Announcing How to Grade: Alternative Models for the College Classroom

Yet another book project!

Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash

As readers may know, I am currently working on a book tentatively titled Collaborative Grading: A Practical Guide, to be published with the University of Oklahoma Press’s Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed series.

This week, with more hubris than I ever thought possible, I signed a contract for a second book, tentatively titled How to Grade: Alternative Models for the College Classroom. Fortunately, I won’t be going this one alone: I’m writing it with my colleague

Josh Eyler

, author of the insightful books How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching and Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It.

The book will be published with the Skills for Scholars series from Princeton University Press. I already have several Skills for Scholars books on my shelf, and I’m thrilled to be in the company of such fantastic authors. While the series has published a number of books about teaching, How to Grade will be first in its lineup about grading, specifically.

Let me give you a little sense of the book’s purpose:

Last week, I met with an amazing new faculty member here at the University of Mississippi who was interested in exploring alternative grading. She wanted to create structures that would discourage students from fixating on bad grades so that they could focus on improving their work instead. She also wanted to avoid penalizing students who had not been adequately prepared for college or who learned at a slower pace than their peers—something that traditional points systems with weighted averages often do. She had heard that there were alternatives to traditional grading, but she didn’t know a lot about those alternatives.

What she needed was a guide with brief overviews of a variety of alternative grading models, along with concrete examples that could help her see how those models might be applied in the context of her course. She also needed tools that would help her choose the alternative grading model that would work best for her as an instructor and guidance about how to modify her chosen model to fit the needs of her particular students.

What she needed, in other words, was the book Josh and I are writing.

Our plan is to begin the book by providing a genealogy or family tree of the most common alternative grading models currently used in higher ed. Opening chapters will also invite readers to reflect on their own priorities, values, and contexts as educators—reflections that will help them choose the most appropriate grading model for their classes.

The following chapters will each cover a specific alternative grading model. We’ll describe the model, note how it’s distinct from other grading systems, and outline the goals or circumstances for which it works best. We’ll also make some suggestions about how to implement the model successfully and provide sample materials that might be helpful to readers as they develop their own systems.

We’ll end the book by providing further tools for reflecting on and revising alternative grading systems. Additionally, the closing chapters will discuss grading reform at scale, providing research and resources to help faculty participate in (and even drive) meaningful change-making on grades at the systems level.

The primary audience of the book is instructors, like the new faculty member I was working with at UM, who are curious about alternative grading and ready to get started. But I’ll be honest: I needed the book as much as the faculty member did. As an educational developer, it’s sometimes difficult to find concise but comprehensive resources to recommend to busy faculty. Tools like UVA’s Teaching Hub and the former Vanderbilt CFT Teaching Guides (now archived by Derek Bruff) can help. But I think a quick guide to alternative grading in book form is much needed, and any educational developer supporting alt-grading-curious faculty at their own institution will find it useful.

How to Grade will also build on the work of previous volumes on alternative grading, particularly the collection Ungrading (2020) edited by Susan D. Blum and Grading for Growth (2023) by Robert Talbert and David Clark. We won’t spend much time on the problems with traditional grades—these books and others (like Josh’s Failing Our Future) have got that covered. But we will expand the work these authors have already done to provide guidance for implementing alternative grading and practical examples of these implementations in a variety of disciplines.

Our goal is that no matter what you teach or the context in which you teach it, you’ll find something useful in How to Grade. Josh and I are excited to get started!