Extra Credit, Late Work, Cheating, Participation & Effort.
If you bring any of these four topics up in a department or faculty meeting, you’re likely to get an earful of opinions. My opinion on these has certainly evolved over my teaching career and in the last few years I’ve even asked students to help me craft late work policies. Joe Feldman takes on all these issues in Chapter 9 of his book Grading for Equity.

​Feldman makes the argument that if we want grades to be an accurate reflection of a student’s academic performance and equitably assigned, then “grades should be based on valid evidence of a student’s content knowledge, and not based on evidence that is likely to be corrupted by a teacher’s implicit bias or that reflects a student’s environment.” (p. 110)  I generally don’t believe teachers are knowingly biased against some students, but I do believe that we all, myself included, harbor unconscious or implicit biases. These biases are based on our own lived experience and are sometimes counter to our espoused values. They can be triggered very quickly upon meeting our students and are not intentionally controlled, according to the Kirwan Institute at Ohio State. Given those facts, we need to put in place grading practices that are bias-resistant.

Don’t grade participation or effort.
Participation and effort grades are often used by teachers as grade “hacks” to make up for other unfairnesses they perceive in the grading system they use (or are forced to use). But even if participation and effort aren’t used in this way, they focus more on the conduct of the student rather than what the student has learned. Grading effort is a minefield because it involves imagining what’s going on in a student’s head. Because of this, they are a fundamentally subjective judgement of student behavior. Even the most well-meaning teacher will be affected by their unconscious bias when awarding grades for participation and effort.

Participation is also problematic because it involves students conforming to a teacher’s expectations of a “good student.” Feldman explains, “Students who haven’t been successful in school, and who have experienced school as an antagonistic place where they have been tracked, disproportionately suspended, and then told they are failing, are less likely to engage and invest in that very institution than the students who have had a pattern of success.” (p. 121)

Additionally, attempts to grade participation and effort would be based on wholly incomplete data--teachers cannot observe each of their students outside of class or even within the classroom on a constant basis. My time as a teacher is better spent on finding clever ways of encouraging participation than trying to track it.

Don’t grade participation or effort.


Don’t use extra credit.
I stopped giving extra credit some time ago because I didn’t feel I was doing so fairly or equitably. I also thought it would prevent students from annoyingly asking me for extra credit points instead of doing the work I had already assigned and asking for help. (That partially worked.) Joe Feldman cites four reasons why extra credit doesn’t match up with the principles of grades being based on valid evidence of a student’s knowledge and not based on evidence that is likely to be affected by implicit biases or a student’s environment: 

1. Extra credit reinforces the idea that the class isn’t really about mastering a standard, but is instead about acquiring points however possible.
2. Extra credit teaches students that points are interchangeable. Weakness on one learning standard can be compensated for by strength on another.
3. Extra credit “undermines a teacher’s own curriculum and instruction.” It supplants a teacher’s lessons with things that may have nothing to do with a target learning standard--think of extra points for bringing tissues or canned food, attending the school play or a guest lecture.
4. Extra credit is “inequitable because it reflects a student’s environment over which she has no control [and] because it requires extra resources beyond the course requirements.” (p. 114) Extra credit can often require money and/or transportation.

If the work is important, require it. Don’t use extra credit.


No grade penalty for late work
I’ve been conflicted over my own late work policy and I’ve changed it nearly every year over the past decade--sometimes enlisting students to help me develop the policy. However, I’ve always included a grade penalty of some sort. Mr. Feldman argues against any grade penalty for late work because “the practice creates inaccurate final grades.” (p. 115) If a student who demonstrates A-level work and then has their grade lowered to a B (or lower) because it’s a day late, does that accurately reflect the student’s academic performance?

He goes on to say that:
  “late work penalties can disproportionately hurt the most vulnerable students. Students turn in assignments late for all sorts of reasons. They have few resources, weak prior knowledge, overwhelming schedules, a lack of engagement, stress, and simple forgetfulness. They may not have been able to entirely control all the circumstances that caused the assignments to be late, and our implicit biases influence the assumptions we make about whether they had. They may learn at a slower rate and need more time to complete assignments to actually learn from them.” (p. 115)

When we penalize late work, we may inadvertently cause students to stop working and not complete the assignment, and or cause others to resort to copying in order to get the work done by the deadline.

Not penalizing late work sends the message that high-quality work is valued and that if the work is important, it’s important whether or not it’s done by the due date or a week later. Meeting deadlines is also important, of course, but teachers can still indicate on most grade programs whether or not assignments were completed on time even if there is no grade penalty.

Additionally, no teacher wants to grade a flurry of assignments at the end of a marking period and so some set deadlines for late work. Last year I started accepting late work up until the summative assessment for a unit since it was designed to help them perform well on that assessment. The policy wasn't perfect, but it was a step in the right direction.

Grade the work, not the timing of the work.


Don’t give zeroes for cheating
Cheating is often viewed as the antithesis of learning and some teachers view cheating as “an act of treason--violating the trust between the student and teacher, and casts doubt on the validity of a student’s...performance.” One of the most common punishments for cheating is the zero. Feldman acknowledges that “we want students to understand how severe a transgression cheating is, and we hope the zero teaches that lesson.” (p. 117) But the zero violates the idea that grades should be about academic performance and not behavior. 

Why do students cheat? Lots of reasons, of course, but they basically come down to the fact that the student doesn’t believe they can be successful without cheating. Maybe they didn’t learn the material as fast as others; maybe they were prevented from studying by some extra-curricular event or family emergency. In any case, Feldman suggests that when it comes to cheating, “we might treat it as a symptom of a student’s academic or personal struggle, and that alone might warrant a different kind of consequence than irredeemable punishment.” He goes on to write, “The real irony of assigning a zero for cheating is that it lets the student off too easy.” (p. 118) If we penalize students with a zero, it makes their grade inaccurate and robs them of the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned and robs the teacher of knowledge about what the student still needs to learn. Assigning a zero may punish cheating but also “exempts cheating students from learning.”

​Feldman further discusses potential aims of punishment (including deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, and restitution) and how these aims come into play for punishing cheating. Just as schools are thankfully moving away from retributive and deterrence punishments (think “no-excuses” and zero-tolerance policies) that often have a disproportionately negative impact on students of color, we can think about more rehabilitative and restitutive consequences for cheating. He writes, “The consequence for cheating that aligns most closely with these purposes is not to assign a zero, but instead to require the student to complete the test or assignment and reveal her true level of content knowledge.” (p. 119) The student would be undergoing rehabilitation. Perhaps the cheating student “...must complete the assessment, or future assessments, with closer monitoring until she has restored our trust--in other words, restitution.”

Cheating is a behavior and should have behavioral consequences, not grading ones.

To sum up:

• Exclude participation / effort from grade calculations
• No extra credit--only required content
• No grade penalties for timing of work
• Non-grade consequences for cheating

Next ...what to do about grading homework...
 

In my last post reflecting on Joe Feldman's book Grading for Equity, I wrote about some of the issues involved in traditional grading practices (TG or TGP).  Before going on to describe his suggestions for more equitable grading practices, I would like to point out that Feldman says that we, as teachers, shouldn't spend time blaming ourselves for our past practices that we may now see as problematic.  We should instead focus on change.  He writes "We have never had the opportunity, resources, and support to examine our traditional grading practices, and so we must forgive ourselves for inadvertently perpetuating outdated and even harmful practices."

But now that I've read and thought about the issue in more detail I can't continue to employ TGPs.  Thankfully, Feldman has some suggestions :-)  He groups his first suggested practices into those involved in making grading easy to understand, mathematically sound, and accurately indicate a student's academic performance.  One practice is to avoid the zero.  It's rarely the case when a student knows absolutely nothing about a topic so the zero is not accurate in that way.  Also, when coupled with a 0-100 point scale, the zero disproportionately punishes students.  Zeroes for a few late or missing assignments can significantly affect a students final grade under TGPs, but they do not indicate final understandings and so are inaccurate in that way as well.
​
The 0-100% grading scale itself is problematic because it allows for many more ways to fail than to succeed.  Often under TGPs, more than half of the scale counts as failing with an F letter grade.  It's also too granular.  I certainly can't tell a student or parent what the difference is between an 85% and an 86% in terms of a student's understanding of a topic.  There's no valid academic reason to have that degree of gradation unless you're simply looking to rank students against each other.  

So Feldman recommends three things: 1) Avoid zeroes, 2) Change the scale to something like 0-4 (five levels instead of 100), and 3) minimum grading.  I'll have more to say about the 0-4 scale later, but if the system in which you are working requires the use of a 0-100, then at the very least you can set a minimum failing grade a student can earn on that scale. Depending on the particulars of your school or district grading scale, that minimum might be between 50-69%.  An example: let's say a student has five assessments on the same topic and gets an 85% (B) on four of them, but is missing the fifth.  Averaging a zero in for the missing one gives the student a 68% (D).  Averaging in a 59% for the missing assignment gives the student an 80% (low B)--which probably better reflects what the student understands about that topic. 

Speaking of averaging...why do we do that? Let's say on a particular topic a student earns these five scores: 82, 84, 40, 94, 94.  The average is  78.8, the middle score is 84, and the score that is most frequent is 94.  In such a scenario, what score more accurately reflects what the student now understands?  It seems like the student was understanding at a proficient level, then had a really bad day, and ended up performing at a really high level.  A 78.8 average for this student doesn't accurately reflect what they now know. 

Feldman writes "Averaging a student's performance over time doesn't accurately reflect what the student came to understand over time and lowers grades for students who took longer to learn and demonstrate proficiency. Instead, a student's most recent performance can more accurately describe their achievement." Although Feldman doesn't specifically call out ways to calculate a student's grade and give more weight to the more recent ones, there are many in the Standard Based Grading (SBG) community that have. Calculation methods like a Decaying Average put more weight on more recent scores and of course teachers can just use their professional judgement as well.  (This of course makes more sense in situations in which the student is being assessed multiple times on the same topic or learning standard.)  I'll also note that widely used computerized grading systems such as those in PowerSchool and Infinite Campus have the capability of calculating grades with methods other than a mean.

Lastly in this section, Feldman points out that group grades reward students for "...working together to create a product regardless of whether each student learned from that group's work.  Awarding grades based on student learning subsequent to the group work refocuses students on its purpose and provide us with opportunities for formative feedback."  I've often graded lab work as group work even though I've required lab papers from every student.  Feldman's comments here (and later) have made me rethink how I will assess lab work going forward.

So, for more accurate grading:

• Avoid zeroes
• Change the scale (0-4)
• Apply Minimum grading
• Weight more recent performance 
• Grade individual performance, not group performance

Next post: Bias-Resistant Grading Practices

My wife is an English professor and although I'm a bit biased, she's an impressive teacher and I'm very happy to be her partner.  In the last couple of years she came across a book, Specifications Grading by Linda Nilson, and our dinner conversations shifted to her new hope for how to motivate and assess her students.  (We both enjoy these pedagogical dinner discussions--it's just one thing among many that makes our marriage so incredible.) Specs grading is a type of Standards Based Grading (SBG) and I have been interested in trying SBG for a long time.  It seems to take me awhile to think about new ways of conducting my classes before I commit to the change, but conversations with her and the positive effects on her students made me even more interested to try SBG next year.  

In addition to having a like-minded spouse, I have also been learning about how to employ modeling teaching techniques in my physics classes--many modelers use some form of SBG in their classes.  Also, issues of equity in education are something that comes up quite frequently in my work as a Einstein Fellow in Congressman Raúl Grijalva's office on Capitol Hill. With those things in mind, when I heard Joe Feldman speak about his book Grading for Equity on a Harvard EdCast podcast, I knew I had to give his book a look.

In his book, Grading for Equity: What it is, Why it matters, and How it can transform schools and classrooms, Joe Feldman argues that grading is a challenging topic to discuss with teachers.  Teachers' ideas of grading are wrapped up in our ideas about how learning occurs, motivation of students, self-direction, and control.  Traditional grading practices (TG or TGP), for many teachers (myself included) often mean using a 0-100 grading scale with letter grades, grading homework and classwork for correctness, not accepting late work (or accepting it with a large reduction in credit), and one-chance summative quizzes and tests.  Feldman argues that these TGPs are problematic for multiple reasons.  I won't go over them all, but I would like to briefly discuss those that stood out to me.

With TG, mistakes are viewed by many students as "...unwanted, unhelpful, and deserving of penalty."  Teachers using TGPs often judge students in all stages of learning including classwork and homework. This incentivizes students to hide their misunderstandings and weaknesses and can lead them to academic dishonesty / cheating.  This is something I've personally observed in my classes and is a widespread concern among many teaching colleagues.

Tied up with TGPs is the idea that "points" can be used to motivate students to perform.  Feldman says, "Teachers use "points" in grading based on the traditional belief that points motivate students to learn and behave, even though "one of the sturdiest findings in social science" is that extrinsic motivation for learning is ineffective and even harmful."  Extrinsic motivation might work for repetitive and simple tasks, but it does not work well for conceptual understanding, flexible problem solving, or improving students long term interest and desire to learn.  Feldman also argues that these TG point systems can also result in students that are more dependent on the teacher and therefore less independent learners.  He also discusses the influence of conscious and unconscious teacher biases that can cause them to wrongly think that "motivating" students with points-based-consequences is the only effective measure they have with certain underrepresented groups.  (This is particularly troubling and I highly suggest you read chapter 3 and follow his references.)

​TG also hides or provides misleading information.  In TG, a student's academic and behavioral performance over the course of a marking period are reduced to a single letter grade calculated via averaging all the student's scores. That single letter grade confuses and hides a student's true understanding of course topics and is affected by everything from a zeroes for missing assignments and homework scores that are due to a particular student's home environment and responsibilities outside of the school day.  The mathematics of calculating the grade are inappropriate and problematic as well. (more on this in Part 2).  

Teachers already know this. As the author writes, "Faced with the constraints of using a single letter to report student performance, teachers are forced to make creative adjustments and adaptations, making grades idiosyncratic, and, therefore, unreliable."  The letter grades are subject to teacher bias--even if that bias is unconscious and unintentional.  Feldman goes on to say, "The variance and unreliability of single-letter grades frustrate students, weaken the schools' professional community of teachers, and challenge the integrity of our schools."

Lastly, I was particularly intrigued by Feldman's analysis of TGPs in light of Carol Dweck's work on Mindset. I was introduced to Dweck's work in graduate school at the University of Akron and my thoughts on teaching have been affected by it ever since.  (I expect you are already familiar with the basic tenets of fixed vs. growth mindsets as they are now common terms in educational circles, but if not, follow the link to learn more.)  Feldman says that although many schools espouse Dweck's "growth mindset" ideals and communicate this to students by stating so in written and oral communications (bulletin boards, posters, course expectation sheets, emails, etc.), TGPs "...often communicate a dis-empowering "fixed mindset" framework for learning, add stress and uncertainty, and can result in students engaging in compensating behaviors."  TGPs frame grades as "performance goals," that is a goal focused on external judgement and evaluation. This can lead to students being motivated only to take on and complete tasks seen as relatively easy and to avoid chancing failure in order to avoid appearing unable or not smart enough.

So then what to do instead?  I'll write about the more equitable grading practices Feldman recommends (some SBG and some not) in my next post.