As Generative AI continues to present a challenge for traditional teaching and learning practices, many faculty are expressing curiosity about alternative grading, a term that includes several forms of assessment (such as contract grading or standards-based grading) where course grades are determined by students’ effort over time rather than by their performance on individual assessments. However, practical concerns such as the change in workload and ensuring academic integrity often put faculty off from pursuing alternative grading.
This caution is understandable. Not only does successful implementation of alternative grading require a course redesign and a significant shift in the focus of teaching effort, but a complete shift away from traditional assessments may not be in the best service to students. Robert Talbert at Grading for Growth details the latter concerns in this recent blog post.
A hybrid approach to alternative grading could be the right fit for faculty who are eager to switch the majority of their course grade to completion or standards mastery criteria, but still want to retain a portion of the course grade for traditionally graded assessments such as a midterm and final exam, paper, or project.
Here is an example of what grading in a non-writing course using a Hybrid Contract Grading scheme might look like. In this model, instructors keep a portion of the course grade, usually anywhere from 25 to 75 percent, tied to performance on standard assessments like exams or quizzes, and base the remaining percentage on students’ effort, usually either on the completion of assignments (regardless of correctness) or on the “edit to mastery” of assignments, a term that refers to students being able to resubmit work until it meets all learning goals.
An advantage of the hybrid approach is that it allows instructors to tweak existing course elements to experiment with moving away from a dependence on standalone assessment events that may not give a true picture of students’ learning. These tweaks allow instructors to pilot alternative assessments in a lower stakes way and make adjustments based on student feedback and their own reflection.
However, it’s important to remember that even these small changes will require some course redesign, particularly around the pacing of assignments and the tools being used. In its essence, alternative grading involves the substitution of instructor feedback for number or letter grades, a change that will always create an increase in the amount and quality of feedback flowing between instructors and learners. Since the feedback should be actionable, timeliness will also be important.
Fortunately, there are tools that can automate feedback processes to make the increased volume of information both more personalized for the learner and more manageable for both learner and instructor. For example, polling and quiz tools can provide students with automated feedback immediately, including correct answers and where to look for review materials, while rubric tools can allow instructors to give more detailed, qualitative feedback quickly.
For those interested in trying a hybrid approach, there are a number of common elements in most traditional course designs that can easily be tweaked for an experiment with alternative grading. The advice below is based on some existing guides from our office, including but not limited to Redesigning Grading Schemes, Active Learning Guide , and Post-Pandemic Guide to In Person Course Development . This worksheet, which provides instructors with a guided reflection on implementing alternative grading practices in their courses, is a great place to start any alternative grading experiment: Alternative Grading Course Planning Worksheet .
Alternative Grading Tweaks to Existing Course Designs
Offering unlimited revisions on assignments and exams
This practice is foundational to the alternative grading practice known as Edit to Mastery. In it, learners are given a set of learning objectives for an assignment or course section or both, and their work is assessed on a rubric that describes their mastery of the objectives. The course or assignment grade reflects their attainment of these objectives. If you’re not sure about what mastery might look like in your course, Grading for Growth columnist David Clark provides a nice explanation of two alternatives for expressing mastery, standards and specifications, in this blog post.
To try it out:
- Clarify the standards for assessment. Share a rubric with the learning objectives for each assignment with your students. If you do not have a rubric structure in mind, the A&S Office of TEI’s online discussion rubric is a good example. Rubistar is also a valuable, free resource that allows instructors to create rubrics from existing templates. For example, if your goal is to use a rubric for a multimedia or multimodal project, there are available templates that can be customized to meet the course/project needs.
- Consider using automated grading tools such as Rubrics in Brightspace or Gradescope so that you can give high quality feedback with a quick turnaround. These tools will allow you to create language that is automatically provided to students when you assign a rating from a rubric to their work and then to customize that language on a case by case basis.
- Be clear about how the final grade for the assignment or class will be calculated using this schema.
Giving practice exams or offering feedback on complete rough drafts of writing or creative assignments
This is a learner-centered practice that many instructors already have built into their courses, but often it is presented as optional, and some of the students who might most benefit from getting additional feedback do not participate. Making completion of the practice exam or assignment draft a portion of the final grade for the exam or assignment emphasizes to students that these are the types of practice activities that can improve their learning.
For example, a paper that is 30% of Final Grade becomes:
- 5% In-class Prewritings
- 10% Rough Draft
- 5% Peer Review
- 10% Final Draft Incorporating Feedback
An exam that is 30% of final grade becomes:
- 10% Practice Test
- 10% Exam
- 10% Corrections + Reflection (Exam Wrapper)
To try it out:
- Create a practice exam or rough draft assignment 4-5 days before the date of the actual exam or assignment. Recalculate the assignment grade to include credit for completion of the practice document.
- Grade on completion not correctness, but give detailed feedback that includes correct answers and where learners can find explanations for them in their notes or course materials.
- Consider using automated grading tools such as Rubrics in Brightspace or Gradescope so that you can give high quality feedback with a quick turnaround.
Build out a poorly defined grading category such as Participation with a completion-based component
Often instructors make class participation a hefty chunk of the total course grade in an effort to signal to students the importance of showing up, keeping up with reading or viewing, and sustaining effort over time. But if there are no measures of development articulated beyond not missing more than a specific number of classes, students may not make the connections on their own between these activities and their growth as learners. If they aren’t given explicit information on the value derived from doing routine activities such as reading responses or knowledge checks, they may put in little effort or take shortcuts (ie, cheat), thereby depriving themselves of any intended benefits.
Defining participation as completion of learning activities that have an automated feedback component allows you to use this grading category to give students practice in the routine learning activities that will lead to their successful mastery of the course materials and feedback on their efforts.
To try it out:
- Have completion (as opposed to correctness or quality) of daily activities count as a portion of the course grade. For the percentage of your course grade devoted to participation or another poorly defined category, specify what levels of activity completion students need to achieve an A, B, or C. See an example of what this looks like in the chart provided with our sample hybrid grading scheme for a non-writing class.
- Create a worksheet that structures the viewing or reading experience and gives learners credit for completion while discouraging reliance on AI to summarize and “do the reading” for them. This Cornell Notes format of a worksheet for lecture viewing is an example of the type of template you might create to help learners understand what to look for in these assignments. For videos, create low-stakes knowledge checks to help learners understand key concepts and takeaways from the assignment. Google Gemini can be a great help for generating quiz banks for knowledge checks.
- Enhance simple attendance taking with learning feedback measures. In a large format class you can do this with a polling tool that records student answers and sends them to the gradebook. A common way of using this method is to use a polling tool to deliver 3-5 content questions spaced across the class period.
- In a smaller class, you can try a strategy such as Entry/Exit Tickets. At each class meeting, students submit via the same method (paper, poll, Brightspace quiz, Google form, etc) answers to the same structured high level questions. The Learning Analytics Student Feedback Surveys service uses Gen AI to help pull out major themes so that even instructors in large format courses can respond in a timely manner.
If you’re thinking about trying some of these strategies, your TEI liaison is ready to help! Reach out to them or to asteaching@nyu.edu to schedule a consult.