Topic: High Standards, Multiple Tries: How I've Been Grading
Supporting students who miss coursework or get off to a bad start presents many challenges. Extending deadlines, giving retakes, or creating alternate assignments strains course staff with rescheduling and regrading; further, judging which student situations warrant these extra opportunities is fraught. Curving course grades or exam grades, dropping lowest assignments, deciding grade cutoffs post hoc, and more fuel a perception of eroding rigor (justified or not).In this talk I present how I’ve tried to make progress on this in my courses, at scale, over the past few years. I’ve used a mix of technological solutions, syllabus design decisions, staff training, and student communication. The primary design consideration is twofold: clearly articulating course outcomes and their mappings to activities, and assuming that most students will need more than one try on many course activities (to sloganize: “high standards, multiple tries”). From these principles, we design resubmission and regrade systems, a retake strategy for exams, and an overall grading policy that gives me straightforward replies to the vast majority of “exceptional” student situations and doesn’t make me feel like I’m compromising on assessment.
Speaker Bio:
Joe Gibbs Politz is an Associate Professor of Teaching at UC San Diego. He teaches courses across the computing curriculum from intro programming to discrete math to compilers to TA training. His recent research focuses on computing education, mentoring, and pedagogic programming language design.
Topic: High Standards, Multiple Tries: How I've Been Grading
Supporting students who miss coursework or get off to a bad start presents many challenges. Extending deadlines, giving retakes, or creating alternate assignments strains course staff with rescheduling and regrading; further, judging which student situations warrant these extra opportunities is fraught. Curving course grades or exam grades, dropping lowest assignments, deciding grade cutoffs post hoc, and more fuel a perception of eroding rigor (justified or not).In this talk I present how I’ve tried to make progress on this in my courses, at scale, over the past few years. I’ve used a mix of technological solutions, syllabus design decisions, staff training, and student communication. The primary design consideration is twofold: clearly articulating course outcomes and their mappings to activities, and assuming that most students will need more than one try on many course activities (to sloganize: “high standards, multiple tries”). From these principles, we design resubmission and regrade systems, a retake strategy for exams, and an overall grading policy that gives me straightforward replies to the vast majority of “exceptional” student situations and doesn’t make me feel like I’m compromising on assessment.
Speaker Bio:
Joe Gibbs Politz is an Associate Professor of Teaching at UC San Diego. He teaches courses across the computing curriculum from intro programming to discrete math to compilers to TA training. His recent research focuses on computing education, mentoring, and pedagogic programming language design.