On my way to the Part-Time Faculty conference yesterday, I heard from my carpool mates that we might be emerging from the latest trough of the enrollment cycle as early as next fall, thanks to a larger-than-usual cohort of MCPS graduates anticipated in Spring 2019. I wonder how well they'll adjust to college coursework after the epidemic of grade inflation that the Washington Post recently reported. Kojo Nnamdi of WAMU had a show last week in which some callers brought up the idea that grades should carry some standard meaning across institutions, a goal that we hoped to address with SBG.
After two semesters of teaching statistics with traditional grading, I'm wondering whether an attempt at Standards-Based Grading would be helpful this coming semester. I'm worried that I've been spoiled by the five-hour-a-week face time of last semester (when I had a section or 017 linked to each 117 section), and the reduction in contact hours will be enough of a challenge on its own, better not to be compounded by having to explain and implement a novel grading scheme.
Not only will I be meeting each statistics section only three hours a week, those three hours are spread out over Tuesday/Thursday. If college is closed due to inclement weather on either of those days, I lose half a week's worth of instructional time. My first semester teaching statistics, I was lucky to have a MWF 11am section, so that each snow closure took away only a third of our weekly instructional time.
Over the course of several conversations this past fall, my colleague Lucious Anderson gave explicit expression to an often-unstated objective of college education, namely the ability to deliver a finished product on deadline. He had to make this objective explicit for one of his own statistics classes, whose students treated due dates almost like gentle suggestions. His background in workforce development and continuing education prompted the example of a team tasked with designing a spacecraft, but one team member shows up two months after the spacecraft has launched and asks to be given full credit for the meticulous work she finally completed for her part of the project. I don't like the idea of encouraging a flippant attitude toward deadlines among graduates who will eventually have to carry their weight on team projects. A flippant attitude toward deadlines is one of the messages Lucious suspects we might inadvertently send by adopting SBG, especially if we allow students to dictate the reassessment schedule.
Even if I don't end up implementing SBG for MATH 117, I'd still like to have frequent assessments to provide students the constant feedback that they'd get with SBG. This consideration is leading me to imagine an assessment regime consisting of weekly quizzes, one midterm exam, and a final exam. I haven't tried such a strategy in almost six years, and back then it only applied to evening sections of precalculus and calculus. If the population served by daytime sections of MATH 117 isn't used to studying for a small number of higher-stakes assessments, then this plan might backfire. Carving out a dedicated review day leading up to each exam is how some professors get student buy-in to the seriousness of the midterm and final, so that's how I'll structure my calendar when mapping out the semester.
A better candidate for SBG adoption might be my MWF section of MATH 150. I haven't taught this course in over six years, and since then the course workgroup has selected a new textbook. The change of textbook is less worrisome than the change in student preparedness, as illustrated by Alice Wang's comment of lately needing "an entire class period to teach students how to subtract 1." Lisa Vaughnn is equally pessimistic about the typical MATH 150 student's algebra skills. With standards-based grading I won't be tempted to lump multiple skills into any given assessment, perhaps to the benefit of those students who lack the desired procedural fluency with algebra.
Thinking through these possibilities out loud would have been better suited for yesterday's scheduled breakout session on "Effective Grading" than for this long-winded blog post. As it happened, the session ended up being canceled. I couldn't even get the would-be attendees who converged on the room to stick around for an informal sharing of best practices from our collective experience, because they were worried about not getting professional development credit if the room wasn't supervised by an ELITE-sanctioned presenter.
This exclusive focus on "grades" rather than learning is precisely what SBG was designed to suppress. If the faculty tasked with supervising our students' learning are themselves more motivated by official institutional credit than by the chance to improve their pedagogical skills, is it really so unexpected that our students also absorb these lopsided values? Once again we see an instance of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."