Alternative Grading in Large Classes
How to implement pedagogical values within logistical constraints
As an educational developer who promotes alternative grading, one thing I get asked about a lot is how to implement these practices in large classes or with high numbers of students. I have a lot of ideas about this. But because I teach small writing classes, I don’t have much direct practical experience to draw on. Moreover, I think the kinds of alternative grading that suit large classes best are not the kinds of grading I typically practice. While collaborative grading can work in large courses (my forthcoming book features a few people who have done it!), it’s not a great fit for every instructor.
That’s why I’m thrilled today to share some wisdom from colleagues who are making alt grading work in these contexts. I’ve been following the work of Jayme Dyer, Katie Mattaini, and Eden Tanner (who teaches at my own institution) for a while now. Each one of these instructors are using innovative grading methods in their STEM courses, often with many students at once. In this guest post, they have some advice for others who would like to explore the possibilities—just in time for spring semester planning.
So you want to try alternative grading. Maybe you’re intrigued by the promise that Alternative Grading can improve student learning and students’ relationship to learning. Maybe you’re tired of students gaming the system, seeming to focus more on their grade than their learning. Maybe you want to spend less time hating grading and more time helping students learn. Whatever brings you to Alternative Grading, you want to give it a try.
The problem is that you teach large classes. How do you implement alternative grading at scale?
In this post, we propose guiding principles and suggest concrete recommendations to help you design a grading system that better supports your students within the constraints of large class sizes.
Prioritize your goals
Large class sizes constrain what you can do in your grading system. Things you could do in a class with 10 or 15 or 30 students – like providing individualized feedback for each assignment, or coordinating with each student to arrange exam retakes – become much more challenging (if not logistically impossible) with 80 or 150 or more students.
However, we view alternative grading in large classes as logistically challenging, but not impossible. Importantly, large classes reduce the margin of error when trying out new grading systems. Just like cooking for a family of four can involve some experimentation (if you burn the rice, it’s easy enough to substitute bread or even scrap the meal and order pizza!), cooking a meal for a wedding with 200 guests has much less room for error. This doesn’t mean your grading system must be perfect before you deploy it in a large class! However, it does lead to three guiding principles:
1. When implementing a new grading system, start with small changes and plan to iterate
This is true for any class size, but especially important in large classes. Failures in your grading system can harm students; the more students you have, the bigger the impact if your grading system flops. So if you start with small changes, the risk associated with unforeseen hiccups will be smaller.
2. Identify and prioritize your goals
Starting small means focusing on only the most potentially-impactful changes in your grading system. What changes should you make? The answer depends entirely on your values and your students.
There are many reasons that instructors implement Alternative Grading strategies. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
You want the final grade to reflect students’ learning, not behavioral compliance
You want to reward students for learning, regardless of when it happens
You want to level the playing field for students with different levels of preparation
You want to promote real learning and measure real learning instead of one-off performance
You want to improve students’ relationship with the learning process, including failure
You want to provide different ways for students to learn and demonstrate learning
3. Context matters
Additionally, we also think it is essential to identify the needs of your particular students. One of us (Katie Mattaini) has used alternative grading at two different institutions. At one, more students struggled to pass the class, so she designed her grading system to help them identify areas of weakness and subsequently learn more so they could earn a passing grade. At the other institution, many of her students were high-achievers who carried significant grade-related stress, so she designed her grading system to support learning while reducing their stress about grades.
Your values and your students are unique to your context. What brought you here? What matters to you? Who are your students and what do they need? What problem are you trying to fix? Teaching large classes means you have significant constraints, and besides, change is hard. That’s why we think it’s important, from the first stages of designing your grading system to the process of iterating for future semesters, to be grounded in your why. Keeping your goals front and center will guide your decision-making process as you implement new grading strategies in your unique context.
Practical advice
Get student buy-in early
It’s important for your students to understand why you’re using alternative grading practices because it leads to buy-in to your grading system. If you’re open about your approach, your students will be invested - and maybe even excited - for the opportunity to escape the typical grading hamster wheel. Take some time early in the course for students to discuss the effects of grades on their learning and mental health, and share your values and the decision-making process that led to your grading strategy choices. If your grading strategies are supported by data, consider sharing the data with your students, even if it’s “only” from student surveys in previous semesters. If students hear good things about the grading system from their peers, they may buy-in more easily. If you have Teaching Assistants, it’s important to get their buy-in too, especially if they help with grading.
Use technology
The larger the class, the more time you can save by using technology to automate processes. You could use technology to help with grading,1 provide automated feedback, deploy and collect assignments, or establish an external gradebook to help students assess their progress if your Learning Management System can’t be appropriately wrangled for your grading system. Your institution’s teaching & learning center or edtech teams can be great resources to find out what’s available. Also, talk with other practitioners, for instance, on the Alternative Grading Slack or the Biology Grading for Growth group, to see how they’re leveraging technology.
Set limits on reassessments
The opportunity to use a feedback loop to reattempt assessments is a core feature of most alternative grading schemes, but providing infinite chances with no boundaries can backfire. Create some positive pressure by setting limits. You can limit the time window students have to retake the assessment, limit the number of attempts they get, or limit how they can access a reattempt (such as via a token system, exam wrapper, or reflection task). You can use just one of these strategies, or combine them, to create positive pressure to help keep students on track.
Be creative about providing feedback
In larger classes, providing one-on-one feedback to each student may be difficult to impossible. You can consider alternative means of providing feedback, including rubric-driven self-feedback and peer-feedback, collective feedback given at the beginning of class, or video feedback for common misunderstandings. To simplify the grading process for non-autograded work, consider streamlining the feedback you provide. For example, you can mark components on a 2-level scale such as having “met” or “not met” explicit standards, or you can use a 4-level scale such as EMRN.
Leverage on-campus resources
Talk to your Center for Teaching and Learning or similar to find out what systems or resources already exist that you can leverage in your courses. Some examples of what you might find are learning assistants or peer tutors, supplemental instruction programs, helpdesks staffed by teaching assistants, or assistance with reviewing your syllabus or setting up your Learning Management System to better handle alternative grading practices.
You can do it!
You face real constraints that limit what you can do in your classroom. Your class size may be so large that providing individualized feedback on student work is prohibitive. You may not have teaching support in the form of teaching assistants. You may need to coordinate with other instructors across multiple sections. If you are VITAL (Visiting, Instructors, Temporary, Adjunct, and Lecturers), you may have limited power to make changes to your grading system. If you do make changes, you may receive push-back from other faculty, or from students, who are accustomed to traditional grading approaches. Your identities may affect how much push-back you receive.
However, there is almost always room to make positive change. Identify the rules, whether written or unwritten, and identify where you can push. What is immutable? What is not? Take small bites. Try one small thing, in just one class. Get creative. There is no recipe that fits everyone, students or instructors! Keep your goals front and center.
We’ve done it. None of our grading systems are perfect, but we’ve seen the positive impacts on our students. You can do it, too.
How we do it
Jayme Dyer teaches biology courses up to 45 students using alternative grading at Durham Technical Community College. She writes about her use of multiple grading schemes and other nontraditional grading strategies on her Substack and shares resources for instructors on her website.
Katie Mattaini teaches biology courses up to 70 students using alternative grading at Tufts University. Her materials are shared publicly on the Grading Conference website. See Mattaini intro bio syllabi in the Biology Alternative Grading Syllabus Repository. (Other repository links can be found on the conference’s Resources page.)
Eden Tanner teaches chemistry courses up to 170 students using alternative grading at the University of Mississippi. She talks through her process for alternative grading a 170-person General Chemistry course in two podcast episodes, on Intentional Teaching with Derek Bruff and on The Grading Podcast with Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley.
*A note from Emily: the Grading for Growth book and blog also have several examples of how alternative grading can work in large(ish) courses, including this one from Jennifer Momsen’s introductory biology course.
A note about the Substack platform from the authors. We had several conversations about whether we wanted to write a post that was published on Substack, given Substack’s current stance on publishing pro-Nazi and racist content. We decided to write this guest post because we think alternative grading can help move the needle in a more just and equitable direction, but we nevertheless want to collectively express our discomfort with Substack for choosing to promote and platform Nazi rhetoric. Notably, one contributor to this post chose not to list their name as an author out of a moral objection to Substack’s pro-Nazi stance.
For example, we’ve heard good things from instructors who use gradescope to grade large numbers of student responses, but none of the authors have personally used it, so we can only anecdotally recommend it. Mail merge can also be helpful for creating student-specific progress reports from a single spreadsheet, if your grading is being tracked outside of the LMS gradebook. Katie Mattaini has even used this before to send out links to retest documents for students retesting different learning objectives.
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