161 - MathFest 2026 Rountable: Challenges, Questions, and New Directions

Episode 161 • 11th August 2026 • The Grading Podcast • Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley

mathfest: 2026

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Sarah Wright: But one of the things we noticed early on when we were starting with our system is that we had students ... We had some required things. We said, "These eight things you have to have in order to get a C-minus and be allowed to move on to Calc III." And we would have a student who met 19 of 22 learning outcomes, but was missing one of the ones we said was critical to getting a C-minus, and now we're saying, "Well, this student either gets an A or a D depending on whether or not we hold true to this learning outcome is critical for moving on." And so we eventually abandoned that because that conversation didn't feel good at the end of the semester to be talking about 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 students' 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. Now Sharona, I usually ask how you're doing, but instead, I am gonna ask where are you doing?

Sharona: That makes a lot of sense. I am coming to you from Boston Massachusetts, because I have been, for the last couple of days, at MathFest, and just really have enjoyed being here. And so yeah. I'm coming to you all the way from the East Coast.

Boz: One of these days, I am going to make it out to that conference. I swear.

Sharona: Yes. Yes. You need to be here. But the powers that be at LA Unified need to let you come. So that's the challenge

Boz: All right, so you're at MathFest, and you're not just there going to the conference. You've actually been doing quite a bit at the conference, correct?

Sharona: Yes. Yes. So we're recording this part of the podcast on Saturday afternoon. I've been here since I've been in Boston since Tuesday morning, and we have had an amazing time because we did a mini course on alt-grading. We had eight and a half hours of contributed paper talks at the conference specifically about alt-grading, and speaking to some of the people who've been here, alt-grading also came up in a number of other sessions.

Boz: You've said that a, a couple of times now over about the last year and a half of conferences that, you've been able to go to that aren't necessarily about grading, the conference nor the session, and yet grading comes up. Yeah. And you also said how many times that either in, in the presentation or just in conversations, it's come up by someone first saying, "I went to the grading conference, and then I tried a thing."

Sharona: Yes. So that happened a lot, and then something new happened this year, though.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Something that happened this year is "my institution got a institutional registration to the conference, and therefore, we have this whole thing going on at our institution". Awesome. And that was really cool.

Boz: How cool.

Sharona: Yes.

That was amazing, 'cause Wartburg was here, Gonzaga, which by the way, I need to apologize because apparently I've been calling it Gonzaga for many years and it's Gonzaga, and I was corrected.

Boz: Oh.

Sharona: So I did not know that.

Boz: I'm guilty of, I'm guilty of that as well then.

Sharona: Yeah. I called them. Apparently Go Zags is a thing, so yeah, but the institutional registrations. And what I really wanna promote this coming year, when the registration opens up again, maybe talk to your center for teaching early or your department or your college. I'm pretty sure the registration fees are gonna be about the same. This past year it was $600 for an institution, and get some budget now. So that was very cool.

Boz: That is cool, and you have not told me anything about that. That is really cool. Now-

Sharona: Yeah ...

Boz: something else though that you've been going to MathFest for a while. Not just for grading stuff, but it's, it is one of the, premier math conferences for higher ed. So it's something you've been going to for several years. But the last few years, you have been doing something unique when you were there. So what- Yes ... what have you been doing and that you did again this year?

Sharona: Yes, so this is our third year in a row where we opened up a room, a podcast recording, and we recorded live from MathFest. So I am very excited because that is what we are bringing you today. We had a group of people that just were hanging out here at MathFest and chose to come over for a little over an hour and have a conversation live for the pod. And one of the things that convinced me is, as much as I love the virtual nature of our conference, being live and sitting in a room with people is just a amazing dynamic, and the ability to have a conversation that is not to be missed.

Boz: All right. So before we cut to this live recording at MathFest, I wanna know, I'm just curious, how many people did you actually have there with you doing the recording? 'Cause I was not there.

Sharona: Doing the recording? You were not there. So I think at our maximum amount of time, because some people came in a little late, some people had to leave a little early, I believe that I had five additional people with me all that, that came together and just talked.

Boz: That, that sounds amazing. I can't wait to hear it 'cause I will be hearing it for the first time too, so let's go ahead and let's just jump into it.

Sharona: All right. Welcome, everyone. This is our third annual live podcast recording for The Grading Podcast at MathFest.

Sarah Wright: Whoo.

Sharona: Whoo. We are so excited to welcome you guys here. This is something we do apparently every year. And it's very impromptu. We're like, "Whoever wants to come." So I have four fabulous people sitting with me in a live room, so I'm just gonna go around and have everybody introduce yourselves. Speak up a little bit, but we'll take care of it in post.

Mariah Birgen: Hi. Mariah Birgen. I am at Wartburg College, which is a small college in Iowa, and I first got exposed to alt-grading- I think at a MathFest workshop, and my brain is telling me San Diego, so it could have been joint meetings. Anyways, that was pre-COVID and I've been working on it ever since. But I think the thing that, that I'm most proud of is for the last two years we've had an institutional membership to the grading conference for my little college, which is 1,400 students, and we've had 16 people show up each time.

Sharona: That's amazing.

y I started my alt-grading in: 2016

Sharona: Welcome to the party.

Yeah.

Sarah Wright: I just did the that's how you do it," but also have not looked back or done anything else since. So it is what I do now.

Sharona: Yay.

Dene Feldman: Amazing, yeah. My name is Dena Dena Feldman. I'm a professor at Roxbury Community College, which is a small urban college here in the state. And I have been aware of standards-based grading for many years, and it's been growing in my mind, and it was just this past spring that I implemented it in my classroom, Pre-Calculus, and I am never going back and for a- the same for all of the classes that I teach. So I'm grateful for the chance to be here and chat.

Kat Schultis: My name is Katharine Shultis. I often go by Kat when I'm being more social. And I'm at faculty at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. We're a mostly undergraduate institution. We have about 7,000 students total, 5,000 undergrad students, and we are a Jesuit institution.

Sharona: And of course, I'm Sharrona. Unfortunately, my co-host, Bosley, is not sitting next to me here in the room. However, you just heard him in the introduction. So he's here in spirit. He's very FOMO right now.

Kat Schultis: I can say how I got started.

Sharona: Yes. Yes. How did you get started?

ding probably around MathFest: 2015

that. At the end of MathFest: 2026

Dene Feldman: I can say I've found it so inspiring. The presence really has stood out to me because not only has there been something relevant to it every day of the conference, but there has been extensive periods of time devoted to it, both as long-standing sessions yesterday and the day before, and then on Thursday there was the course, and then, we have this opportunity now today. It seems like there has been so many chances for people to hear about it. The only thing I could maybe even wish for is some more poster presentations and some such to... But, yeah, no d- no complaints from here. This is Dena who said all of that.

Kat Schultis: This is Kat again. I think what's been interesting for me is there's a mix of people and their backgrounds, but by and large, in the sessions on alternative grading, very few people felt the need to define what they meant by a lot of things, right? The four pillars showed up, but it wasn't ever like, "Okay, let's discuss these and what they are in detail." It did show up sometimes in other sessions that I attended that had some stuff about grading, but it seems like there's a lot of knowledge in the community, and I think that's cool.

Sharona: So you did see stuff about grading not in the sessions dedicated to grading?

Kat Schultis: I did.

Sharona: Can you give an example?

Kat Schultis: I think the biggest examples were over in the Project Next session, that they ran a session on the impact of Project Next, and several people there spoke about how their Project Next encouraged them to do alternative grading.

Sharona: That's amazing. Yeah. The impact.

Dene Feldman: Yeah, as Dena I will also add and tailgate on that, I saw it when I was attending workshops and town halls discussing math education in this time of AI. When you're trying to decentivize, if you will, students to cognitively offload onto AI machines, one of the ways to reduce that pressure is by reminding them that there is no point value system. You reduce the stakes for any assessment process, and that's definitely one of the hallmarks of alternative grading. So that's come up in every session about AI as one of the solutions to help integrate effectively math learning with AI, which is here to stay.

Sharona: Anyone else?

Mariah Birgen: This is Mariah. I spent a long time in the exhibit hall and talking to exhibitors, and I would say that I was very disappointed with the there are a lot of people in the exhibits that are like, "Oh, I have this new way of doing grading," and there are a bunch of people who are using AI for grading. And we can get into the details of whether that's a great idea. But several people, when I was talking to them about I have ju- I just have this better way of scoring papers." Or there was one exhibit I was really excited about, which was someone who had done a lot of educational research on ways of supporting student learning, and then I said how does that... how are you tracking that? Do you have any way to do that using alternative grading?" And it was that- they had not heard of this. And they're like you can adjust the percentages that the points go into Canvas, and then Canvas sucks in what percentage of the work the students have done." And I didn't do a hand slap to the forehead, but I was like, "We need to be..." Those are the n- those people run all the machines that manage everything, and that is gotta be one of our next places we go.

Sharona: So good news, I can't talk about it too much, but one of the bigger philanthropies, shall we say, that is investing in reforming math education is going to be funding some work of the center to work with at least one, if not two, of the digital service providers to get us some better options other than just Canvas. And Canvas finally just released their version 2.0 of their Learning Mastery Grade Book literally this week or two weeks ago. So if you are on Canvas, definitely go check the LMS system. But we are definitely wanting to work on that. And so that's really fun. So that's really great.

So I do wanna also welcome another person who just joined us. Would you like to introduce yourself, your institution, and how long you've been involved in alt-grading?

Cory Wilson: Hi I'm Cory Wilson. I'm at Oklahoma City Community College, and I think I've been involved in alt-grading for- Three, three years maybe

Sharona: I would say this is your third podcast reporting, recording live at MathFest.

Cory Wilson: Yes.

Sharona: Now- I'm not sure you talked on the first one, though.

Cory Wilson: I did not.

Sharona: Yeah, so th- this is our main audience member from the first one. But he did talk last year, and I'm recruiting him to maybe... We're gonna- We're trying to add some regional in-person stuff, so I'm trying to get Cory to help spearhead maybe a Southwest regional. We'll talk about that, though.

But anyway, so yes, good news on the grade tracking front. We're starting to get some investments. But and I did also speak with at least one service provider who's like, "Let me show you our comment library." And I'm like, "That's great. Feedback's important. Where are your proficiency scales?" They're like you can build those in the feedback library." I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think that's gonna work."

So. Okay, so that was the first question, just can anyone share one of the most surprising things that they heard? Or a surprise. It doesn't have to be most. A surprising thing that they saw or heard related to grading, something you might wanna try, something you went, "Ooh, ouch."

And while you're thinking, we're gonna have ... we had another person join us. We're gonna ask you to give your name, your institution, and how long you've been involved in alternative grading.

d since, I would say, I think: 2021

Sharona: Okay. Fantastic. So does anyone have something they'd like to share that they heard? I'll actually go first while you guys are thinking. So one of the challenges that I'm battling is I, and everybody who knows me knows this about me, I'm extremely anti weighted averages. Like to an extreme, but for situations where you are institutionally required to keep them. And if you're institutionally required to keep them, I will be happy to work with you to subvert them while still looking like you're keeping them. But I did hear a number of presentations where I was very happy people were dipping their toes in, and they were taking maybe one section of their course and doing mastery in that one category, but that category was a certain percentage of the grade and everything else was other percentages. And then they were coming to conclusions why things didn't work.

So I wanted to get other people's impressions, 'cause for me, that's ... I'm so anti that I almost can't evaluate it with any unbiased perception. So does someone wanna give me their perspective, or are we all so biased- ... and that's why we're here?

Dene Feldman: This is Dena, and I really hit the nail on the head when I was in the one talk or two talks and the discussion about nevertheless the breakdown of the grade as percentages based on certain things. Immediately, I look at it and cringe, and I also... It seems as though it's the goal is not learning. And it's... when I see that, it just immediately strikes me as being about rank ordering student performance as opposed to capturing their moment in time in their learning process. And given everything that we've seen and the evidence that puts in favor of the focus on the pedagogy, on the andragogy, it really surprises me to see nevertheless those points, grading policies, and percentage distributions even in the face of that.

Sharona: Does anyone have a counterpoint? Please argue with me if I'm wrong.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: This is Sudhadip. Yeah. I think the most of the time the point-based issue is coming from institutional- I know ... some kind of guideline. It's maybe even for instructors who are trying to transition toward alternative grading. It's like the university mandates final exam has to be 20% of your score or something like that. I have been fortunate to be in a place where there is not as much restriction. There is still some restriction, but I think that's more toward the graduate student instructors who are teaching the first time. The instructional faculty are allowed to experiment with other things and as long as it produces a good result. And our... Honestly, like every class that I've done alternative grading in, my scores have been skewed all toward the higher end, and the department hasn't said anything weird about it. I will point out, I feel like this, h- I've seen in some of the grading schemes, homework still tends to be a bit percentage based and-

Sharona: Oh, and that's something I was gonna bring up 'cause, 'cause everybody knows I do points accumulation and it's fine if you need to make homework 20% of your overall grade, but why do you have to grade out of 100% of your homework? Like, why can't you just make way more available than they need and they just have to do a certain amount to get there? That's the thing. I'm... Like, that's the thing when I see these and everyone's like, "To get an A, you need 90%." I'm like, "Why? Why can't we just say you need to have completed X number of problems?" And why is it a percentage? What do you think is driving that thought that it always has to be a percentage out of a total?

Mariah Birgen: Mariah here. So I would say that these are often people who are de-transitioning from a very traditional grading scheme, and there are things that they wanna try, and there are things that they haven't even thought about trying yet. And, I had a conversation with someone, and we were talking about how amazing it is to free yourself and do alternative grading and really focus on what the students know at the end of the course instead of worrying about they, whether they can do it in week two or week three. And you could see her face was just overwhelmed. And so I said, because I've been working with students at my college, I said you don't have to jump into the deep end here. One thing that I've seen people try is just see if you can do redos on exams or something." And so maybe what we're seeing is someone where part of it is still very traditional because they haven't wrapped their brain around how to do that in that particular situation. And so while I love the idea of giving students lots of opportunities, and you have to get to the point where you can tread water I can imagine people who just haven't considered it.

Sharona: And I agree with you there, but I'm thinking more of the tables that I've seen that say, to get an A, you need 14 out of 16 of my core standards, and you need seven out of my nine supplementals, and you need 90% on the auto-graded homework. And even that, I'm like, A, why 90%? What, what happens if they get all of your learning outcomes and they don't get 90%? So that's a common problem. But also, I- I'm like, why don't we do, you have to get 14 out of 16 and seven out of nine and complete at least 60 homework problems, or six homework sets, or some quantity amount that doesn't count against them the things that they don't do.

Mariah Birgen: But again, you're talking about auto-graded homework, and so I think what we have is the technology working against us. Auto-graded homework says what percentage of the homework is the student done.

Sharona: Except you can set most of it to show you points.

Mariah Birgen: It depends on what you've got

Sharona: I know Webwork you can set points on.

Mariah Birgen: Webwork's wonderful, but yeah. Other ones, it's- Right ...

Sharona: so that's another area maybe for the Center is- ... to make sure that we talk to all the publishers and say, "Please make sure that you show..." 'Cause Macmillan does this. You can show grades as points or percentages in their entire Achieve system.

Mariah Birgen: And I've been working with Hawkes for decades and for a long time it's if you can do 80% of the problems right, you get 100%. And if you don't, you go back and redo it again until you get 80% of the problems. And I will tell you that I had students who that was a friction point for them, because they would just, they would get to 75% and then they'd just give up. They're like, "I put enough time in this. I know how to do this. I'm moving on." And yeah, I think we need to continue that conversation with the tech people.

Cory Wilson: All right. I this is Cory. I will say I think that there is a way of gaming that. If you want a weighted homework scheme I think you can still work with the PPP points that you use. You just modify the percentages. If you know what, The number of points that you have in your homework system, say, you don't have to set the bar at 90%. You can set the bar at 80% for an A and then convert back to points. And in my experience, the students much prefer seeing, "Oh, I have to accumulate points," rather than, "I must accumulate a certain percentage."

Sharona: And I guess that's what I'm arguing for is I'm not saying don't make your final grade wrap up. If you need your final grade wrap up to be they have to get a certain... you can do that behind the scenes, but communicate to your students, "I want you to complete X amount of work. And if it takes you X amount out of 2X, X amount out of 3X, X amount out of X," like I don't care what the proportion is. I want to tell students, "This is the amount that I think you need to do what you need to do." And we had someone on the podcast who was the first person that ever persuaded me that doing a weighted average grade wrap up made sense in his situation because what happened was he defined his A's completely in terms of mastery and standards and stuff like that. He defined his C's, and he had a couple of different buckets of work. He had some standards. He had some projects. It was like a blend of specs and standards, and it was complicated enough that for him to put all the use cases of the B in a table was insane. It just didn't make any sense. So he had a formula. I'm like, "Okay, I can see that if your system needs to be complicated enough, mine can be simple but maybe you do have a set of standards that you need to hit. There's 14 or 16 of them, and there's three projects, and there's two presentations, and you're like how much weight does each of this evidence count towards?" Behind the scenes I can kinda see that just for the ease for the instructor, but I really don't wanna communicate that to the student that way. I feel like that's where we get that bad behavior on the part of the student because the student starts trying to do the math. Instead of living with, "Okay, I need seven of these and four of these and two of these," they start going, "Oh, but if I got three of these, then maybe I don't need seven of those. I can get six of those," right? And they start to do all that garbage.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: So I have three thoughts. There are a couple of versions of homework grading that I've tried before. Once, I think I had that you had to s- complete this many homework sets out of this, and that counted as one of the standards. Students just skip that standard, so that was bad. Then in a ordinary iteration I had tried that you had to complete the homework on a particular standard to be eligible for reassessing that standard. That worked pretty well. These were both versions where students were taking auto-graded homework. Now, to the point of why I think percentage has been prevalent or I still think I need it is mostly because I don't grade my students' homeworks as much. There are student graders who grade those, and it's hard to train student graders to distinguish between a complete and incomplete or E versus M versus R than to just train them on, "Here's how you do partial credits."

Sharona: So you say that. I'm gonna push back a little bit. Norming a 10-point problem and getting consistency among graders on 10 versus nine versus eight versus seven is actually harder than a four-level system.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: No, it is a four-- Like, e- I... So I did a four-level system. It was like zero, one, two, three, four. And the four levels were still qualitative and not necessarily "Oh, you take off this point for this thing." But just having that idea of like this looks like halfway there, I think it's easier to train the graders on that idea of two out of four than being like aim out of E.

Sharona: Possibly. I, I still would push back and I would say go to emojis, pick five emojis and say, "This is a smiley face. This is a cloud. The cloud means confused. The smiley face..." But I still, I'm gonna always push back on numbers. Yeah. But I hear what you're saying. I absolutely hear what you're saying.

Kat Schultis: I just wanna push on those emojis. Make sure you clarify them with the students. I had a student who missed the first day of class and wanted to know what the black squirrel was doing. And I had to point out it was the skunk emoji.

Sharona: Yeah. I had to change from a cloud to the thinking face man because the cloud they started perceiving as bad, and so they're like, "I got a cloud." I'm like, "Oh, God. Oh my God." But yeah, so I agree with you though. I'm pushing a little bit on it. Okay, so th- so that was one thing I picked up on was all of this homework stuff is still the perniciousness of the weighted average is coming in. And I'm concerned that even if it's only in the one section of homework, that because students understand it, they're gonna end up focusing there where they shouldn't. What else did you hear that is... Do you hear something you're thinking of trying?

Cory Wilson: This is Cory. So I saw a talk in the second session, or s- yes, the second session about the challenge grading system. It's by Xhumari and Burn, I believe. So if you weren't able to see it, if the slides aren't- don't end up being available, there's a wonderful paper in Primus about it. I think that it would work very well with the alternative grading systems that I use. Maybe with a little trial and error, but I thought that was a very interesting assessment strategy.

Sharona: What was the core idea that you took away from it that you're thinking of trying?

Cory Wilson: I think the idea of... first of all, calling these assessments challenges for me at least, conjures a different there's a different connotation that, I as an instructor believe in you, and here's something that I want you to achieve. So that's the first takeaway. The second was that the, there was a reassessment structure built in, but you did an individual assessment at first and then a group assessment in the second portion. This was done in an online setting, so there's some modification for in-persons, I think. And then you had, I think, three attempts built in, four attempts built in to the structure, so it made retakes a little bit easier to handle, it seemed like. But yeah, it was interesting. I'll have to read the paper a few more times, but...

Sharona: Yeah I'm intrigued always by language. I'm also intrigued by this multi-part exam stuff. Not... I heard a couple different multi-part ones, but this idea, especially for the course I'm gonna be teaching, which is quantitative reasoning for everyday life, where quite frankly, if anything they learn is going to make me happy, right? So the idea that maybe they do an individual quiz, and then immediately I have to figure out how to do this, but I wanna capture their quizzes immediately. So I might literally just walk around and take pictures of everybody's quizzes, and then put them in their groups and have them keep working on it together and come up with their confidence levels, and then turn that in, and then have them correct it in a group and that somehow I can get individual achievement out of that process that is intriguing to me. Anyone else hear something they're thinking of trying?

Mariah Birgen: Mariah here. I went to the community engaged learning session by accident and stayed because it was fascinating. I got to look more into that. But each student makes their own personal development plan at the beginning of the term, and the phrase was, "Come as you are, each of you has something to offer." And so I'm not yet at a contract grading level in my classes, but I do believe that there's a portion that I want the students to be in control of because I want them to motivate themselves, and I think we need to teach them how to do that. So I was super excited about... I have a new thing I have to learn now

Cory Wilson: Yeah I think... this is Cory. I think that's always the best thing about these sessions is sure there are things that don't, may not work for our set of skills, our personalities, but having these ideas out there are important for certainly for the students, but also for our growth as instructors and how we engage with our teaching.

Sharona: Any of you hear during the session where they talked about the remember whens? Were you here when... So there was somebody who was teaching- Yes ... I believe calculus one and had underprepared students. And this is something I am struggling with because I have been very successful with underprepared students in my statistics class, in part because that class does not rely as much on their precursor knowledge. But I personally have not cracked the code for underprepared pre-calculus students or calculus students. So she created these remember whens, and they actually came up organically, and then they became intentional. When she realized the degree of algebra challenges the students had, she started every single class with a ten to fifteen-minute group activity of a remember when. Remember when you learned to factor a quadratic. Remember when you learned to do the slope of a line or whatever it was, and they would do a bunch of algebra work or numeracy work the first ten to fifteen minutes. And whatever it was, she would have taken it from the actual calculus example she was about to do. So if she was gonna do derivatives or she was doing like, say, the limit definition of the derivative f of x plus h minus f of x, she would have them do f of x plus h on that, whatever it was, like a quadratic, right? So they're the actual examples that they are remembering, they don't yet know, but it was the middle work she would have done in a calculus problem.

So then she goes from that, and they all have that in front of them, into the calculus teaching, and they get to that step, and she stops and says, "Does anyone recognize this?" And they're like, "Yes." They've already done that thinking work, and they're ready to just slide through the calculus because they already brought it back to their front of their minds, and they already have the correct answer because as a whole team, they went through it, and they really dove in to those, those algebra challenges. And that was fascinating to me because it would bog us down very much in the middle of trying to learn some pre-calculus to go back to an algebra... and I'm shocked personally. I thought that pre-calculus really is a baccalaureate level class, but everything in there is now taught as far down as algebra one. There's nothing new in pre-calculus except maybe limits, which I don't even get to. And, but even exponentials and logs are no longer new. Now trig, but I was teaching first semester, so I was teaching the function portion of pre-calculus. So if that's the case, I, I'm like, what do I do? They've had this for years, and they don't have it. So that was... I really am intrigued by those remember when's. And this, this very intentional idea that if you know what you're going to do that day in class, pull the precursor work out to the front, and then when you get to it within the class, you can basically skip it because you already... "remember, we did this, right? Everyone got it? Good." And you move on. I'm like, huh.

So it's not per se grading, but it came up for her in the context of, I want them to master this, but what's getting in the way of their mastery is their precursor skills. So I felt like the grading exposed that for her. I don't know. I was fascinated by that.

Kat Schultis: No, I think there's some good ideas there. This is Kat. Another thing that I think is... I got the same message out of that in that we already do some of this with our calc two stuff. We've got, "Okay, here's a complicated limit, and it's really... it's clunky to work out, but we're gonna need it in a minute when we do the limit comparison test, but you don't know that yet. Just work out the limit for now, right? And then we'll do the limit comparison test in a minute." That's built into some of our worksheets. The other thing that's similarly not quite on grading, but is similar is thinking about some of the ways that you can help track some of the behaviors you're wanting in students. And I like the idea, we have our students, they get some points for being in class. And right now, our tracking is really clunky in that we make them once a week tell us what they did. And I like the idea of maybe using an exit ticket to track those points more automatically for the students so that they're not missing out on points at the end of the semester towards that participation portion of their grade if we're doing the tracking and they don't have to remember to do it 'Cause it's that compliance bit that I feel like I'm struggling with right now most in Calc 2.

Sharona: Did anyone hear anything? 'Cause I don't remember hearing it in the sessions that I was in, which is most of them. I didn't see a lot about student buy-in this year or about ways of building trust with your students. Were there other sessions you might have gone to that had to do with building trust with students, even if it wasn't specific to grading?

Cory Wilson: This is Cory. I actually saw Brian Katz from Cal State Long Beach gave a talk- Oh,

Sharona: he's here?

Cory Wilson: Yeah.

Sharona: I missed him.

Cory Wilson: Ah. He gave a talk in the SIGMAA IBL meeting. It was wonderful talk, but he mentioned that he does things like have students DJ at the beginning of class to help them introduce themselves a- and their personality into the class. What else did he talk about?

Sarah Wright: This is Sarah, and this is why I didn't bring this up, 'cause I couldn't quite get the particulars also, but I was in BK's talk as well. Working at the beginning to grapple with the norms of the class, and this is not about grading, but more about how we're all going to approach the course and the material, and where we're allowed to critique, was a big thing there. Critiquing the mathematics, critiquing the methods of learning, critiquing the community that they're working in. So it wasn't about building buy-in for any particular grading system, but a buy-in to focus on learning, I would say- ... was evident there.

Sharona: We recently reviewed a paper on the podcast a couple episodes ago about creating safe learning environments and the importance of that in building student engagement. Because in order to be engaged, you have to feel psychologically safe, and when we look at the harm that grading does, anything that you can do to build psychological safety, which if you can improve your grading, that will, is gonna have all these benefits. So I think that we have an opportunity to change the language around buy-in and talk more about- The goal of continuing to make our classrooms safer and safer for students. And by changing our grading, even if it doesn't improve the DFW rate, even if it doesn't change some of those things, but if it builds a culture of classroom safety, and I think that's one of the problems that we're facing is that grades do so much harm traditional grades do so much harm, that the students are coming in with all of that harm. They're walking into our classrooms assuming we're going to harm them, even if they can't articulate that. So the more that we can talk about and prove to the students that we can be trusted and that we have their psychological safety in mind the better off everybody's gonna be.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: BK... Sorry, Subhadip here. BK used this word which I quite like. He used the congress instead of-

Cory Wilson: Yeah ...

Sudhadip Chowdhury: what you usually call contract with the student. He said, "Oh, you need to make a congress with the individual and the collective decide what your classroom norms are going to be and how you're going to engage with the material." It was inquiry-based learning talk, so it was all around also what does inquiry mean in the classroom? But yeah, definitely some kind of a collective conversation with the student on the first day of class being like, "Let's vote on what our rules for engagement should be throughout the quarter, throughout the semester," might be a good idea for that buy-in bit. I have always used the weighted grades analogy in the past where you have bunch of different scores. They all weigh to average to the same score, and student, what grade should the student get? It has some effect, but until you keep reminding them every two weeks about this, it you just have to keep reminding them. I think it's not a one and done conversation.

Sharona: Sarah, you were gonna- I was gonna- ... respond to the psychological safety.

Sarah Wright: Yeah, pick up on the, when we were talking about how much, when we're grading homework percentage-wise I think what a lot of our, all, a lot of our alternative grading systems let us do is look at the grade, whether it's... as building up versus subtracting. And I think even- Even if it's not actually changing the grades that come out and the DFW rate, just the language we're using that we have to use when we're grading this way is a safety thing. And I'm coming from this as a, a mathematician who's taught math classes and graded this way, but also as trying to, and moving towards trying to get other disciplines at my university to move in this direction and cause less harm. And Those are things I feel cut across disciplines of y- yeah yeah ... even if it's still this percentage of your grade that the final paper is, let's check off the things that they're doing and build up to that 50% that it is instead of-

Sharona: And I think that's at the heart of when I talk about grading as the misuse of mathematics. I have a number of analogies, but one of the ones I really like is that in traditional grading, your syllabus assignment or your syllabus quiz or whatever is a helicopter ride to the top of a mountain because you make it very easy to start with 100%. So you go from nothing to 100%, and then you spend the rest of the semester slipping. It's really hard not to spend the entire semester slipping down. You almost never go back up, and that is a very precarious place, and how much fun is that if you're, like, someone who wants to enjoy nature? You took a helicopter ride enclosed in a metal box to the top of a mountain, and now you're trying not to get blown off the mountain. Whereas if you start at base camp and you have some pretty guide markers along the way and you have some flags and there's some butterflies to look at and maybe there's a lookout you can take a detour, and it might take you a little longer, maybe you don't get as far up the mountain, but isn't that a more enjoyable experience?

And that's the metaphor I use for we are accumulating evidence. That's the goal, is to accumulate evidence, and I think that's why it still continues to bother me anytime we put a percentage in front of a student because it's a deficit mindset. Percentages almost never... They don't go up because the maximum you can get ever is 100%, and it's so skewed. That's why I just wanna turn everything into points if we have to and just be like... And I don't like using 100 points because if, if it's just percentage is maxed.

Dene Feldman: It's too easy to take a percentage.

Sharona: Exactly. So that's why I think our triple P is, for one of the classes, it's like you have 1,480 points available and you need 850 to meet the bar. But if you don't meet the bar by the end of the semester and you come to me and you're like, "I wanna meet the bar," I'm like, "Great, here's 100 more points worth of problems." I don't care that you're out of 1,580 and they're out of 1,480. You both did 850 points. And I do some things where I'm like, "This is more important than that, so it's worth more points." But not because we're averaging them. It's just this is super easy and not directly on topic, but I will give you points for so many different things because I justify it with saying, "All of this stuff is helping you learn. All of it." So I just, I still am like super uncomfortable with these bars that are written in percentages because they still feel very deficit-y to me instead of being asset-based. I don't wanna use the denominator ever-

Dene Feldman: You shouldn't. Fractions are hard. Fractions are hard. Fractions are hard.

Kat Schultis: I will say that, this is Kat again, before I even switched any of my grading systems- ... I was always using a points accumulation model. I never- I had 90% in the back of my head, but yeah, this class is out of 850 points, and so whatever number of points is what you need for an A. And maybe I still have that 90, 80, 70% stuck in the back of my head, but I've never wanted to com- communicate it that way to my students.

Sharona: And I have that too because in my head I have 28 learning outcomes, and if you want an A, you gotta get 26. Why? 'Cause that's a little over 90%. Like-

Sarah Wright: Yeah

Sharona: I don't have a better reason- than that. And, I, and I don't... And I thought about it. I don't know how to have a better reason than that right now, 'cause I don't want it to be all. I think that bar's too high.

Sarah Wright: Certainly.

Sharona: And I can get almost everyone to 24, 25, 26 out of 28 And I don't want them to stop trying. I think so. I'm like, this sounds about right. I don't know

Sudhadip Chowdhury: On the distinction of the sorry, Subhadip th- this is I think For the different categories, having them all based on points and then, like, adding up to a big number, I just had this thought that we're going back to the same idea though. Like, all of the activities kind- are assessing similar things, which they are not. Homeworks assess different skills than exams, and they should not be comparable. So this is why we have the parallel system of oh, student has to do this and this instead of-

Sharona: No, absolutely adding up numbers. No, absolutely, and I don't ever combine the different categories. I'm just saying I have a big category of all the stuff that is not checking for proficiency. I'm like... and in that case, I'm like, "I just want you to do stuff." You can do some stuff before class, some stuff in class, some stuff after class. All of it is to help you learn. Even though they're different stuff, that one I'll mush together, but I will not mush the proficiencies. I have 28 learning outcomes. I want you to achieve 26 chunks of my stuff- ... 28 of my standards to get an A. Now, one of my standards is the mush. I've made one of them, like that whole 850 point whatever, that's to achieve the bar to get the the proficiency on the non... I call it my habits of mind learning outcome.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: Are students allowed to not get that standard?

Sharona: Yeah. Okay. 'Cause if they wanna get an A, they gotta get my

vector Spaces one.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: So I understand that, right? Yeah. So then this is the question do you feel like that is a fundamental skill that they must learn to pass this class? In like having that habit of mind.

Sharona: So I don't like must-haves. You must pick 26 of my 28 to get an A. You must pick 17 of my 28 to get a C and pass the class. I don't care which 26 or 17 or whatever, because who am I to decide which ones are critical? Now, I also teach classes that I don't feel anything is super critical, right? So maybe if I taught nurses and I had a drug calculation standard, maybe I would think that was. But I teach linear algebra. I don't care which two or which eight. If I'm gonna say enough is enough, I don't really care which ones. Now, that being said, I have some mathematical practices in there, and I know for a fact you cannot get those without at least getting some of the content right, so I'm not worried that you're gonna have so little of the content because you got these other things. Like that one habits of mind is not gonna be the distinguisher between you passing or not, except you have to have had 16 then content and the one versus 17. It just doesn't matter to me. Does that make sense?

Sudhadip Chowdhury: Have you actually had any student who did not get that standard?

Sharona: The habits of mind? I've had students get 27 out of 28, and the one that they're missing is the habits of mind Because they're either coming in with a very strong background or they did a bunch of work but didn't bother to turn it in. There's a lot of reasons that somebody doesn't do that one. In fact, Bosley, who's not here today, he would be the one who would do it without, in part because he would wanna prove he could do it without. And that, and he'll be the first to tell you that. He was the student that got 80%, 90%... he tells a story, and he's gonna laugh when he's hearing this, so hi, Boz. But he tells a story where he figured out that the teacher handed out the papers in a certain order. So he would sit in the seat that was the first to get the paper, and his goal was to finish the exam in pen, getting 100%, before the teacher handed out the last paper, and go, "I'm done," with his hand way up, right? Obnoxious. Obnoxious, okay? But that was him. That was what motivated him. Whereas I was the one who's like, "I missed a homework. Oh my God." So yeah, people do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons.

Mariah Birgen: And this is Mariah. We were talking earlier about psychological harm. And I often have to think about different students have different psychological traumas that are coming to my class. So I teach some classes that look super different than any other math class they've ever had, and I don't have to... i've spent less time explaining to the students how their grade's gonna work because they're all freaked out that they're gonna write a paper in a math class. And in fact, my engineering students are encouraged not to take that class their first year because it's so different that they just struggle with making that transition.

So I like thinking about all of the students who are coming, the Bosleys, the Sharonas. And what are the things that I can do, even though this thing is going to freak you out in week one, to make you comfortable enough to stick it out, to be able to trust me that this is in fact a place where you can be successful and you can learn in your own way. And it's one of the things that brings me to alternative grading that as a straight grading like I was used to when I was younger isn't the right way to measure the students in the class. They need to get over all of this panic before they can start showing me what they know.

Sharona: And I think that the intentionality that we are- placing on what goes into our grade is what is leading us to think about our students and their needs in a very different way.

Kat Schultis: Yeah.

Sharona: Because if you can just do some mushy math, you don't have to pay attention to any of that, 'cause you can slap 20 points on this and 100 points on this, and it all goes into the mix and no one cares. But if we're, like, saying, "I want a learning outcome about can you do the mathematics of voting?" It forces you to think, how are my students gonna respond to voting? 'Cause voting is not a neutral topic, especially in these days, or if I'm gonna have one on quadratic equations and I have a student who has failed at quadratic equations for four years, but I'm grading quadratic equations and it's transparent to the student, I have to think about that, or I can think about that, I should say. Don't have to.

Kat Schultis: This is going back a little bit. This is Kat again. But one of the things we noticed early on when we were starting with our system is that we had students... We had some required things, right? We said, "These eight things you have to have in order to get a C- and be allowed to move on to Calc III." And we would have a student who met 19 of 22 learning outcomes but was missing one of the ones we said was critical to getting a C-minus, and now we're saying this student either gets an A or a D depending on whether or not we hold true to this learning outcome is critical for moving on. And so we eventually abandoned that because that conversation didn't feel good at the end of the semester, to be talking about that big of a difference for one thing. And we couldn't actually determine whether or not had we picked the right things to be so critical, right? We don't know. Every student's going on to something different, and it was a lot of stress for our students, too, right? They'd say I have to get this one on the final because otherwise I'm gonna get a D in the class, but if I get it, I get an A." And that's not good for their health either

Sudhadip Chowdhury: I'm still not very comfortable with the idea mostly because, we're still teaching service courses in some sense in, in the lower level. And these students will need some of the skills. If they're not going to be math majors, they're taking calculus because they need calculus for their physics, chemistry, biology. Or probably not biology, but whatever STEM major or non-STEM major they go into. And having completed a class, the next instructor does expect them to have come away with some basic skills from that class that- if they do not complete, I do not necessarily feel that they have actually passed the course.

Sharona: So I've two things to push on with that. We're not saying they don't have to complete anything. It's that, is our judgment so perfect that we can identify the one thing that if they don't get that one thing, it doesn't matter that they got everything else in the course, that one is gonna... So the problem with requireds is if they miss a required, then nothing else matters, and that's very extreme. Now, we say that's never gonna happen, and then it happens. So that's number one. Number two, we can prove mathematically that there are a group of students who manage to achieve, in your points-based class, a 70%, and they know absolutely nothing. So we have to be careful to not hold ourselves to too much of a higher standard than the current grading system. And that's, so that's wh- I'm not comfortable. The reason we're not comfortable is 'cause we can see it. Whereas we're basically, if someone has a 76%, we're like, "Yeah, they're passing." Really? How's your weighting doing?

Kat Schultis: And we see it with students coming to our classes with weaker backgrounds, too. If a student doesn't know the unit circle in Calc 2, somewhere before Calc 2 there was a breakdown in whatever system, because that's something they should know, and they should know it well enough that I don't feel the need to re-teach it every semester. And yet, I think I've taught it every semester for the last two years.

Mariah Birgen: But let's go back to Sharona's remember whens.

Kat Schultis: Right.

Mariah Birgen: You have discovered that, this is Mariah, you have discovered that in that content day, that's a remember when you're going to do. I have a similar thing where, but mine is, oh, we all remember this, but just in case, I'm gonna go over it again. And after the third time, they're like, "Oh yeah, these are the ones where Dr. Bergen knows that we have all forgotten." And they laugh.

Cory Wilson: At this point, I think it's valuable to plug you mentioned students going i- into other STEM fields or maybe someone is... I have had a journalism student take a calculus class, that it's important, it becomes important for us, we're all math people here, to reach out to other departments and see what do students really need? So in my institutional context, primarily, students are taking calculus to go through engineering. There's really not much in between. It- biologists will take business calculus because they can take business calculus for that. But knowing if we are service courses, knowing where our students will end up, I think will help inform our practice and help inform what would be best for students as far as what do they need, when will they need it.

Sudhadip Chowdhury: I think the conversation could come from a different department mandating what they think is needed out of the course. But even then, somebody decides that, oh, the student should come away with these skills out of this course.

Sharona: And for me, if we're gonna go that route, they should be the mathematical practice skills. They should be can they solve a problem? Can they pose a problem? Yeah. Can they... Not any given, can they do this derivative, that derivative, this thing. This has been an amazing conversation. Believe it or not, we're almost at time. I know. I know. It's shocking, isn't it? First of all, I just wanna say thank you. This kind of conversation is, I think, one of the great values of having these things happen at conferences like this, 'cause we're all learning from each other. We're doing these things. But what's one thing that you would like to share that you're like, "Hey, we would like to see the Center focus on this," or, "We'd like to see the community talk about that."

If you wanna take a moment to think. I'm going to share mine, which is this keeps convincing me that as much as in-person is expensive, that it needs to happen. And so one of the goals the Center has is to support our people and possibly support other people doing more conference attendance for the purpose of generating this conversation. So that is one thing I wanna go towards. I'm gonna go in a round robin. Either Mariah or Cat, would you like to start the round robin?

Kat Schultis: I can start 'cause I have something on my brain. I think that we can support people who go to the section meetings to give a talk on , an introductory, inviting talk on math on alternative grading, especially with mathematics. And I think that we have enough people all over this country that those people are gonna be going to the conference anyway. They just need a little bit of help figuring out what they're gonna say

Sudhadip Chowdhury: Subhadip. I mostly this is based on recent experience. We usually are like if you're coordinating like a large enrollment multi-section course where you might want to go use alternative grading, you need to train graduate students, and that is something that I don't know there are any venues currently for that in the sense of, there are instructors who do it, and they give their own spiel to the grad students, but there isn't really a do they care? Do they actually get anything out of it? Is there a-- If there was some kind of a sustained professional development workshop for grad students

Sharona: to learn about- So is the workshop for grad students, or is the workshop for coordinators to teach coordinators how to do this with

Sudhadip Chowdhury: grad students? I guess both, right?

It's for yeah, it's like a professional development for teaching and also for the graduates. I'm not sure what would be more useful, but-

Sharona: So the center has that skill set. I don't know that we've formulated it into a workshop, but we will do that now because the... Even though we were working with adjuncts and not graduate students we did this with a team of up to 20, 25 instructors for many years. So we will put that on the list. I love that, thank you. It's now on the list of workshops that we have to develop.

Sarah Wright: Piggybacking off of that, this is Sarah by the way I am starting to think about multidisciplinary things and trying to cause good change at my university. And I feel like I have a lot of training and professional development in how I personally teach in a math course. I don't have a lot of... Even though I have coordinated a center of teaching and learning, I don't have instruction for me on how to lead professional development across disciplines.

Sharona: Okay. So possibly having a workshop on alt-grading for how to become a professional developer in a multidisciplinary environment.

Dene Feldman: Yes. I'll second that.

Sharona: Okay. Done, on the list. I'll have it in six weeks. 'Cause I've been doing it,

Sudhadip Chowdhury: I was saying maybe coordinate with CoMInDS, because CoMInDS has a bunch of professional development workshop- Okay ... training programs going on currently, I think.

Sharona: Yeah. So I personally have done this in the context of engineering, math. I've done the intensives in that environment, and then I've done some other ones, like I did one in biology. So we've got some people, so putting it on the list. I will plug the Alternative Grading Institute which is coming up in December. It's a two-day intensive. And it is cross-disciplinary professional development to do this yourself, not to be a trainer. But we can definitely look at training the trainers.

Cory Wilson: This is Cory. So excellent ideas from everyone. From my background, I'm going to go a completely different route. I'd like to see more qualitative research about Student sense of belonging, student opinions about the course, not just course evaluations where students get to be anonymous and, maybe say some not so charitable things about us. But I'd like to see interviews and classroom videos and analyses of those. I think that could be really interesting and really fruitful, especially for instructors who are curious about how it might work in their classrooms and how it might impact their students. Maybe it would help them feel more comfortable.

Kat Schultis: This is something I've been thinking about as my career has gone on. This is Kat. And I think that one thing we need to do is make sure that we're supporting our faculty at all levels, and I'm thinking particularly of the VITAL faculty, and that's visiting professors- Instructors instructors, TAs, adjuncts, and lecturers. So all of our folks who don't have the privilege of tenure or promotion. And going to this conference. And I would love to see a network potentially, or just some other po- th- there are other ways this could be done, but a network of people willing to say, "You are doing this in your classroom. I am willing to have a conversation with you," and then write you a letter of support from somebody at another institution that says, "This is great work." So that those more contingent faculty have the support of the community so that they feel more comfortable continuing to experiment and explore.

Sharona: All right. And I'm gonna throw one last one that's on my brain, is taking this up a level at the conference level to the university policymakers, whether it's AAUP or AACU or whoever the right organization is. I'd like to start getting in front of university administrators, not to do this top-down, but to get them to start deconstructing the barriers that a lot of our faculty have in the form of their handbooks and constraints in their systems. And maybe working with, academic senates and stuff like that. 'Cause I don't need them to force the change. I don't want them to force the change, and I don't want them to relax the rules so that everybody goes crazy. But I would like there to be a place where they can say, "This is how you have to do it, unless you apply to the senate or whatever to use this alternative path, and here are some principles or here's some ways we do it." 'Cause we do know that if they just go wild, then we've got some instructors that do very terrible things in traditional grading too, all right. I wanna thank everyone for being here. This has been such a fun conversation. Can you believe an hour went by so quick? So thank you, and we'll see you guys around.

And thank you for listening. Thank

Kat Schultis: you. Thank you. And thank you from Bosley.

Cory Wilson: Real, real fast before you do that, I wanna do this for him.

This is for you, Bosley

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

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