if you love quilts, or if you love board games, it's also a game that is, it can be as think-y or as casual as you want it to be. It can be as competitive or as everyone's on their own as you'd like it to be. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It has cats, the points.

[00:42:18] Bonni: You are blowing my mind right now. You probably know Derek Bruff.

[00:42:23] David: Yes, absolutely.

[00:42:24] Bonni: Derek Bruff, when he was on most recently, recommended the board game Wingspan. My parents don't listen to this show, so I can tell you. You and I are having a conversation in the middle of November, and they're getting it for Christmas. Don't tell them, David. I'm always looking for ideas for them. My mom has been a quilter for as long as long as I've known that my mom was a quilter. It's just like that's been her life. It sounds amazing for her, but it's fun to sometimes have things be intergenerational. Our daughter loves cats, just loves cats. I'm picturing, would this be the game that someone would be able to play who was 8 and someone who's in their 70s?

[00:43:10] David: Absolutely. It is very quick to learn the rules. The rules are pretty intuitive. You put a piece on the board, and you're looking for those pictures of the shapes you're trying to make. Like I said, as casual or as hardcore as you want to be with strategy. If you just want to sit and make a board that looks really nice and see how many points it's worth, then you can do that.

[00:43:30] Bonni: Oh, it sounds perfect. It sounds amazing. You've just made my holiday. Is there anything else you want to recommend that will fit perfectly with my family?

[laughter]

[00:43:37] David: Let me, let me re-up Derek's recommendation of Wingspan. That is another favorite, and it's another one that's just visually beautiful, but it's also really fun, and again, as serious or as casual as you want it to be. The problem with recommending board games is there's no end to doing it.

[00:43:55] Bonni: Oh, it looks amazing. As we close down our time together, I'm realizing that I did have another recommendation. I implied it earlier, but I wanted to be explicit. Go look at David Clark's website. Go look at his website and just think about for yourself, how might you make what it is that you explore in your discipline a little bit more able to peak people's curiosity. There's so much there. You have an entire thing where, speaking of grading resources where you can go entire Google Drive folders full of resource, you got to have some time on your hands to do it.

Because you're going to be so curious about wanting to go- I feel like I'm still not done, David. I haven't gone through everything that's there. There's so much there. That's a recommendation I neglected to say explicitly, but I'll be including in my list as well.

[00:44:43] David: I think it's important to say this relates to my website but also a lot of the things I've talked about today, flexible due date policies, so many of these are taken from other people with their permission, of course. I don't know that I've had a truly original thought here at all. A repository of sample materials is managed by somebody else. My grading ideas are coming from other people, and there's a really friendly community of people out there who think about higher education and especially about assessments and want to help each other improve. I'm honored to be a part of that. I'm just one piece of it.

[00:45:20] Bonni: I appreciate you saying that there was a lot of, let's say, heated debate or a flurry of things on social media, specifically Twitter in recent weeks over someone who wrote a piece that was implying- maybe not implying, maybe I'm being too soft here, had explicitly said there's one way to do this alternative grading thing. A lot of people, "No, there's not one way to do this.: There's this danger to thinking that it's my way, and it's the right way. I appreciate your generosity with saying these are threads. I appreciate today's conversation, David.

These are threads that we're able to engage with each other and, yes, define some terms but to the extent that it's helpful then to build our practice, but not to the extent that it's helpful to build legalism into what we do. Because there's so much that context matters in this, people's own strengths and that matter and the course that you're teaching and how important is scaffolding for whatever it is you're trying to prepare. I appreciate the way that you come with your research and your communication that is so credible while also leaving room for diversity of thought and practice. Thank you for that

[00:46:38] David: Absolutely. I'm glad you brought up that particular tizzy on Twitter because, yes, it's true. Any of these things we talk about, if someone looks at them and says, "Actually, that will not work for me in my situation because of this thing." Perfect. What matters is you're thinking about it. You're thinking carefully and thinking about where those limits are, or why you're doing things the way you are and not just letting them go on uninspected.

[00:47:02] Bonni: I think some of the dangers, too, of conversations like the one we're having today or your book when it comes out, is thinking then that that means your thinking or my thinking has then ended on the topic. I don't know about you, but I never want to stop changing my mind about things. Because I want to keep learning and growing, and students are going to change, and our contexts are going to change. It's really important.

[00:47:23] David: Absolutely, yes. Teaching is not a static thing at all.

[00:47:28] Bonni: Yes. David Clark, thank you so much for coming on Teaching in Higher Ed today. Thank you for coming on it next year. Thank you. [laughs] I'm so grateful for just getting to have a two-way conversation with you today and look forward to those future conversations as well.

[00:47:42] David: It has been great talking with you as well. Thanks for having me on here.

[00:47:45] Bonni: Absolutely.

[music]

Bonni: David Clark, thank you once again for being a guest on today's Teaching in Higher Ed episode. Today's episode was produced by me, Bonnie Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroger podcast. Production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Smith. Thanks to each one of you for listening. If you have yet to subscribe to my weekly Teaching in Higher Ed update, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. You'll get the show notes from the most recent episode. You'll also receive some other nuggets that do not show up in the regular podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time on teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:48:48] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Arbitrary limits in our classes, with David Clark - Teaching in Higher Ed

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David Clark discusses arbitrary limits in our classes on episode 443 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

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Pilot Study - Stress Management : Beck & Verticchio, 2014

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Pilot Study - Stress Management : Beck & Verticchio, 2014

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ASHA 2023 - Alternative Grading - Technical Session

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Kerry Mandulak, Professor, Pacific University

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Kerry Mandulak, Professor, Pacific University

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mandulak@pacificu.edu

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Jennifer Essig, Program Director, Indiana University South Bend

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Jennifer Essig, Program Director, Indiana University South Bend

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Melissa Fryer, Assistant Clinical Professor, Pacific University

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Melissa Fryer, Assistant Clinical Professor, Pacific University

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Mindfulness practice : Beck et al. (2017)

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Mindfulness practice : Beck et al. (2017)

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Experience doesn't reduce all stress : Ellis & Briley (2017)

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Experience doesn't reduce all stress : Ellis & Briley (2017)

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Experience Doesn't Reduce All Stress on JSTOR

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Charles Ellis, Patrick M. Briley, Experience Doesn't Reduce All Stress, Journal of Allied Health, Vol. 47, No. 4 (WINTER 2018), pp. 277-281

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SLP Students Anxiety, Expectations & Needs : Plexico et al., 2017

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SLP Students Anxiety, Expectations & Needs : Plexico et al., 2017

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Grad Student Stress : Lieberman et al., 2018

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Grad Student Stress : Lieberman et al., 2018

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Without much critical examination, teachers accept they have to grade, students accept being graded, and none of us spend enough time thinking about the why, when, and whether of grades.

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Susan Blum on TIHE : Author of UNGRADING

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Susan Blum on TIHE : Author of UNGRADING

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[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 350 of The Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Ungrading with Susan Blum.

[music]

[00:00:09] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

[00:00:18] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I'm Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, and be even more present for our students. Joining me for today's episode is Susan D. Blum. She's a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, currently fixated on education and pedagogical praxis. She's the author of "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, and the editor of their recent volume, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). Susan, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:18] Susan Blum: Thanks, it's so great to be here on this illustrious program.

[00:01:22] Bonni: Oh, I'm so glad to just get this chance to talk with you. Not only have I, of course, read your book, but also followed you for quite some time on Twitter. This is such an important series of conversations that are happening right now. I'm excited for us to explore them, but I want to start out way back when to our childhoods and hear as you talk a little bit about what do you remember about grades as either a little girl, or when you got to junior high, high school? What do you remember about grades, and what they did or didn't do for you?

[00:01:55] Susan: I loved grades. I got good grades. I was this perfect good girl student. The grades were affirmation that I was good and smart, and following the rules, which I didn't always do completely. I was a procrastinator. Sometimes I didn't know exactly, I had these recollections of like, history class. I didn't really understand what was happening in there. I was really good at test taking, and I love taking tests, and school was a perfect fit for me. Where I've ended up is kind of funny, because I kind of reject all of that right now. I've had quite a journey over my many decades of living with school as a student and a teacher, and also a parent. Whatever that's worth.

[00:02:50] Bonni: When I think back to my own childhood, I think back to having a growth mindset, but not utilizing this feeling that I got good. I don't even remember grades, kindergarten, third grade, I don't remember them. When I start to remember something about grades, and also academics would be around high school. I felt like I could have continued on that, they call it gate, the gifted program. I know that that's a whole, lots of challenges with that area of our education here at least in the United States. I remember, like I felt like I could have done that. That seemed really hard, and didn't have a big payoff for me.

I didn't understand really, I think the choices I was making. I went what I considered to be the easier route and didn't care a lot about grades. I didn't really care a lot about grades even by the time I got to college, but boy, oh boy do I remember in my master's program, I don't know what happened to me, but I was going to get perfect A's. I'm here to tell you today that I got perfect A's except for one A minus, and I'm still mad about it.

It's interesting how it kind of evolves like that. I don't think I really thought as critically. I shouldn't say I don't think I'm sure I did not think as critically about grades as I should have once I was in a position to "give them to people", which the way I'm phrasing that, of course has its challenges too. What do you remember about- because at some point you have to realize, wait, everyone doesn't have the same relationship I do with grades. Everyone's not the perfect test taker. It's not always because they don't want to be.

I think a lot of times we ascribe merit to these things, that you've got that bad grade because you're a bad person or you're bad at whatever, like it's a choice thing. Where do you remember in your career starting to go, "Wait, there's a big difference here."

[00:04:49] Susan: Well, I certainly knew people who I knew were very capable, and thoughtful, and interesting, and creative people who didn't get good grades or perfect grades in school. I always thought there was some- I'm sort of humiliated to be saying this, but I'm saying it out loud, because I think it's important for your listeners to understand that there's a journey, and that if they have not questioned grades at all, they're in really good company. I didn't question the objectivity and value of grades until well into my teaching career, which is shocking to me right now. It's like I had this complete epiphany and revelation and transformation.

Now, I know that I used to think that but I think so completely differently that it's hard to feel like the same person feeling those things. My real transformation in terms of how I think about grades came when I was doing my book on plagiarism. I wrote a book called My Word: Plagiarism and College Culture. I really began by thinking that grade inflation was a problem and that students' cheating was a problem. I ended up thinking that grades were the problem, and not the students, and not their production, and not their work ethic. The whole way we framed everything because, by that point, I was reading about learning in a really serious way.

I discovered Alfie Kohn, who literally changed my life. When I started to read about motivation, and I started to see how the rewards themselves were as he says punishment, I completely flipped the way I thought about all of it. Now here I am, like 15 years later, and I have a completely different attitude toward all of it. Grades are, in some way, that kind of linchpin in the whole transformation I personally have had in how I think about learning school, what we're doing here in higher ed, my role as a teacher, what the students are supposed to be doing. All of it is connected, but you have to really question grades or you're not going to get to what I see as the right outcome.

[00:07:25] Bonni: Alfie's name comes up quite a bit in the literature and of course in other people's discourse around this. I just hear his name in many aspects. Tell us more about what he means when he says rewards are the punishments. Tell us more about that.

[00:07:43] Susan: If you think that you have to give people extrinsic rewards for behavior that would otherwise be meaningful, then you are basically telling people that they shouldn't trust themselves, they should always be waiting for external validation, external control. The end of his book has a whole detailed analysis of behaviorism and why that is not the right model we should have for the relationship between students and teachers. Even if you are getting good grades, you're always threatened by the next bad grade, and you're always missing an opportunity to focus on what you're learning for its own sake.

[00:08:34] Bonni: Do you have a recollection of a time in your life, your education, where you saw yourself doing that performance, or the behaviorism?

[00:08:44] Susan: No, because I was made for school. School was made for me. I loved everything about it. I loved math, and I loved science, and I loved foreign languages, and I loved literature, and I loved everything except gym class. I felt great joy in learning everything. If it was hard, that was okay. For me, it was fun. I understand that not everybody's like me. I've watched students over the years, and in some ways the more highly achieving students do this more, do things for performance for achievement, for pleasing the teacher. If you say three responses, I'll give three responses. If you say one response, I'll give one response.

All of that is simply a matter of keeping an eye on the points and making sure you get the points. To my mind, genuine education isn't simply this kind of points game.

[00:09:55] Bonni: I started doing this. I've done it many times, but I'm just recreating it for virtual environment, there's a company called Human Synergistics. They've been publishing for decades a very simple case that's built around the way that institutional review boards make their decisions about medical research, what would be more permissible versus less permissible with their three guiding principles. We do it in a non-medical, non-research class. It's a business ethics class, but it helps to introduce some vocabulary around ethics.

As I was introducing it, I was having to explain to them that you're going to get points for doing this. Like there's a place in the gradebook for points. Just by doing it, you're going to get the points. There's this tension where we're just trained, we're ingrained that there's a right answer here, and what she's looking for is this right answer. I'm going, no, actually, this whole experience of you just saying, what do you think? I don't need you to be a medical researcher and practice probably better if you're not, because then you'd be able to come into it with more of a beginner's mind and thinking about ethics from more of a beginner's mind.

I really had to spend a lot of time helping because this is a new class, and we're all just getting to know each other here. Why would they trust me that there's not something about the performance that they're about to do that I'm going to trick them and be like, two points off, or whatever? I am one who is not fully embraced ungrading. I'm so glad to learn from people like you, you used the word journey a few moments ago. This isn't something that I think would be wise to just jump wholeheartedly. We don't have to be perfect in terms of that you can incorporate many aspects of it.

Then it does, of course, require transparency, this is how this is structured, then this will be rated using the following criteria. I tried to get a little bit closer to maybe specifications grading, although I don't know if that's the best representation, but we can start to hear from people like you. Then that's where I'd like to head next with what were grades designed to do, versus what they are actually doing.

Could you talk a little bit about what many of us, myself included, just learned without realizing we were learning like this, this is it. This is why we do this. This is why it's so important. Then that tires screeching moment where you go, but it's not doing that. Here's all the other stuff that it's doing, that is really detrimental?

[00:12:36] Susan: I just want to piggyback on something you said a moment ago about students thinking you're tricking them. Because when I first began ungrading, I had the sense that students thought I was tricking them. I had to learn how to really explain what I'm doing and build trust in the class, in each other, in what we're doing in the enterprise, so that they can see that I really know what I'm doing in removing this thing that everybody thinks is actually the central part of the enterprise.

I wrote this other book called, I Love Learning; I Hate School. There was a chapter in there about grades. It's based on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interviews done with undergraduates. You ask them what the point is of college, and they say, "To get good grades." People believe that grades are important. I think people think they're important for three reasons. One is for sorting, so we can tell who's good and who's bad, or who's most good, and who's least good, for communicating, for feedback, or whatever, and for motivating. It falls flat on all three points, and then it also has bad effects, in addition to not producing the good effects that we hope.

We know that when you focus on extrinsic motivation, you reduce or even sometimes destroy intrinsic motivation. If you have to bribe somebody to do something, then it must be because they don't want to do it for itself. If you tell somebody, "Eat this peach, it's really delicious." Eating the peach is its own reward. If you say to somebody, "Eat this peach and you get five points," they'll think, "I guess there's something wrong with the peach so that they have to give me the points." There's research for decades and decades, a hundred years, showing that extrinsic motives don't really work. They're not necessary if you have meaningful activities.

If the learning is interesting, people will do it. Some of my happiest teaching moments are when a student says, "Wow, this was so interesting, I forgot it was for school." I think, "Okay, that's all I need." I could die happy. We think that grades are necessary for communicating or feedback. For a hundred years, people have shown that grades are completely inconsistent, different faculty, teachers, K through 12, in higher ed, include different dimensions in their grading schemes.

Some include participation, some don't. Some include attendance, some don't. Some include all the quizzes, some let you drop some. Some include improvement, some don't. Some include engagement, some fuzzy sense of that. Faculty are completely inconsistent. We also know that when students get a grade on an assignment, they only pay attention to the grade, even if there's feedback, written feedback, they tend to disregard that feedback, because they see it and faculty see it as only there to justify the grade. We're not actually producing much feedback anyway, we believe that grades are necessary for sorting in a kind of myth of meritocracy.

We know from all kinds of research in terms of equity, in terms of how advantaged people are going into things, that grades basically track with advantage at every level of school, everywhere. I don't see my own role as reproducing prior sorts, I see my role as trying to help every student get somewhere, and they may be going to different places. Those are the three things that grades are supposed to do that they don't do very well. Then we know, there's so much research showing that grades lead to things like cheating and plagiarizing, because the incentive structure is there.

Grades lead to gaming the system, they lead to doing the minimum, to doing superficial work, to dependence on a teacher, dependence on the judge, what do you want? Is this right? They lead to a false sense of completion, now you're done. As a writer, am I a perfect writer? When do I get to be the perfect writer? I don't know. Then finally, all I'll say for today is that, grades also lead to a huge amount of anxiety. In some cases, anxiety, so severe that people are depressed, and it leads to suicide. That, to me, is the most impossible and unthinkable outcome of this whole system.

[00:18:01] Bonni: I think sometimes it's hard for people to take this in, because sometimes there's just so much cognitive dissonance. It can feel like, "Wow, all of this is true, but this has been true forever." Or, "Maybe I don't buy into everything, but some of this is true," to start to wrestle with some of this stuff. I know you've collaborated with, shared with so many people around this. Do you have a guide for us as we start to go, "Wow, some of what she's saying might be true. Oh, I'm recognizing some of that in myself and also, in students that I have had in classes."

To what extent do we need more information reading a book on? It would be great, which is why you're here today. To what extent could we start small? Again, I don't want to give you a binary choice. I just love your thoughts on, as you've seen people begin to be confronted with the same things that you and I have been confronted with in our teaching, and so many others. Start small experiment, or go out and get more information or give me a third choice? I'm not thinking, blend the two.

[00:19:12] Susan: I think starting small, is probably necessary. You can't just do everything you've always done and get rid of grades through and through. You have to really think about your goals, and not only your goals, but the students' goals. Think about your students as actual people and people who are learning things for purposes. If they're not learning for a grade, why else are they learning? What are they getting out of this particular thing? The more fascinating you can make it, the more you can appeal to students' innate curiosity, which we all have. It is part of our nature. It's part of our being as mammals, not just humans.

All humans, all animals are curious, and we all love our subjects, and we are deeply passionate and curious about them. Why can't we join our students on these kinds of adventures, to discover, "Wow, anthropology, it's everywhere." If you show students that their life can be more fascinating by learning what you're doing together, you don't have to grade everything. You can also have authentic outcomes so that the students do something with what they're learning, they tell their classmate whom they like, or they tell their partner, or they tell their roommate, or they apply it to something.

Those are genuine outcomes, and when you do that, they can be small things, "Go interview your grandmother and ask her this." You don't have to grade that because your student will be so inspired, and the grandmother's feedback will be reward. Then, grades aren't necessary. It does mean rethinking assignments, it does mean you're not going to necessarily get people to read something really boring, so maybe don't assign something really boring, unless you help students find a reason for their own purposes, for that to be useful.

It does mean rethinking a lot of things, but you can rethink small things, and then get your confidence, and then see that it actually has good outcomes. Talk to your students, ask them what they think. Ask them what they feel. Once you actually have an honest conversation with your students, I don't think it's hard to get rid of grades all the way.

[00:22:04] Bonni: I'd like to share one other example from my class and then get your response to it because I have been so inspired by your work and it's so rewarding to just know I'm not done but to have already felt really good about the progress. You were mentioning about thinking about your goals. What's the purpose for why someone would learn this? I decided in this business ethics class, one thing I wanted to change pretty dramatically, at least it felt dramatic to me. Picture this, 2020 spring, I was teaching a business ethics class, and I always would do this business ethics in the news.

I'd give this sticky note to everybody as they came in, they would write down what's the story they saw in the news that came up since we last met. We put them all on the back wall and then we sort them. As you already know, well, the story is going because there would be the first week one business news story about some economic effects of something potential, coronavirus, whatever, and then the next week, and the next week, and before you know it, every sticky note was about the coronavirus. Of course, we didn't meet together after that, but I started to see some real misinformation that they were coming into contact with.

I had spent so much time thinking, "I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough about this if I can't do it," and I was like, "Get over yourself. You cannot have students bring news stories if you're not going to at least attempt to equip them with this stuff." You might be familiar with Mike Caulfield's work. He is an expert in misinformation. He has a framework called the SIFT model, and the whole thing about it is any of us can do this stuff. I did have that feeling like, "Wow. Well, this is something I'm feeling increasingly passionate about, but how do I get them to be interested in it?" I had a couple of exercises that were just you did it or you didn't do it?

That was all I was looking for. I had them answer some questions like where do you get your news from? How do you feel about that? What would you change, if anything, about the way that you get your news and all of that? All of them, except one of them, had something they'd like to change? I thought, "Well, here we go," because I couldn't have and they all felt very different. I haven't done even a simple analysis of them yet, but it's all still fresh, but everyone coming in with some innate desire to change something about their current methodology. I suspect that as we go, they might even feel even more of an increase, I hope. I definitely feel it.

I have an increasing desire to learn more about this. I pictured this potentially being something they'll carry with them for many, many years to come until it all changes again. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you in terms of the kind of reflection that you're talking about, that curiosity. I'm sure you've run across times where people really struggle with, "I don't know how to get people curious about this," or that perhaps are not self-aware enough to know that in their discipline because they're just so steeped in it that it's hard for them to think with that beginner's mind?

Do you have any guidance for us in terms of thinking about the goals to get outside of ourselves and back into our students potentially?

[00:25:20] Susan: Well, I now begin most all my courses asking students to generate their own goals, and to see how this class might fit into their lives. It might even be a required course. In addition to checking the box for the major or something, what else can you do from this? I have a lot of student voices and I asked students to do a lot of connecting between what we're doing in class and what they are living. Even if students take five courses a year, that's 40 courses over four years of college, they can't learn everything. We can't teach them everything in 1 semester, in 20 semesters, in 30 semesters.

What we have to figure out is, what are the dispositions that will help them learn going forward once school is over? I don't just mean for their first job because their first job will not be their last job in almost every case. What kinds of experiences are students going to have in our classes, whether it's critical information literacy, or whether it's ethnographic observation, or whether it's asking questions about ethics, or whatever it is? Having that experience of the power of this insight is something that I think we can help foster if we have interesting enough activities.

It might mean rethinking textbooks, and tests, and quizzes, and things like that, you can get to the same outcomes in a lot of different ways. I think trying to imagine what the students are actually engaged in, what does this feel like for the student to be doing, what are they reading, what are they hearing, what are they writing, what are they studying, what are they learning, what are they talking to other people about, and really trying to figure out ways that this could be meaningful in a multiplicity of ways.

Universal Design for Learning is something that has so many facets, and that can include people having different goals. Some of your students might end up going into business, and others might end up being teachers. How can all of these different future paths be enriched by whatever they're doing in your class?

[00:28:03] Bonni: It's so true. I got such a kick out of some of the less traditional disciplines that might sign up for ungrading showing up in your book, including I really enjoyed that, I need to go reread it again, the chapter with someone who teaches computer programming. I suspect you probably just got so tickled reading this chapter when you first started in because I'm thinking about your work in plagiarism, and cheating, and all of that, and programming, there's a lot of challenges that would show up that just how easy it would be to copy-paste in all of those things.

You could think about fighting that with fire or you could think about that's what we create with our system of grading, and if it doesn't go away, then you're not going to be able to tap into that. Then, the other one, of course, I got which I've had a chance to interview a couple of times for this podcast, but who teaches in STEM fields biology, I believe, forgive me if I'm getting it wrong. Just before we close this portion of the show, would you give any advice to people who are feeling a little resistance like, "This is all well and fine, but it doesn't work with my discipline because it is so test-oriented or it is so traditionally-minded when it comes to measures?"

[00:29:19] Susan: Right. You're talking about Rissa Sorensen-Unruh who teaches organic chemistry-

[00:29:25] Bonni: Yes. Thank you.

[00:29:27] Susan: -and Chris Riesbeck. They teach it very different institutions in very different disciplines, but many people have done versions of ungrading in all different disciplines. I don't have time to talk about all the research on physics education, and chemistry education, and math education, but a lot of people have really tried to capitalize on active learning techniques, on involvement, on curiosity. Derek Bruff talks about, time for telling. You don't lecture, lecture, lecture until the students are stupefied and then ask them to do something meaningful, you give them some puzzle or something that makes them curious, and then they have to work it through. At which point they might end up having to take a test, but the way they get there is a very different model.

[00:30:23] Bonni: Yes, and even when you're talking about taking a test because that is some of the challenges that some colleagues of mine will share, we can give lots and lots of low stakes, no stakes practice tests because we've agreed that wouldn't it be great if you could get into medical school or wouldn't it be great if you could achieve, so there are still going to be boxes that our students need to check in order to attain some goal. Is it a master's program, whatever? It's not like that's going to go away, but that's true.

[00:30:54] Susan: Sadly, that's true.

[00:30:56] Bonni: Well, maybe I shouldn't even say that because I am pretty amazed at how quickly so much has changed around standardized testing. I'm embarrassed to admit, I have no idea if this is happening in other places, but almost as soon as the words are out of my mouth, of course, it has to be recharged sometimes behind on these things, but that happened pretty quick.

It took a pandemic to really dislodge it, but so maybe I shouldn't be so confident at that, but at any rate, if that's what your job is to prepare someone to take some type of a standardized test, that doesn't mean you have to create the same conditions of that to help foster the learning and can we lessen that anxiety now?

[00:31:41] Susan: Well, and we know that when students learn for a test, they often forget it really fast. If we can deepen their learning, then they're much more likely to have good outcomes on tests and I don't want to take too long because I know we have some time limit. Like in Finland, they don't take a lot of tests in school at all. They don't have homework, they don't have tests, they play outside, they don't teach reading until they're older and they do really, really well on international tests.

There are lots of reasons Finland is small, is wealthy, is homogeneous. There are lots of other factors, but just because someday there's going to be some big standardized test doesn't mean all of life up to that moment has to be fixated on these inhumane and ineffective learning experiences.

[00:32:35] Bonni: Yes, and what I know, you're not saying, but just because I have another episode, that'll be right around the time that this one airs and where neither of us is saying that memorization is an important, in fact, it can really deepen learning. In many of our disciplines, that's a critical thing, but does the memorization have to come with that? Does it have to be coupled with these high anxiety, high stakes things? I think in terms of plagiarism and cheating and all of that, I had an opportunity to speak with James Lang who's also written a book about cheating and that's one of the things I take away from that conversation, which was five or six years ago, as wild as that is.

I think I was under the impression of like, "Well, we throw that out too, and no, no, no, we don't throw that out." That stays in here as a very important aspect of learning. It's just how we're trying to get people to memorize things, that's the problem.

[00:33:26] Susan: Yes, we could keep going about that.

[00:33:29] Bonni: No, please, please just respond because I'd love to hear it, and then we can get ourselves over to that recommendation.

[00:33:33] Susan: Well, I think the main thing I would like to encourage everybody to remember is that the goal is learning and learning can be for the purpose of use or interest. Those are really good motivating reasons. If you have to memorize the abbreviations for the elements or something like that. When students really understand that it's so that you can do these other things and we can make it fun and it might be hard, but we can do it, then it's much more likely that it will stick.

We know a lot about how people learn about retrieval effects and memorization and practice and all of that, but also it's true that you can learn a random string of facts more easily when they're embedded in meaningful context. Rather than just have a stack of flashcards, it's what you might also need to do. I studied Chinese and so Chinese characters, I had to learn with flashcards, but reading, writing, using, speaking, flipping them up and remembering, all of that is necessary, but also seeing them in context, not just having one very simple quiz after another is I think important to remember.

[00:35:03] Bonni: I'm so glad that I asked you to expound on that and also that you were willing to because you just gave me the perfect segue into what I didn't realize I'd be recommending today. I want to extend actually something that you just said, and I've shared on prior episodes that Alzheimer's runs in my family and so I have a close relative who we both worry together about that is that going to happen. Anyway, we were talking on the phone the other day and she was mentioning that she read, there was a book someone came out with recently about keeping your brain healthy.

She's learned a number of languages in her life so she was picking up another one and I can't even remember what the new one was that she was picking up, but I had this realization and that was as I was speaking with her because I have always wished that I had learned another language, specifically, Spanish is one that I really regret. I took a class in high school and just never got very far with and I kept always thinking like, "Well, I could never learn it fluently unless I immersed myself and so it's not worth doing."

In that moment, I thought, "You know what? What would be wrong with learning a little bit more Spanish than you can remember from college? What would be wrong with you using the same app that she's been using and you could talk about it and you could ask how she's doing with hers," but I don't know why I decided with language that it's an all or nothing thing and I haven't quite figured out and I'd be interested if you have any thoughts on this, but there has to be benefits that would come without me learning all Spanish to be able to speak and write fluently.

[00:36:38] Susan: Okay. Well, one of my other hats as a linguistic anthropologist and so yes, there isn't an all or nothing mastery, but I know why you think that it's because of school. It's because you either get an A in Spanish and are perfect or you might as well give up and real life isn't like that. Many people can communicate really well with what might not be seen as perfect standard Spanish and what is the harm in trying? What is the harm in demonstrating goodwill to Spanish speakers by trying to meet them partway?

I'm not even talking about the cognitive benefits of learning something new, but you should try to learn Spanish imperfectly. Learning imperfectly is a very good human goal for a lot of what we do in our lives.

[00:37:36] Bonni: That's what I'm going to put for my recommendation. Try to learn something new imperfectly. The other thing I'd like to share, I know that there are a lot of apps and that any app or service, they're all going to have their limitations in that, so I have not done extensive review. I did decide to use the same one that she's using, so I'm having a ball with it. That was called Duolingo. Again, for example, it asks me to speak a phrase and I'm sure it's not perfectly capturing if I'm saying it right, but it's better than nothing. I've been enjoying it, so I'll share that too if anyone wants to just dip it.

It's been free so far that they do regularly try to get me to subscribe, but I just click no, thanks and I've just been having fun for about it takes five minutes a day, and I've been doing that most days and it's been great. I'm going to pass it over to you now for your recommendations and, Susan, thank you so much for that encouragement. I just love the way you framed that.

[00:38:31] Susan: Great. Well, I've been using Duolingo for Spanish also, but I love languages. I've learned a number of them over my years, and I have reservations about Duolingo, but I'm using it anyway and I have actually paid for the premium version because I'm susceptible to that kind of pressure.

[00:38:50] Bonni: I may be too.

[00:38:51] Susan: My first recommendation-

[00:38:52] Bonni: We'll see what happens to me in a few weeks.

[00:38:55] Susan: I've been doing it for years. My first recommendation is Jill Biden's coat. Dr. Jill Biden at the presidential inauguration was wearing a spectacularly beautiful coat and in it, there was embroidery and the embroidery was of a quotation from Benjamin Franklin in which he said, "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." I think that's right and I think it's amazing that Jill Biden is so committed to her role as an educator, that she had that embroidered into this historic quote. I have another recommendation. I don't know how many I get.

[00:39:45] Bonni: I'm riveted.

[laughter]

[00:39:48] Susan: Okay, I'm going to limit it to four.

[00:39:50] Bonni: I love it.

[00:39:52] Susan: One is a book called Insomnia which is by Marina Benjamin and it's got a really beautiful purple cover. I read it when I had insomnia. It's a beautiful book. It's beautifully written. It's got some research and some personal experience. The third thing I want to recommend is a book called Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, it's by Kirschenbaum, Napier, and Simon. The 50th-anniversary edition is being published next month with the effort of Barry Fishman, who is at the University of Michigan. He says the astonishing thing is that basically everything they wrote 50 years ago is still true, and we need to read this.

Then the fourth recommendation, and I will stop with this one is Peter Elbows book, Writing Without Teachers, which was recommended to me by my dear colleague, Kate Pantelides, and I am so inspired by Peter Elbow's book and a lot of the other people writing about writing.

[00:41:07] Bonni: I've heard great things about Peter Elbows over the years. That sounds like so good. All these are so great. How did you know about the embroidery?

[00:41:16] Susan: I don't have any idea. It was somewhere.

[00:41:20] Bonni: I'm going to have to go back and check out what she was wearing and see if I can find that quote in there. That's great. This is so fun. It's been such a joy to get to talk to you. I know we worked on scheduling this together for a while. I've been looking forward to the moment. It was nice to be able to have more of a relaxed read with the book and just soak it in. I read it a little slower than I do some of them, and it just what a treasure you've given us.

[00:41:45] Susan: Thank you for inviting me. Obviously, we could keep going for a reason all the time. [laughing] It's really very thought-provoking to commit to talk with you. I look forward to listening to the next episodes on your podcasts.

[00:41:59] Bonni: Oh, great. Thank you so much.

[00:42:01] Susan: Thanks.

[music]

[00:42:05] Bonni: Thanks once again to Susan Blum for being a guest on today's episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. Thanks to all of you for listening. I recently updated the way that I do my now weekly I can say it now weekly updates. If you haven't subscribed yet, head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe, you'll always get an overview of the most recent episode, and you'll also receive a look at some resources and other relevant episodes. Lots of people are giving me good feedback that the new format works. Head on over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and thanks once again for listening. I'll see you next time on Teaching in Higher Ed.
[00:43:05] [END OF AUDIO] The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.

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Ungrading, with Susan Blum - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Susan Blum shares about ungrading on episode 350 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast Category/tags: Assessment + grading

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FEEDBACK LOOPS (From Grading for Growth, Talbert & Clark)

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FEEDBACK LOOPS (From Grading for Growth, Talbert & Clark)

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1. do something
2. get feedback
3. think about the feedback
4. make changes

(EXAMPLE from stuttering midterm)

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Why Alternative Grading? (from Grading for Growth, Talbert & Clark)

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Why Alternative Grading? (from Grading for Growth, Talbert & Clark)

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"grades built on growth over game-playing"
"LEARNING over letters and numbers"
"productive relationships over adversarial ones"

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FOUR PILLARS OF ALTERNATIVE GRADING (from Grading for Growth - Talbert & Clark)

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FOUR PILLARS OF ALTERNATIVE GRADING (from Grading for Growth - Talbert & Clark)

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1. Student work is evaluated using clearly defined and context-appropriate content standards for whta constitutes acceptable evidence of learning.

2. Students are given helpful, actionable feedback taht the student can and should use to improve their learning.

3. Student work doesn't have to receive a mark, but if it does, the mark is a progress indicator toward meeting a standard and not an arbitrary number.

4. Students can reassess work without penalty, using the feedback they receive, until the standards are met or exceeded.

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CSD 506 syllabus : Language about alternative grading

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CSD 506 syllabus : Language about alternative grading

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Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

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Jesse Stommel on Teaching in Higher Ed : Just released!

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Podcast (tihe_podcast):

Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

For us to be talking about something like unlearning or ungrading, there's an irony in that because we are the people who need to do that work the most and the people for whom that work is probably the hardest.
-Jesse Stommel

The only wrong way to do something is to do it unintentionally, to do it in a way that isn't carefully thinking through what we're doing.
-Jesse Stommel

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Undoing the Grade, with Jesse Stommel - Teaching in Higher Ed

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Jesse Stommel shares about Undoing the Grade on episode 483 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast