Grades. Grading. Final Grade. Any variable of the word “grade” is likely to fill me with a confusing combination of panic, unease, and boredom. As a student, grades were fine. I did well enough in academic settings that I could choose to ignore my grades. My undergrad years were spent at a small liberal arts school that was happy to eschew quantitative assessment (while still dutifully collecting letter grades for future use). But as an instructor, “grade” has taken on a whole new meaning. Now grades and grading fill me with something somewhat like dread. There’s the tedium of grading, the worry of being unfair or inconsistent, the ever-lasting curiosity about whether students read my comments, and most pressing, the constant concern over whether grades are a helpful way to communicate with my students or a painful (or even detrimental) requirement of the neoliberal university. Before every semester, as I decide on assignments and grading scales, I ask myself: Can I grade to inspire or acknowledge improvement? How can I avoid having grades become markers of a student’s identity? How do I handle the power of a grade and the sway it holds over my students? And, vitally, how can I make grading less boring and time-consuming?

I’m still a young instructor with a lot to learn, so as I ask myself these questions, I don’t have much teaching experience to draw on for an answer. What I do have are my years of experience as a student, conversations with my peers and professors, and the internet. This August, as I was hammering out the details for my fall class and circling through my list of questions, I started thinking about the types of assessment I most enjoyed as a student and what I got out of them. My mind immediately turned to experiences that relied on self-assessment. I enjoyed the feeling of power and control they gave me, and I appreciated the trust they demonstrated. However, because my undergraduate education was less than traditional, I wasn’t quite sure how to translate those assignments and experiences into my classroom. Rather than give up on the idea, I turned to the internet. I asked my peers and colleagues on Twitter how they incorporate self-assessment into their traditional classrooms and searched through education blogs and websites for ideas. I got a lot of great suggestions, including reading logs aimed at measuring literary growth, video reflections on reading and writing processes, and written self-reflection assignments intended to measure performance. These suggestions and the excitement I found on education blogs, gave me the confidence and inspiration to try experimenting with my own class.

So I started an experiment: as usual, I designated Participation – that vital but oh so vague category – would make up 20% of my students’ final grades. (My classes are small and conversation-based, so the relatively high percentage makes sense.) However, I also added two short, written assignments where I ask students to state what grade they think they deserve and why. I explained the assignment on the first day, and my students nodded along. That seemed to be that, and the first few weeks of the semester went by uneventfully. But then something amazing happened. About a month into the semester, my students and I came up with a participation rubric together. I asked questions like what the scale should be (Checks? A – F?) and whether quality or quantity counted more, and my students ran with it. Even typically quiet students spoke up to weigh-in on the importance of originality or group participation. About half-way through, the students realized some of the standards would make it almost impossible for quiet students to earn better than a C, so we went back and adjusted the language and standards. Ultimately, the class agreed on a rubric that I thought made sense, was fair, and was easy to use – something I’ve struggled to do every semester I’ve taught.

Our chalkboard that day – Making a rubric can be messy

But the real magic happened after that class. Since that day, the overwhelming majority of my students have shown a noticeable improvement in their class contributions. The quiet students are talking more, and the talkative students are doing more to build on previous comments, making the discussion feel more like a conversation rather than a Q+A session. I’m not sure what it was about coming up with the rubric that changed things (Did it clarify the standards? Did it show them that their input mattered? Did it remind them they were being graded?), but it did, dramatically.

Click to check out our final rubric!

I’m now in the process of reading through the class’s first round of self-assessments, and grading doesn’t feel like a chore. Partially this is because it’s taken a lot of the pressure of grading off me. I am not trying to manufacture a fair grade from some notes, impressions, and an unsatisfactory rubric. I am starting with a grade and an argument, one that I can then compare to my notes and impressions. I’m not as worried about fairness either. I know that my students and I are on the same page and that the goals and expectations are clear. In the few instances where students have been either too lenient or too harsh on themselves, it’s much easier to compare a specific moment in their assessment to their actual performance than it has been in the past to explain feedback to students who felt their grade was “random.” Finally, the assessments I’ve read so far have been exceedingly honest, and they’ve granted insight into my students where I had previously relied on assumption. Reading these reports, like one from a quiet student explaining his struggle to get out of his own head, or another from an exceptional student who’s striving to make more succinct comments, has reminded me how much value my students place on the work of our class and their education. While I always assumed this was the case, reading it in their words is inspiring and is helping motivate me through this long stretch of the mid-semester. And, rather than dreading the list of questions I know will haunt me in January, I’m already looking forward to incorporating self-assessment into other parts of my teaching next semester. I don’t yet know how my students feel about my experiment (that will have to wait for the end of semester survey), but I hope they enjoy it half as much as I have.