Okay, so I decided to switch to specs-based grading (SBG) for my calculus classes this year.

Let me start by saying why I was interested in so doing. We use Michael Oehrtman's CLEAR Calculus labs in our calculus classes to (hopefully) foster deep understanding of core calculus concepts (in particular the “approximation framework”, which is the $ \varepsilon-\delta$ definition of limit, sans $ \varepsilon$ and $ \delta$). Last year, which was my first year as an assistant professor and also my first year at UNCO, we encountered a lot of student disgruntlement / discouragement / dismay about the grading of the labs. Basically what was happening was, the labs were graded out of 20 points, and every little mistake would ding you a point or half a point, and pretty soon you were down to 15/20 for a pretty decent lab, which looks an awful lot like a C – let alone if you had serious misunderstandings about the concept in the lab, in which case you could be down into like 9/20 territory. What was extra problematic is that students were totally giving up on the labs and not reading any of the comments we'd write. They'd get the labs back, look at the number at the top, get that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach, and never ever look at the rest of the lab again. Not the best for learning anything from the labs.

So then I started reading a lot of stuff about SBG. This was immediately attractive because it combined a points-free (pointless?) grading system with the opportunity for rewrites. That sounded to me like a good way to get students to actually understand the stuff that was going on in the labs – a revision cycle would give them the opportunity to look at and think about the comments we spent so much time writing on their labs, fix their mistakes, and learn something out of the endeavor. (Plus, there's a lot of questions about the goodness / evilness of partial credit, which this system basically throws out the window, but I won't get into that whole thing in this post.)

I decided to start grading students' lab writeups on a three-level scale which essentially works like this: Mastery = you totally know what you're doing, and maybe you've made a few small typos; Progressing = you mostly know what you're doing, but you've made some important mistakes that really need to be fixed; Novice = it's pretty clear that you don't know what you're doing, or your work is substantially incomplete. The key to this is two-fold: only Mastery work “counts” toward your final letter grade, but you get (functionally) unlimited opportunities to revise and resubmit your work.

More on that “functionally”:  I have a couple of restrictions that are tied to a completely virtual currency system called “tokens”. You get five of them at the beginning of the class, and there are opportunities to earn another one every once in a while. A regrade of a lab writeup that was originally graded at Novice level costs one token, whereas a regrade of a Progressing lab writeup is free. Also, your rewrite is free within a one-week window of getting it back, and will then cost a token if it's after one week but before two weeks. After two weeks, no dice. This timer resets every time I pass back a graded (re)writeup, and I write the date on the top of each rewrite when I grade it to serve as a baseline for this timer.

(Lab grading is, of course, only one dimension of my overall grading system, which also includes exams, pre-class assignments, participation on a class Piazza board, and a gateway exam. Maybe more on this later.)

A couple weeks after school started, I sent an email to a friend about my use of SBG to grade the labs. I think this email captures my initial enthusiasm pretty well, and will thus quote (slash edit) from it liberally:

Let me just say how totally happy I have been so far that I instituted the rewrite system. The fact that it costs a token to resubmit Novice-level work gives people an incentive to do well the first time (and means that by and large, regrading isn't terrible, because I'm mostly looking at decent work to begin with); the fact that you can resubmit at all means that ~~~~~~~ students are actually reading my feedback ~~~~~~~~ , which is a huge and, uh, what's the opposite of demoralizing? remoralizing? change from last year. And then the time limits mean I don't have to deal with one huge pile of re-grading all at the end of the semester.

However, it is true that I have increased the volume of grading that I'm actually doing. [ed. note: yeah, about that.]

The three-level system has made grading stuff drastically easier, because I don't have to come up with some mostly-arbitrary mapping between severity of mistakes and “points” taken off. (“Should this work get fiiiiiive points, or five and a haaaaaaaalf points??”)

So, that's why I did this, a bit about how I did this, and how I originally felt about this. You'll notice the “initial” in “initial enthusiasm” and the “originally” in the previous sentence, which foreshadows my next post: what I did when my grading load became completely unmanageable, because of course it did.