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Recertification of all 100-level math courses is underway at Montgomery College this semester. This process is intended to ensure that the general education objectives inform the design of any course that might be taken to satisfy distribution requirements. The use of standards-based-grading (SBG), in which assessments are narrowly focused on individual skills throughout the semester, might seem antagonistic to the goal of students' following a broad "thematic pathway" during their time in our institution. In response to a concern shared by the leader of our SBG study group (that a GenEd course could not simultaneously be a SBG course), I spoke with some other MATH 181 instructors on my campus and came up with the following points.
The perceived incompatibility between a course's GenEd designation and grading by standards is probably exaggerated, even though I alluded to as much in reason #2, bullet point 3, of the "Top Reasons for SBG" document. ("SBG confers a more standardized meaning on your final grade in the course. ..., [a reason which] applies mainly to courses that have a direct sequel within the same department, since the various majors that feed students into a "service course" often have different interpretations of what the essential learning outcomes are.")
In my mind, the use of SBG to ensure transferrability of course credits is a vital safeguard against the common practice of 4-year institutions such as UMCP forcing our graduates to repeat content that they've already mastered. This role can still be played by SBG, if all instructors of the course agree to input the final grades as determined by the standards-based calculation. When the schools reviewing transfer applicants see that our final grades are standards-based, their insistence on repeating a course "to protect the integrity of their major" becomes less defensible.
What GenEd recertification asks us to do is complementary to this goal of transferrability. With SBG we're allowing students to take ownership of their learning, but only within the bounds set by the course objectives. The signature assignments allow students to take their ownership of the learning process beyond those course boundaries, integrating their life experiences, their other coursework, and their mathematical skills to create work that reflects their individual talents and interests. Such signature assignments force them to answer for themselves the question "when am I ever going to use this?" By answering that question with a personalized capstone project, students become capable of marketing themselves to constituencies external to academia.
In short, as Sean Cornally put it in his Think Thank Thunk blog, SBG is a gateway drug that sets instructors down the path of creating a student-centered learning environment. GenEd recertification, with its focus on integrative learning opportunities, continues down that path and gives students even more freedom in crafting representative samples of their work. We as instructors don't have to give those signature assignments any weight in the final grade, using only SBG for that purpose so that transferrability of credits is ensured. The self-promotion potential that signature assignments provide will be reason enough for our students to engage with them whole-heartedly, as I'm seeing with my MATH 110 students in their ePortfolios.