I sometimes get asked why I use specifications grading. This is usually followed with the question, “What’s wrong with points? That’s what we’ve been using since I was in school, and what today’s students are familiar with.” Let's explore these questions a bit.

While exploring how to make my classroom more equitable, I found the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. Surprisingly, there was a copy of the book already in my house — the privilege of being married to another educator and having a daughter that taught for Teach for America. I started reading parts of the book and realized how much I had to learn. I narrowed my search to grading in computer science and found a couple of articles that talked about specification grading. That lead me to the work of Dr. Linda B. Nilson. I found the ideas behind specification grading fascinating and highly applicable to my situation. So, I set off to try it out.

I am documenting here how I used specification grading in my classroom during the Fall 2020 semester. It is too early to make bold claims of magical solutions as I am not convinced that my implementation of the ideas of specification grading are fined tuned yet and I only have 1 semester as reference. Nevertheless, I am definitely not going back to the old way of grading.

During the fall 2016 semester, I participated in a multi-session faculty learning community that explored what specifications grading is, how it might be implemented, and what it might do for our students and us. In her book Specifications grading: Restoring rigor, motivating students, and saving faculty time, Linda Nilson claims that specifications grading can make grading faster, clearer, and more precise, allowing the instructor to focus more on promoting improvement in students, rather than worrying about justifying a grade.

The basic tenets of specifications grading are to provide a very clear, detailed description of what is expected of the student for a given assessment (the specification) and then evaluate their submitted work as complete or incomplete against that specification—they either met the specification, or they did not. Simply providing clear expectations can make a significant difference in a student’s ability to submit what you are wanting. It almost seems too good to be true.

Historically, I have assigned points to everything students do for a course and then determined their course grade based on the total of their earned points compared to what was possible to earn. This means that a student can do poorly on some assignments (or not do it at all), and great on other assignments, and then depend on the “extra” points from the great assignment to offset the lack of points on the poor assignment. This effectively generates an “average grade”, but does not necessarily reflect what the student accomplished. Students were also inclined to beg for partial credit.

My day started by learning that a student had dropped my CS 120 course. Yes, I’m usually a bit saddened when this happens, but I understand there are lots of reasons students drop a course for which they’ve enrolled, and that most of those reasons have nothing or little to do with me. But this time it was different; the initial reason she gave to me for her dropping the course was how I was grading her work. I was particularly saddened and discouraged that I appeared to be the major reason for her dropping the course. Further, since there are few females who enroll in computer science courses, I really like to keep the few who do enroll. To think I might have chased one away was unacceptable to me.

I am utilizing specifications grading for the first time in our CS 120 course this semester. This course serves as our first introduction to programming for our students. I am evaluating most assessable items in the course as complete/incomplete—either they fully met the detailed specifications I provided to the students, or they did not. I am evaluating the outside-of-class, work-by-yourself projects based on an A-F scale, where students must complete certain specifications to earn a given grade. The better the grade, the more items that have to be successfully completed. However, the highest incomplete specification determines your grade.

Educators interested in equitable grading practices often do not know where to start or how to adapt practices to their specific classroom situation. While many educators would explore alternative grading if they knew how, lack of easy access to clear descriptions of practical techniques is a significant obstacle. This situation is complicated by the fact that not all techniques work in every situation, instead embodying trade-offs that require consideration, with some being more advantageous for particular class sizes, or particular learning tools, or particular course content, etc.

This Playbook collects practical recipes (or “plays”) describing specific grading practices instructors can choose to employ. It is organized into chapters that are each centered around specific aspects of a course’s grading policy. Plays within a chapter aim to describe various practices one might consider, including a discussion of the tradeoffs and an explanation of how to apply the grading practice. Individual plays also include a discussion area at the bottom where anyone in the community can add their own experiences with the practice, ask questions, or further develop ideas.

Nilson and Packowski present the unique characteristics of the specs grading schema, all of which simplify faculty decision making, reduce antagonism between the evaluator and the evaluated, and increase student receptivity to meaningful feedback, thus facilitating a mutually beneficial, rigorous learning process. Used consistently over time, specs grading can restore credibility to grades by demonstrating and making transparent to all stakeholders the learning outcomes that students achieve.

This book features five new chapters stemming from firsthand accounts of dozens of instructors actively using specs grading and new material in six of the remaining eight chapters. It lays out the surprisingly simple transition process, positioning specs grading as the most viable and easy-to-use system available to faculty.