Article: Grading
The Four Pillars of Alternative Grading
Robert Talbert
Adriana’s
Recommendation
This blog post cuts through the confusion many instructors can experience when choosing which alternative grading practice to adopt. Rather than examine the details of any particular practice, this blog post articulates four principles (or pillars) that unite all alternative grading schemes.
It seems smarter to focus on the overall ideas that unify these different approaches. So this week, rather than introduce another kind of grading practice, we’re going to pull back to a higher altitude and try to distill what all these ideas have in common and come up with a general framework for these practices. Not a “definition” of anything — there’s still too many idiosyncrasies and varied practices to hope for something that’s both precise and general — but instead a map, with room for interpretation, that stakes out some of the common ground that we seem to be walking together.
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