In this episode, Sharona and Boz are joined by electrical engineering professor Tim Monk to tackle a surprisingly thorny piece of grading design: how to combine multiple types of assessment into a final course grade. Starting from a listener email that initially raised skepticism, the conversation unpacks Tim’s approach to blending standards-based grading for learning targets with specifications grading for projects—using a carefully designed weighted system at the final “wrap-up” stage. Rather than relying on averages throughout the course, Tim uses them intentionally at the end as a communication tool, avoiding common pitfalls like masking learning gaps or penalizing early mistakes. The discussion surfaces key tensions around grading philosophy, clarity for students, and the trade-offs between precision and flexibility, ultimately reinforcing a central theme of the podcast: there is no single “right” system—only intentional design aligned to what grades are meant to communicate about student learning.

Links

Please note - any books linked here are likely Amazon Associates links. Clicking on them and purchasing through them helps support the show. Thanks for your support!

• The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring, by Benjamin Bloom
• Wikipedia Entry on Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem

Resources

The Center for Grading Reform - seeking to advance education in the United States by supporting effective grading reform at all levels through conferences, educational workshops, professional development, research and scholarship, influencing public policy, and community building.

The Grading Conference - an annual, online conference exploring Alternative Grading in Higher Education & K-12.

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

• The Grading for Growth Blog
• The Grading Conference
• The Intentional Academia Blog

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

• Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
• Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
• Undoing the Grade, by Jesse Stommel

Follow us on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

If you would like to be considered to be a guest on this show, please reach out using the Contact Us form on our website, www.thegradingpod.com.

All content of this podcast and website are solely the opinions of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily represent the views of California State University Los Angeles or the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

145 - Tim Monk

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Tim Monk: You mentioned the intentionality, right? So I think it's the, you're looking at how all the results look through, and I see it a lot as a communication tool in a way, right? Because it's equivalent to an enormous table. But that's like indecipherable, right? So it's much more succinct to communic it as this computation especially to engineering students. They should be able to process that.

Boz: Welcome to the grading podcast, where we'll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students' learning. From traditional grading to alternative methods of grading, we'll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student success. I'm Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I'm Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer. Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week, you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I'm Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today? Sharona?

Sharona: I am loving the fact that, not loving the fact that spring break is over 'cause I enjoyed being on spring break, but I am loving the fact that we're two thirds of the way through the semester. Because I am definitely getting to that point Spring semester for me around weeks 11, 12, pretty rough emotionally, but getting through it. And then I just finished the second weekend of my show, so no complaints here. No complaints here. How about you? How are you doing?

Boz: You brought up the timing of the year I'm still adjusting to my new role with my main job with LAUSD because testing used to be one of the things I was really heavily involved in. I'm still heavily involved with the prep up to, but I'm nowhere near as actually involved with the testing, i'm still adjusting to this not being an incredibly hectic time of the school year. For me. It's a weird feeling.

Sharona: And you used to do the master schedule build at around the same time too, right? Yeah, right before, after the testing window.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: And there's less of that too. Not very busy, huh?

Boz: I'm still busy because all the prep work, but yeah it's coming down, instead of building up.

Sharona: And we have a guest today in the studio as well. So we have Professor Tim Monk with Southern New Hampshire University. Tim is an assistant professor of electrical engineering. He's worked as an analog and mixed signal integrated circuit design engineer at Skywork Solutions and Silicon Laboratories. He also was an instructor at UC Davis. He has 12 patents.

Boz: That's cool.

Sharona: And not only a Bachelor of Science and electrical engineering from the University of Maine, but also holds a master of science and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from UC Davis. So Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim Monk: Thanks. It's good to be here.

Sharona: And how, I don't know, how do you feel about that? Two thirds of the way are because are you on semesters or quarters at Southern New Hampshire?

Tim Monk: We're on semesters, but our spring semester starts very early, so this is the start of the last of three weeks.

Boz: Oh

Sharona: wow.

Boz: We're really

Tim Monk: closed. Yeah. So we will be done, yeah. Sooner than most. So we get a nice long summer break.

Sharona: Awesome. For those of you that always hear us ask you to write in and basically go yeah, we're not gonna write in. Nothing ever comes of that. We have Tim on the podcast today because he actually wrote in and I wanted to read to you the submission that caused us to invite you, and then we're gonna start with our usual spiel, but. So Tim wrote in and said one thing that he thinks was missing from our discussion on how to deal with wrapping up the grade when there are multiple types of assignments, is to use percentages for the assignment types as in traditional grading. So that first sentence, I was like, oh, I don't know about this. And then the next sentence says. Before you bristle too much, hopefully I can explain the benefits of doing so. I'll first frame the issue as I see it applied to a class where I teach, where I had only two categories, learning targets from quizzes and exams, and many design projects. These were both large important aspects of my course. Defining how much of each were needed for a C was relatively straightforward as there was a clear minimum of each. However, higher letter grades were difficult, especially around a B with plus minus grades included, and it goes into some of the challenges of dealing with this and lands on, instead of computing a numerical score for each category, perhaps as one would, if the course were only exams are only projects, I use standards for exams and specifications for projects, and then waiting them each at 50%, I solve the limitations, or I'm sorry, by doing this. I solved the limitations of using a table for the final grade wrap up. So it was a very interesting thing. And when I forwarded this to Bosley, I'm like, oh, I'm not convinced percentages, that sounds like weighted averages. But it was interesting enough to have you on the pod, so welcome and I'm excited to get to talk about this topic.

Boz: Yeah. But before we get too far deep into this, 'cause I definitely have questions. Something that we always like to do with our new guest is just how did you get involved in this crazy world of alternative grading?

Tim Monk: Yeah, of course. I'll start with a couple of stories from when I was a student that kind of speak to why I was receptive to it when I came across it. Because I think a lot of people run into alternative grading and some people I adopt it, some people bounce off of it. So the first was when I was an undergrad. I had a professor who he would give these really hard exams and then he would write the scores after each exam up on the board afterwards, and then he might circle the forties and say, this is probably an A in the thirties and this is probably a B. And then, but then the next semester I had, I had another class with him and we, all those students in the class, we just rocked this exam. So he's writing the exam. He's 98, 95, 94. I think the lowest was like an 89 or an 87. And then next to them, he just writes the grades A, B, C, D, F, like as a joke. And then he says, what don't you know, I grade on a curve.

Now he was joking, but it illustrates the belief that your grades should be an absolute performance level, not relative to how other people in the class are doing. And I think that occurrence really crystallized that for me. And so that was something I had as a belief coming in before it. The other one was when I was a TA in graduate school, I was working with a professor who told a large undergraduate engineering class near the end of the term that if he looked at your final at the end of the semester and he thought that you didn't learn the material, that he would adjust the curve however he needed to so that you would fail the class. Wow. Now that, yeah, so that sounds really harsh and I don't quite remember how I reacted to it at the moment. Now, I wasn't a student in the class, so I had a different reaction, but I guess I share it because it stuck with me. And I have the positive version of that, which is that if I look at your performance at the end of the class and I think you did learn something, then you should at least pass the class, right? Regardless of how the grade wrap up works.

And so I want to have a system that takes that into account, somehow. It doesn't always work out that way for if, but at least in terms of exams and stuff that, that seems to make sense. So those were, a couple beliefs I had that made me, I can receptive to some of the features of alternative grading. But what really set me on the path was when I was in graduate school, I knew I was gonna be teaching at some point in the future. And so I went through this course that Sanjay Ashen has up on MIT open courseware on teaching college level science and engineering courses. And one of the things in there, he talks about what Benjamin Bloom called the Two Sigma problem, which is that if you have tutoring, the average performance of students under that environment, it's about two standard deviations higher than traditional group instruction. So his sort of question was, okay, how do we get methods of group instruction that are as good as tutoring? And he had done some research on mastery learning, which at least gotten halfway there based on the research that it's, one standard deviation higher than traditional group instruction. And that idea is basically that you teach everything and then you have some sort of assessment and then based on how you do in the assessment, right? There's a second phase where if you did well, okay, you can do some enrichment stuff, but if you didn't get it, if you didn't, master it, or I would probably use the word proficiency. 'Cause the first time you learn something, you're probably not a master at it, no matter how well you do on the assessment, right? You go back and review the material. And until you've got that level of proficiency, then you move on to the next topic. And then especially for things that stack you're gonna come into, to each new section with a foundation.

And so while after I graduated, I went into industry by design for about 10 years. When I came back to teaching full-time, I knew that I was gonna be looking into this and how to implement that in, in my classroom. Now, that first year I was hired like two weeks before the start of the semester. I was hit the ground running. I got some practices going, but only in the background was I looking into this. And from looking into mastery learning, found mastery grading, mastery based testing, and that was really the first pieces I saw. But then from that kind of branched out found more blogs found the grading for growth blog and book found specifications grading. And that sort of, introduced me to a, a panoply of options in terms on terms of the grading front. But that was really what introduced me to it.

Boz: Yeah that's interesting. If someone's listing has not heard of the Two Sigma problem by Bloom, that's one of his cornerstone pieces and really gets into looking at what different aspects can affect student learning. And it's got, had some really interesting findings in it. But yeah, this whole idea of, okay. Here's the material. What do we want our students to know? How do we know if they're gonna learn it or when, what do we do when they do learn it? And what do we do when they don't? Which is also basically the four questions that the Defours bring up in their PLC materials is looking at this idea of Bloom's mastery of learning and then going from there.

Sharona: Yeah I love that as well. The fact that Benjamin Bloom is like one of the cornerstones of grading was one of those aha moments for me once we started digging into it more. 'cause I, of course know about Bloom's taxonomy and those things, but I did not really understand that Bloom had looked so much into grading, or not grading, but this mastery learning concept. And so then to find out that. He was the PhD advisor for Thomas Guskey and that Thomas Guskey was such a pioneer and this was amazing for me.

Boz: Yeah, but that's, most people keep thinking, this whole mastery and I'm calling it mastery 'cause that's what Bloom called it. I agree with you, Tim. I now usually refer to it as proficiency, but everyone thinks that this is, such a new thing. Like Bloom first came out with this in like the sixties. I think it was like 19 67, 68, something like that. This is not a new idea by any means.

Sharona: So that's how you got started? And can you give us a brief idea of what your environment is that you're in now and the basics of your system. And then I really wanna dive into what you proposed and talk about. Why I reacted to it the way I did. And I do have one caveat I wanna start with. So I am very firm against averages. If you talk to me and I've been accused of being a bit of a purist, I wanna, number one say nothing is wrong. If you listener. Have to or are using weighted averages in some way. I am not saying you're wrong, it doesn't work for me, and we give a whole talk about that. So I wanna start that upfront. I'm not accusing anybody of doing things wrong. But as I talked to you, we had a little preliminary conversation and as we looked at this in more detail, and I noticed that it was in the grade wrap up and it wasn't within the content. I'm like, okay, I see where we're going here. So I'm very interested to dive into that. But before we do, can we, can you give us some context about the university you're at, the types of students that you work with, and the classes that you're working on doing this stuff with and what you do with it?

Tim Monk: Yeah, so I am, on campus, in person and our classes are relatively small. Generally capped at 20. And I'm generally teaching three to four courses a semester. And then I'd say in terms of student population we have, a wide range of, academic preparation. We have a relatively high number of, first gen students, relatively high number of commuters relatively high number of like veterans. So that's the population front. And then, yeah, to speaking of what the grading elements of my course look so I'm using a lot of standards based grading for on quizzes and exams. So I generally have about 20 learning targets in each course. And I'll generally, the first time you're being assessed on it you'll have a quiz and then I'll go over it immediately afterwards. And then there'll be like another older question on it. And then. If you don't get it on those two times, then you can revise something and then bring it to me in office hours. The revision process is your admission ticket to the office hours time. I think partially because of the commuter piece. I was in initially doing more of that and I would have very busy office hours, especially at the end of the semester. But some students have a hard time making that. So I've introduced more exam times in my courses so that students aren't limited by, our mutual availability. I try to meet students as, as much as possible but just to remove that as a barrier. And I use basically a modified e em RN. So I use A-E-M-R-N-I marking scale. So e for excellent. M for meets expectations. The difference there basically being, on an exam environment, I don't expect you to not make computation errors. And then the sort of my alteration there is really try to communicate to the students what they should do. So I differentiate like an R of you need to reattempt, meaning that I think you're close enough that just based on this feedback, you're gonna be able to get it the next time. And n which is needs more study, you need to go back and do more practice. But before you reattempt , and then that sort of those wrap up half or a large portion of the course.

But then I often have, some project work or some other things out outside of class that I'm usually grading on a specifications grading scale because it's more holistic. It's putting together simulation and analysis or including some design. So it's stuff that doesn't as well lent to what I can do an on exam and is more of, okay what's the package? What can I put together in, into a project? And therefore, the project portion of the grade, I'm usually using a table like most alternative graders would. Based on the number of projects you complete at the end of the semester I'll give you a grade. So that's, very normal, basically you get a lot of the points for the first one. And then incrementally last, right? So if there are like four projects in the semester, right? It may be, A, B, C, D, zero, basically. And then because I've got these two different pieces, right? The question is, okay, how do I combine those together into a course grade, right? 'Cause individually, I think there's probably not much difference between what I'm doing, what you guys are doing, if it were just purely standards based or purely specifications base grading, but I've got both of these.

And so the first time I taught a course that was fully alternatively graded and had these two portions, I actually started writing the table in my syllabus. And then I got to the B and then I just realized that this table is gonna be enormous. Because one decision you could make, right? You could be very prescriptive. And I think right there, there are plenty of classes where this is a completely appropriate decision to say that no, like to get a B you need a middling number of learning targets and you need a middling number of projects, right? And same thing. Same thing for the A, right? But I didn't like that answer. Because in my experience you could. You could have sort of an overall, I guess what I would, judge to be an overall B performance where you're excelling in one category or the other, right? Maybe you can come in and do the exams, you know really well and do everything on paper, but for some reason you're struggling putting together things in the project. On the other hand, maybe you struggle in the exam environment, but you can, really knock it outta the park with the projects. And so both of those categories seemed they could be, a B level. But I didn't wanna have this expansive table. And so it just seemed that, the average was a tool to give, achieve what I wanted without having to, spend pages explaining to the students what they would need to do for each letter grade.

Boz: All right so, I'm gonna break this down and make sure I'm understanding this correctly.

Tim Monk: Yeah.

Boz: So we've talked about the grading architecture of a course. You know how you end up redesigning in these decisions that make up your grade. How you get to a final grade. We are really talking about that fourth decision of, yes, after we take all of these learning targets, what the students got proficiency or didn't, and how do we wrap that up into an A, B, C. Now we've shown you and I on, on, some of our like beginning podcast.

Sharona: We have a getting started series of seven specific episodes.

Boz: Yeah, we talk about different ways of possible different ways of doing this wrap up. And we've also said many times that there is no one right way to do any of this, but what you've come across, and this is also a problem I've seen a lot when we try to define every possible outcome. Okay, we're gonna, if we are going to mix a few different types of categories, okay A you can get, this much from here or here or here, and it becomes this ridiculously long, complicated algorithm or table as in your case. Or we get the ones that they wanna be prescriptive. And I'm like, okay, so you're saying if someone got a hundred percent of this. But they only get two projects. They've gotta get a C because the two project was the minimum. And we actually do in our, in some of our training, Sharona, we talk about the edge cases, what we refer to as edge cases, that anyone that's taught for more than a, minimum amount of time you're gonna get the student that you don't think you could ever have. Like the student that does everything on one thing and can't do anything on the other oh no, that's impossible. Yeah, you'll get that student. So that's the issue that you came across, right? That you've got these two distinctively, different categories that are graded completely different. You said one of them is pretty much a standards base and the other one is a spec based. and Sharona, you and I have talked about courses where we've mixed the two, but we've, at least when I mixed it, they were like mixed within a single assessment. It wasn't, I had one full set of assessments or assignments that was standards and one full one that was specs. When you did your history of mathematics, when you mixed within the assignments too, right?

Sharona: Yeah, so well, actually what I was thinking about this because when Tim and I first spoke, and he is I've got standards and specs. I'm like that's what my history math class was. I had 10 learning outcomes and I had four projects, and it was for me pretty straightforward. However, I did not assess my learning targets separate from my projects, my learning targets were actually embedded within, so even though I was checking proficiency scales, they were still within the same assessments as the specifications. So it wasn't really, even though I was like, yeah, you need seven learning outcomes and three projects, the reality was you got the learning outcomes from the projects. So it didn't quite have that same wrap up challenge. And I think what initially bothered me because you landed on, like I said, in your, you said in your email you essentially landed on weighting these two categories, right?

Tim Monk: Yep.

Sharona: And what I'm still struggling with, and this is why I wanted to have you on to discuss it, is goes back actually to my grading philosophy. What am I trying to communicate with my grade? And does averaging different categories, is that consistent? Is that consistent with, if I am saying a B has a set of meaning, like for me, whether or not this is right or wrong and I, this is an area I still wanna go back and look at. I usually set a bar and in my head I know that an A means you got this much or more of the content, and a B means you got this much to this much. Whether I'm assessing it on a project or a quiz or whatever. I'm confident that I can say that's what a B means. Do you feel that your structure, how you structured it, and I want you to get in a little more detail. Meets whatever criteria you set for yourself about what your grades mean.

Tim Monk: Yes. I do. And so to your point of what you want, right? I'm not saying that this is always the answer, right? It can certainly be the case of you want to be, for lack of a better word, prescriptive, right? That okay. A B means you get right some certain amount of both categories, right? That can be the correct answer for a course. But generally for my courses that's not what I'm interested in. And I guess to, to see whether I'm looking at it, I'm evaluating. I don't think I've checked every, every combination, but I'm looking at, okay, how do different combinations, how do they turn that into a final letter grade? And are those all acceptable? And so I do think that's a valuable step of checking that the results are good, right? You don't wanna blindly plug it into a numerical algorithm without seeing that it's giving you good results.

Sharona: So can you give us some examples, like what is your baseline for a C in one of these courses? Is it because you are doing this numerical waiting at the end of the day?

Tim Monk: Yes.

Sharona: And is there a cutoff and what's that number for the C For the B for the A

Tim Monk: Oh, the number yeah, the numbers are the standard. I guess in my experience at universities, I've been into the standard numbers, right? So like a 70 is a C minus and that through, a 72 right? And then, the middle range of seventies or a C and so on and so up, up through to an A, right? And then in my context, basically things less than a C minus generally don't count.

Boz: So exactly how are these weighted? We keep talking about it and I know Sharona we read in the email, but. You've got these two different categories. You do some kind of weight, like what exactly does that look like?

Tim Monk: So there is some variety, but I think maybe for the purposes of this conversation, it's easiest to focus on that first implementation where it was, 50% learning targets, 50% projects.

Sharona: So basically if somebody got 70% of both. So if you're 20 learning targets, if you got 70% of the 14 out of the 20, you 50% of your grade was at 70%. Yeah. And if you got 70% on the projects, it evened out, right?

Tim Monk: Yeah. It evened out. Yeah. No, again, right? So the projects are right, assessed with a table. So if there are like four projects, like that first project like that gives you a D. Okay and if you don't get any right you're like, averaging it is zero because, so I with that do say basically, hey, you have to get at least one project, otherwise the numbers aren't gonna work out. And then all the way if you get all of them you're getting an a on the projects and then similarly on, on the learning target side.

Sharona: Okay. And so you're basically 4, 3, 2, 1. 4 projects as an A three projects as a B, two projects as a C one project's a D, yeah. And then 90, 80, 70, 60. Out of the 20 learning AR outcomes. For simplicity's sake.

Tim Monk: For simpl, yeah. Basically.

Sharona: Okay. And then you add those two together. So do you allow then, if you've got an A on the projects?

Tim Monk: Yeah.

Sharona: How low can a student go on the learning targets and still pass

Tim Monk: Oh, and still pass?

Sharona: Or is there a minimum.

Tim Monk: So I don't put a threshold there, right? That just comes from however the numbers shake out. And I am, I guess I'm comfortable with that because if you can put together like four projects, right? In a junior or senior level engineering course and there, there may be like more mini projects, right? But there a two, two to three week type thing, if you can put that together and you only got half the learning targets. That you, that still makes sense to me to pass the class. Because you still you can still get some of this stuff in class on the exam and you're bringing these projects that are succeeding.

Boz: You said you don't have a minimum threshold, but you do, especially with the projects because like you said, zero projects is a zero mathematically. Even if I've got a hundred percent of the learning targets on the assessments. If I've done and completed no project, which for your course at your setting probably makes sense that student shouldn't pass, right?

Tim Monk: Yeah. If they can't meet the specs for one project throughout the whole semester, right? It makes sense that they shouldn't. And I think that's I would say the traditional alternative grading approach would be basically to dictate, Hey, you must have at least this number. Of projects complete to, to get a C and this number of of learning targets. Yeah, so I guess on the project side, yes, I basically do have a minimum because of how that works, right? Because it is really a big accomplishment under specifications grading, to get that first one complete and meeting all the specs. That's an achievement.

Boz: Yeah. And your class, it's engineering design class, like the designing and the completion of project pretty important. So the fact that. If I'm in a student in your class, even if I have gotten a hundred percent of the learning targets on the assessments, if I can't finish a project, then yeah, I probably have not either, either not actually mastered the learning, or I've at least not shown you enough evidence that I have, and rightfully so I don't pass the course.

Tim Monk: Right and maybe I'll refine my answer. The right on the projects, there is a minimum and I am looking at that, I guess why I'm saying I'm not imposing a separate rule about minimums outside of what naturally comes as a consequence of computing the grade for each category and then averaging them together.

Sharona: I think what's interesting, 'cause you know the mathematician in me is looking at the actual weights, right? Yeah. And I'm saying if you got all of the learning targets. Then you only need another, 40. You need a 20% out of the 50% to get to 70. But because of the way you have your 4, 3, 2, 1 set, one project gets you there, right?

Tim Monk: Yes.

Sharona: And so that is interesting to me. I think if you had more projects, I would be more concerned that you're really letting. One of the sides really overbalanced the other, but because those projects, there's only four of them, like I can see, I'm picturing how the math is working. I'm like, yeah, okay. I can see that the math works out. And you're able to clearly articulate to the students why these two categories. And I think that is one of the things where I'm persuaded. Again, because you've built it so intentionally that the 4, 3, 2, 1 removes the skew of the zero to 100 grading system on that side of it, right? Because it's an even spread, essentially.

Tim Monk: Yeah, I think that's the key I'd say there's two pieces, and you mentioned the intentionality, right? So I think it's the, you're looking at how all the results. Look through, and I see a lot as a communication tool in a way, right? Because it's equivalent to an enormous table, right? But that's like indecipherable, right? So it's much more succinct to communicate it as this computation especially to engineering students. They should be able to process that. And then the other piece as long as each category is graded, like under the four pillars the way we think of alternative grading, you're not suffering from the problems that you can get with averaging in traditional grading.

Boz: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. 'cause that was one of the things that I also talk about because, i've said many times about how much I'm against averages. But the reason I'm against averages is because it punishes you for early mistakes. If you're taking an average over the entire, like course, even if by the end I've shown that I do have mastery, the materials, we're still getting punished for those early mistakes. But because of where you're taking the average, you're not. Taking, averages of all of the early decisions. It's just in this last decision, this last wrap up, you're not coming across that issue that, that punishment of early mistakes, because you're just doing it at the very last, at the, like taking that end grade for each category. So you're avoiding that issue with averages completely.

Sharona: So how does this get communicated through the semester? Because if this is happening at the very end then what do you do with them in the meantime?

Tim Monk: Yeah, so I laid out in the syllabus, but students may or may not read that. So generally I have, like the one time in the semester I generally use slides is the first day. And that's so I can show some diagrams and some flow charts particularly related to grading and to show, for instance, the table for how projects work if they're, if I'm using that to show Hey, what's the feedback loop for how the learning targets work? Of, okay, you're gonna, you're gonna attempt this and then you're gonna attempt on the next one. And then if you still didn't get it right by the time after a couple quizzes, then you're gonna come see me. So I I try start by laying it out at the beginning. And then I have found, and I think this is maybe a general practice of a general issue for alternative graders, is that sometimes students don't process like how your grading works the first time. 'cause there's some students who respond to the system and they see what the system is. They're gonna game the system to get, what they want. And if I've done a good job of setting up the system, then that means that they have to learn, which is great. There are other students that just, they're gonna show up and do whatever they're gonna do regardless of what your course looks like. And so one thing I try to do at various points during the semester, particularly in the middle and maybe towards the end, is to send an email to students to lay out, okay, where are you? And what does that mean for your grade? And what do you need to do between now and the end of the semester? Mostly that means hey, if you haven't gotten a project yet, you really need to get at least one of these going and right. If you don't have enough learning targets yet, hey, you need to be coming to me in office hours. But really practically, right? If you're behind, you probably need to be coming to see me as the instructor to, to get some extra help. Now I have the ability, 'cause my classes aren't too large, that I can do that communication piece, but I try to add that because. Some students yeah, don't seem to process how it works or they're just used to being able to show up, get some partial credit through the semester and things work out at the end.

Boz: Oh, yeah. No, that was one of the things that Sharona you and I both found with our statistics class is we started off the year, spending a bunch of time going through the explanation of our grading system. And no matter how well we thought we did with that. We would always like, get to the middle of the course and a handful of students would have no idea what was going on with the grade. So yeah, we've gotten to the point to where we're like, okay, we're going to explain it a little bit at the beginning, and then we come, like you said, about the one third mark. And we go into a little bit more detail and I'll go through and do some, examples or some scenarios like, okay. Here's a few scenarios, what needs to happen, and then we'll do it again about the two thirds mark. And I'll still have students be like, wait, you mean I'm not already failed this course? Like I still have an out, I still have a way that yes you've struggled, you've been struggling, but you're still here, you're still fighting. So yes, you can still do this, but yeah, we found the same thing that having to go through and talk a few different times about the grades. Sorry Sharona, I was cutting you off.

Sharona: I had a conversation today with a student who has to do revisions and I showed him his Learning Mastery grade book, and I have talked about going into the Learning Mastery grade book in Canvas multitude times, and he goes, oh. I've never seen this. I didn't know that this is where I could go to look. And I'm like, he's got four or five revisions to do that'll take him from one learning outcome to four mastered. And this is the first time I'm teaching this class and I'm a little bit behind in some of the design work. So we're gonna be back loaded on actually grading stuff. But I basically told my students today, I'm like, if you have four or more learning outcomes complete, I'm very confident in you getting the class. There's 35 learning outcomes in the class. And I'm in week 11, so four or more is woo. But that's on me. But I have a lot of students at one and two, and I'm like, okay guys, you know what? If you're at one and two, I still think you can get there, but we gotta get cracking. If you're at zero, we need to talk. And I had 12 of my 29 students in class today. I'm just having persistence issues. But yeah, it's week 11 and I have students going, oh, I didn't know this was here. But it just I'm still grappling with, I think that this is an area where a lot of people listening to the podcast have struggled because I'm looking at a grade tracker, a progress tracker that we were given as an example that has exams, quizzes, activities, and labs, expert of the day, a mid-semester self-assessment, a project pre-submission, three projects and a final project. And this progress track has to combine all of these into a final grade wrap up. And so this is a tool that students can use to, check on things. But I'm like. If I were a student, I'm like, I have no idea. 'Cause there's just so many things here. There's 42 activities and labs. That's just one category. There's 12 quizzes, three exams, three expert of the day, things four projects. I'm like are we just assessing everything? I'm just, I'm a little bit like holy molly. So I'm not sure what I would do there.

Tim Monk: I think there has been this thought that if we have the students do something, we have to assign it. And lately I've been thinking that's less and less true especially as I've been trying to avoid assessing work that I do not see the students do for various reasons, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still be giving those assignments. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't be tracking those assignments, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's, yeah, it's going into the grade. Because I do think there is a practical limit, right? It's as much as one advocating for, right? Doing this averaging, if you have five or six categories, I'm not sure how robust each of those categories can be. And how much an average would make sense with so many different things I would, I'd have to think about, how do you conceptualize that, especially, if you think about the quizzes versus exams, like what is the difference there? And there may be answers, but those are questions to ask

Boz: you were talking about, assessing everything. That is one of the things that when I'm having my, like individual coaching discussions with people on trying to use any kind of alternative grading, like when you look at an assignment. Are the students trying to show you their mastery or are they trying to build up their mastery? Because if they're trying to build up, then that shouldn't be part of their grade. We do something shown in the stats class that they'll get some, some points for doing it, but it's not whether it's correct or not, and it's just a little bit of a way to, give some importance or some.

Sharona: For me it's a little more than that. I do think that there's a learning outcome I'm trying to teach, which is how to learn. And so to me the way you learn is a combination of preparing, participating, and practicing after class. And so I actually think that's what he's talking about is our preparation, participation and practice learning outcome. And we give points for that as an accumulation tracker, basically. Do you do enough stuff? Because at some point we need to teach students that doing stuff is partially what matters. I think it's more than just throwing them a bone and trying to game the system. I don't know. Boz, if you agree with me, I know that we do it, but would you get do away with it if you could?

Boz: No, at least not with the classes that I have been teaching. I'm not saying that. I might be teaching a class where I wouldn't at some point, but I haven't been in that scenario. And we've talked about this before, we teach different classes and we don't have the same exact gradings architecture in any of them. So yeah I've never had a class where I haven't had that. That's not to say that I wouldn't.

Tim Monk: I question those things and I've recently had all the answers for how I grade homework. I've done sort of the accumulation thing that you suggest. I ended up not liking it because it communicates that you have options about what to do. And really, I want really, I would like the students to do all of it, but particularly any preparation work, just you have to do it so that you're ready for class. And I think if you're offering like a big bucket of points, like actually someone explicitly communicating to the students say you can choose to not do this part, but then you're not gonna be ready for class. And so what I'm doing this semester is I'm actually not assessing homework at all? I'm assigning it and it's mostly auto graded, but then I do wonder about this and other sort of general alternative grading practices, what's the incentive for them, in my classes versus their other classes. I some sometimes worry that the more flexible I am the more in the short term they're gonna prioritize their other courses. Because they have deadlines that are hard, that are firm, that are now and so then they can get later on in, in the semester. And I don't know what the right answer to that is, but it's, it's one of those things that I think probably a lot of us are thinking about, based on the environments that we're in.

Sharona: So I do a couple of things on that preparation side. The first thing I have just had to acknowledge is that I can't force my students to behave a certain way. Like I just can't.

Tim Monk: Yep.

Sharona: The best I can do is both incentivize and give natural consequences. So to do that, I make my deadlines very firm on preparation work. Only time you can get the accumulation for that is if you do it on time. Otherwise it's out. You just, you cannot make it up. But it's the easiest points to get if you do it on time. So it's like really easy to do and super hard, no flexible deadlines. So then you can do more stuff flexibly, but you gotta do a lot more work. So that's a human nature thing. I also hold the line on, I am not going to reteach what you were supposed to prepare. So there's a little bit of a natural consequences. You're gonna come into class and you're gonna be immediately hit with multiple choice clicker slides, and if you haven't done the reading, it's gonna hurt. And a lot of those hard deadlines come really early in the semester. So it's like the first two weeks before you get a chance to figure out that I'm flexible. And so you're already in the habit of doing my preparation and found out how easy it is before my flexibility kicks in. So that's one thing, but I also, it depends on the class. In my case, like for my pre-calculus, because my students, what they're struggling with is material they have seen for six or seven years. I actually don't want them prepping. I want them coming into class with whatever's in their head, and we are going to grapple with filling in holes and discovering concepts together because the prep work is just gonna reinforce whatever nonsense they've picked up and they have not been able to decipher for six years. But that's specific to pre-calculus. 'cause none of the content in pre-calculus, at least in the first semester, is actually truly new to them, except maybe exponentials and logs.

Boz: Those shouldn't be new either, but that, that brings up an interesting point, and I wanna ask more about your context. Tim, like the classes that you've done this with you, you've said the name of them, but are these freshman level, senior level. Like what? What kind of level and where are they? Do they sit in a sequence and if so, where? In the sequence?

Tim Monk: I'm teaching mostly sophomores through seniors. Yes. Many of the courses are in a sequence with each other, and many of them are after, a sequence of math, especially calculus courses.

Boz: Okay. So when you say you teach mostly sophomores to seniors, do you have classes that are mostly sophomores and then other classes that are mostly juniors or seniors, or are your classes actually mixed between the three different grades?

Tim Monk: There's some natural mixing from, students, coming in with transfers or getting in different places, yeah. But I'd say, there's some courses that there's particular one course that's like my Signals and systems course, and the spring is, mostly sophomores. And then there's some other courses. Yeah, I'd say, that are, there's some that are, say mostly sophomores, some that are mostly juniors, and then others are, like a mix of juniors and juniors.

Boz: And do you in your grading architecture or in your class setup, are they all pretty much identical? Are they different from course to course? Depending on the course and the sequence and the students.

Tim Monk: Yeah, there's some variation. There, there are a couple that are almost identical, but and I'd say the learning target part is the, what's most common between them. I'd say for most of my courses, I have learning targets assessed on either exams or quizzes and exams. And generally there's about 20 of them. The project aspect of things as we've been discussing. That's where there's the most variation and where I am still tinkering the most as I figure out, what should be the assessments. Like we were talking earlier what I was. Doing more earlier, mostly out of class, assessment for projects. I am shifting away from that to they're gonna do the projects during the semester. The assessment piece may be different. So like in one class this semester they're gonna turn in like a portfolio based on based on that work. And then we'll have an oral conversation about that portfolio. And then in another class, I'm gonna have a long final exam, which is based on the design work they've done. In the projects throughout the semester. So I get a clear grasp of, okay, what did they know?

Boz: The reason I bring that up, 'cause I really wanted to make sure we, we hit this point 'cause we are coming up on time already, which is surprising, but I really wanted to make sure we hit this point. We've talked about this a lot, Sharona, that, there is no one right way, that there are many different flavors to alternative grading, and what works for one person in one setting, in one style of class might not work in another. And I know Sharona I've talked a lot about how much I dislike averages. You've talked a lot about how you dislike just math, any kind of math in the grade. But Tim, you've really come here and you've shown. How you're still doing this, you're still using averages in a way that is working for you in your scenario, in your setting. And I love that we can all have these same kind of ideas, these same concrete beliefs that are fundamental beliefs that you said in your origin story that one of your beliefs was that the grade should reflect what the students know at the end. That's, that's one of my core beliefs too, that it shouldn't be in relative to. It should be in relative to the content that they have mastered or gotten proficient. So we have these core beliefs, but we've got very different ways of putting it together and putting the actual architecture together to make it work for our students and our class and our setting with our, personal beliefs and just the way we do things.

Sharona: And I think what works for me, Tim, now that you've clarified it. Is what you're not doing is you're not masking poor performance on a certain piece of content with good performance on another piece of content. See, that's where a lot of these averages, like if you're averaging your E's and your m's, like you start to mask things or if you, or ease and r's all of a sudden it's 50% of the content you're really strong on and 50% you don't know at all. That's where I have problems, but that's not what you're doing. You're really got two separate buckets of essentially counts and you're like, I need to combine these counts. But I am confident because of the way I'm combining these counts that the baseline count is still representative and the top count is still representative. And then there's just a lot of options in the middle, right? Little bit of this, little bit of that in the, in that middle portion.

Tim Monk: Yeah and I guess a lot of it, yeah, I do come back to incentives, which is that, and my initial goal of looking towards mastery learning type thing is right. If you've got re attempts. Built into your grading architecture, then you're giving the students incentives to learn the material before moving on. And that's one of the problems I was seeing before I adopted this, is that, you'd have some students who think they're doing okay based on partial credit. And then sometimes, the, that last third of the semester, they realize that, oh, I really, I don't have a solid foundation that I can build upon for this last material. And sometimes that means that things don't go well that, that semester. But if you have a chance and a reason to go back and learn that earlier material, then you have a much more solid foundation that you can build upon for this semester and the ones to come.

Boz: Alright. We are coming up on time. Sharona is there any last minute thing that you want to bring up before we start bringing this to an end?

Sharona: Just, I appreciate you taking the risk of actually emailing in and being like, I'm gonna tell you something. I don't know if you're gonna because my first reaction was, yeah, I don't like that, but I gave it a chance. And we both did. And I, it just, I'm very grateful for you to taking the risk to come on and being like. Not quite where you're at. So thank you for that.

Tim Monk: Thank you for having me on. I was prepared for more resistance to the idea. But this, yeah, this has been very pleasant. Thank you.

Boz: And I want to thank you, Tim, for both writing in and for coming on and yeah, giving us a opportunity to talk about a different architecture structure that is a little bit different than what Sharona and I usually talk about, really going out and showing, there are so many good ways of doing this, so many right ways based on your specific, course and your specific scenario. So I wanna thank you for, like Sharona said. First writing to us last line of your first paragraph, knowing exactly how we were both gonna react to it. So you do, you were taking the risk. I appreciate you coming on and for those that are listening, there really is, there are so many different good ways of doing this and I think the biggest thing is just to really examine those choices that you're making. And I've said this before, if someone really earnestly looks at their choices of their grading and they really take that time and they come out of that and say, traditionals for me, Hey, all the more power to you. I just. I don't mean many people that have done that, but you've gone through, you've made these, really conscious decisions and you came out with something that works for you, and I love that and I thank you for coming on and sharing that with us and with our listeners. And with that, you have been listening to the Grading podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we'll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode's page on our website. www.thegradingpod.com, or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact Us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.