The semester is a game.
I dole out points and pluses and minuses
As and Bs, and the students collect.
They compute averages.
They doublecheck addition.
They hold the grading scale up to the sun
to see where they land.
Their questions pre-final are
never about content.
They are...
"How many points do I need to..."
"If I got 65 on the final what would that mean..."
Q: Has anyone here ever withheld grades for the term?
Have you ever run a system of any kind that gave feedback
but no scores, opting instead to offer the final letter grade only
at term end? Did it work? Can it work? Does it recalibrate
their snowflaky brains?
How lazy are you Tingle? Or should I say Calico/Archie/Ben or whoever this is?
ReplyDeleteWithold grades>? So what do you do all semester? Just sit and read old posts from RYS?
Actually, if you were a genuine honest_prof, you'd know that the games that students play are injurious to learning, and that something should be done to prevent them. Why doesn't someone buy this troll a penis enlarger, to give him something more useful to do with his time than harassing us? But then, I suppose it's better than the dog kicking or child molesting he'd do if he weren't here.
DeleteNo I don't do that, the grade is part of the feedback. Plus I can only imagine how many emails and calls I would be wading through at the end of the semester. At least if I give regular grades I can tell them it shouldn't be a big surprise they got a D when all their grades were D's.
ReplyDeleteRichard, I can't see this working. Ideally, students would care most about learning and very little about the official grade. Real life is so far removed from this that it's unrealistic that students could adapt to an ideal behavior just for your class.
ReplyDeletePlus, their heads would explode. Exploding heads create a big mess (and that's just the paperwork).
In writing classes I've done this a number of times over a 25+ year career using a portfolio system. I give feedback on essays throughout, but students have the option of pressing on with new work or revising and improving old work right up until the last week.
ReplyDeleteThey have some sense of their grade obviously as I give them feedback on individual assignments.
It works beautifully with students who want to be there and who want to learn. It's miserable mess with the rest. Surely other English proffies use a portfolio system where grades don't get assigned until the end.
IAWTC. Paid for it a bit on my evals, though.
DeleteDepends on the institution's rules if it is workable or not - at my uni, you must provide X proportion of grade by Y date, Y being before the deadline where the student can drop the course without academic penalty. The X proportion is fairly small (15%) so my main beef is with the Y date, which is very near the end of the course, but after the deadline for getting zero refund on tuition fees for dropped courses...
ReplyDeleteI've tried giving the work with feedback, having them suggest their grade by comparing the feedback with the rubric, and only then getting their grades... at least that way most of them read the feedback, but it was a lot of work and upset the snowflakes...
ReplyDeleteI'm trying a portfolio system this semester in my writing classes, but paired with Elbow's "B Contract" to alleviate some grade anxiety. They will turn in drafts of essays along the way and I will provide substantive feedback for revision but no grades. Then, at the end of the semester, they have to choose their best work for the portfolio. If it meets the requirements for the B Contract (pretty clearly spelled out), they get a B. If it goes above and beyond in sophistication and care, it gets an A.
ReplyDeleteGrumpy, that sounds like one of those ideas that's great on paper but that students would never appreciate.
I"m actually doing this right now. I have steps for one major project. They have a rubric so they know what is expected of them, but I don't grade their topic selection or their source approval submission, or their outline, then their rough draft, etc. They have to turn all this in, on time, but they don't get the grade until I read the final papers at the end of the course.
ReplyDeleteBeyond that, all there is left is their attendance, which is measured with in-class assignments. So they get a sense without any numbers until the final grade. I think it works precisely because of the consistent feedback.
Not allowed where I work now. But I used to work at a place with evaluations only, and a "shadow" grade at the end. The students didn't care much about the grade, and it was fine. That was a long time ago, and a very different kind of student than the ones I have now.
ReplyDeleteThis is such an odd profession, these rules about what a proffie can and can't do. Where I work I do exactly whatever I want in the classroom, including withholding grades until the end of the term.
ReplyDeleteI find it to be the ONLY way I can get undergrads to focus on the work. I give fairly detailed written evaluations on each project, essay, or report. But no letter grade. By the 3rd week students have learned that asking me leading questions about their grades is just a non-starter.
Our debates are about the work, not the grade. At the end, they turn in final versions of everything, and I grade that.
I know everyone teaches somewhere different, but I can't even fathom the notion that a Dean or chair would tell me I had to do something against my own idea in a classroom. I don't mean this in an accusatory way, just offered as an idea of what happens elsewhere.
I think this method has a lot of potential; as I said, I use it myself on a very large project. However, I think it is easily done incorrectly. In fact, it reminds me of online teaching: lots of potential to enhance learning when done right, yet so easily done wrong.
Delete"If I got 65 on the final what would that mean..."
ReplyDelete...that you don't know how to do math if you're asking me.
I've never done this, and I never would. It's grossly unfair in my opinion. One of the more important decisions students have to make is how best to allocate their time between their various classes and other commitments, and it's difficult to do this properly if the professor refuses to give you a completely objective measure of your progress. Detailed feedback may well give them a sense of where they're at, but why just give a sense when you could be precise?
ReplyDeleteMany of you seem to support this process. What precisely do you believe to be the benefit? I'm seeing none (at least, not without nasty drawbacks)
from IceMan:
ReplyDeleteI'm not a regular commenter, but I read CM nearly every day.
Prof. Tingle's question is a good one, and I'm with the folks who attempt to use a final grade only approach. I don't think this is a very uncommon idea, at least in the college I work in (private, Cali). We give feedback and students KNOW how they're doing. But removing the letter or the number from the equation has an almost magical effect on them.
They want to improve the PAPER, not just the damn score. I can't tell you how enjoyable a 15 minute conversation in my office is with a student and her paper when the question "But what do I have to do to make it an A" is removed from the options.
If you can do it, do it. It was life changing for me when I moved here from a school with odd mandates about how and when I had to give grades.
@Richard: You're right in observing that the numerological games that students play can be harmful to learning. Still, I don't think that withholding grades are a good answer to it. Withholding grades will just cause resentment, and accusations of sloth, as we've seen above. In fact, I go out of my way to make sure students know their grades in my class, by writing the grade for the whole class on the second mid-term exam, which I return to the students. Since weeks pass between the second mid-term and the final, I write updated grades for the semester so far on the last homework assignment, which I return to the students just before the final exam. They therefore really should know their grades, before the final exam. It still doesn't stop them from playing their numerological games: in fact, last semester I actually had a student who, halfway through the final exam, just plain stopped filling out his Scantron form (yes I know, but with 100 student in the class and no grader, I must use them), and left the exam early. He figured he'd scored high enough: in fact, he got a D for the course.
ReplyDelete@ Reg W I wish I worked where you worked, I always have the chair meddling in my class in the name of student retention.
ReplyDeleteWell if Nando were here, he would tell you about how at Drake Law they kept his first semester grades until he was halfway through semester two. His friend JD Painterguy will tell similar stories about Touro Law....but nobody wants to hear about the law scamblog movement here.
ReplyDeleteEverybody here had somebody, sometime when they were undergrads or grad students hold test or paper grades from them. I'm sure it drove you crazy; it did to me. So I don't think holding grades works.
Hey, more power to the law scamblog movement. My problem with Nando is: What does he expect me to do about his problems? I'm a physics professor. I do warn my students that there aren't many jobs in abstruse fields like astrophysics, and there are jobs in practical fields like biomedical physics and energy, but not enough of them listen.
DeleteI took a class like this in grad school. I hated it (not the class as a whole, but not having grades). The professor was earnest in wanting us to focus on the content, which I appreciated, but not knowing where I stood didn't give me any opportunity to figure out where and to what extent to focus my efforts on improving. We received narrative comments, but they were so general and Socratic in nature that I couldn't really tell what the professor agreed or disagreed with in my work.
ReplyDeleteThe only way I was truly able to find out how I was doing was to schedule a conference with him and go through the two major papers paragraph by paragraph, along with his comments, and ask for assessment. I did this of my own initiative and was thus able to learn he thought I was doing B+ work while also getting some idea of what he expected for me to improve, which I then put to good use. Not everyone took the time to do this, and some were disappointed in their grades at the end. At least in a grad class there were only 15 of us, so it was a feasible if cumbersome method. I can't imagine doing it with a freshman comp class (or multiple sections) of 28 at five essays per student.
That's pretty much how all my grad classes worked, not because the professor was making a point, but because the grade was based on a single final paper (and maybe a seminar presentation that led to it, but even that wasn't clear; I don't remember ever seeing any kind of grade breakdown or grading criteria on a graduate syllabus). This wasn't an ideal situation, since to some extent it reflected laziness and/or hubris on the part of the proffies (after all, they selected us to be part of their excellent graduate program, so we must all be fully qualified, with very little feedback or other support, to sail on through classes and generals and the dissertation, and get a job that reflected well on the excellence of the department, right? Well, not quite, especially as both the department and the job market deteriorated.) But I can't say it really bothered me. On the other hand, I'd had some practice, since my high school did give grades, but didn't do class rankings or give academic awards (though it did do sports awards, which always annoyed me; I didn't mind there not being academic awards, but I did mind having to sit through the sports-award assembly every year). But I'm very (sometimes too) internally motivated. I could have used more help in tying my dissertation project -- and perhaps the seminar projects leading up to it -- in to ongoing critical conversations, but I didn't really need grades to help me do it.
DeleteLast semester, I had a student withhold his grades from himself. I was giving feedback and grades, on electronically submitted papers, and he was failing to look at the feedback. When he eventually did look, about 2/3 of the way through the semester, he had a massive temper-tantrum right in the middle of class.
ReplyDeleteNow, I am leaning towards instituting some kind of policy that forces students to look at their grades.
I like the idea, but I wouldn't risk it unless I had tenure, and maybe not in an introductory-level class even then. There's some value in letting students in core courses know whether they're at least passing now and then, I think. I could go for one midterm grade (required anyway for intro-level courses at my institution) and one final one, though, or for some sort of passing/warning that they're barely passing/fail (or AB/C/DF) system during the semester (at least in my experience, the gradations in the AB range generate most of the grade conversations anyway). But, like others, I fear that the reality is that a few students (who probably would have focused on the work anyway) would benefit, and the rest would be so overcome by grade anxiety that they'd fail to pay attention to the actual work of the class (or, conversely, would would pay very little attention the class at all, since assignments that weren't generating grades would seem sort of unreal). I think it would take the kind of overall institutional policy F&T describes to really work, and it takes a fairly unusual sort of student to want to go to an institution like that (and a fairly unusual sort of parent to pay for it).
ReplyDelete