Monthly Archives: August 2018

Standards-Based Grading in Fall 2018

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An Overview of My Semester

This semester, I’ll be teaching three different courses:

  • Pre-Calculus Mathematics (MATH 111), a course designed to review algebra and trigonometry for students who plan to take our (scientific) calculus sequence;
  • College Algebra (MATH 101), a course designed to cover algebra and function basics for students who will continue on either to MATH 111 (pre-calculus with trigonometry) or MATH 105 (business calculus); and
  • “Applications of Mathematics Across the Curriculum with Technology” (SMFT 516), a graduate-level course designed for in-service science & math teachers who are working toward an interdisciplinary M.Ed.

Due to enrollment challenges, my schedule for courses shifted in late July, so I spent a while during the summer trying to ditch my old plans for the semester and start over. Although I was planning to attend Mathfest in Denver, CO and give a talk in the session on #MasteryGrading based on my years of experience implementing standards-based grading in my courses, I must admit that before my trip I had no plans to use SBG in any of my courses this semester.

But then… UGH!!! INSPIRATION FROM PEOPLE. AND TOO MANY GOOD IDEAS.

So I attended every talk in the #MasteryGrading session at Mathfest. And wow, I got a ton of great ideas from all of the talks [stay tuned for future blog post] and, on a personal level, I really enjoyed our conversations, meals, and hang-outs outside of the session itself. (Thanks, y’all!)

Unfortunately a couple of days into Mathfest I realized I just couldn’t go back to traditional grading, so I threw out all my traditional plans for the semester and committed to myself that I would implement SBG/SBSG/MasteryGrading in 100% of my courses this semester.

Did I mention that I got home from Mathfest only 15 days in advance of my semester start?

The Nuts and Bolts of Fall 2018: SBG PreCalculus and SBG College Algebra

Rachel Weir, of Allegheny College, is maintaining a repository of course documents for secondary Mathematics courses that are using Standards-based grading, Specifications-based grading, or Mastery-Based Grading: Rachel’s SBG Repository

Both my Pre-Calculus and College Algebra courses are using the exact same setup. It’s very similar to Tom Mahoney ‘s (@MathProfTom) approach in his College Algebra courses. Here is the basic setup:

  1. I have written 25 standards for each course.
  2. Every time a student completes a problem on a standard, I will assess the solution using a “SGN Rubric” (see below). This assigns either 0 points, 1 point, or 2 points to each attempt.
  3. A student’s score on a standard is the average of their best two attempts.
  4. A student earns total points out of 50 possible (25 standards*2 points max). Together with work in an online homework system, this converts to a usual letter grade*.

For example, for any given standard, I will track a student’s progress as something like “0,1,2,1,1,1,0,2” and this student will earn a 2. After two perfectly correct solutions, the student isn’t required to answer problems on that topic again.

*My department requires a departmental-wide final exam that is graded using a partial credit, percentage system, and this exam must be worth at least 25% of each student’s course grade. So the actual grade computation is (75% performance on standards)+(25% final exam performance).

Links to Possibly Useful Things

Here are some links that I’ve freely distributed to my students. Perhaps reading them will shine some light on how I explained this system to them. Also, there are more details about the “SGN Rubric” I mentioned above and explanation about online homework & how it fits in.

Things To Do Later

I haven’t mentioned that third class (“Applications of Mathematics Across the Curriculum with Technology”). It runs double speed for half the time, during our Express II semester, and it doesn’t start until October. I want this course to be a project-based course, so I’m going to figure out some way to introduce specifications grading into my design. Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) has written extensively about his use of specs-grading and it’s my plan to steal as many ideas from his MTH 350 F18 Syllabus as I can. Our courses are very different, but he has so many clever ideas for his course skeleton. Once I write my syllabus, I’ll tell you about it.

MAAthfest 2018

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Right now I’m in Denver, Colorado at the MAA’s annual Mathfest. Mathfest is fantastic, and every time I come I tell myself I should come back every year. Check out the Twitter hashtag #MAAthfest to see some of what’s going on.

I’m here to give to talks — one was yesterday and the other is this afternoon. Both are on the topic of non-traditional grading (or mastery grading), which I’ve written a lot about in the past. Here are copies of my slides:

I think my take-away message of both presentations is the same, and it’s the following:

Kate’s Grading Philosophy: Grades should reflect student knowledge and should have a positive effect on student learning.

Standards-based grading is the way I’ve decided to build this philosophy into my courses. Since I’ve written about my implementation in the past, now I’ll describe something I want to do in the future.

I want to implement some kind of portfolio assignment for students to show off their homework solutions. I imagine letting each student pick her best/favorite solution for each course standard, and gathering them all up together, for an end-of-term “look at all the stuff I’ve learned!” binder. This project would fit into course grades as a “grade modifier” on top of a “base grade”. The base grade would come from performance on standards on normal assessments (exams, quizzes, etc) and would be a typical letter grade (A, B, C, …). The performance on the portfolio would modify a B-grade into B-, B, or B+, depending. My rationale for implementing this project is (a) to have the students work on a single thing throughout the term, with changes for feedback, revision, drafting; and (b) to motivate them to work on homework problems or even more difficult problems that aren’t necessarily accessible in an in-class assessment.

My fear is by doing this, I’m asking dozens of students to hand me dozens of problems to review, right at the time that the clock starts speeding up for me to get my final grades submitted. Also, this is probably going to be at the same time that I have to write and grade final exams, and also tackle all of the re-assessments that students are excited to tackle at the very and absolutely last second possible. Until I find some way to schedule my way out of a complete grading nightmare, my portfolio idea is going to be on hold.