Toward a Scope of Practice for (Un)Graders

What are we qualified for? What are we responsible for? And why do we assess student work anyway?

Photo by Daniel Christie on Unsplash

Since I’m not teaching at the moment, I’ve had some brainspace to zoom out and think a bit more abstractly about grading. One thing that’s striking me, as I read and talk with others, is that we need a common starting point for thinking about the purpose and functions of grading and assessment. Why do we, as educators, assess student work? What are the intended and unintended consequences of that assessment? Who are the audiences for our evaluations beyond the students themselves (and who should be)? What are we responsible for as givers-of-feedback or graders and what is not our responsibility?

This last question, in particular, was buzzing around my head as I listened to a recent episode of the always-brilliant Teaching in Higher Ed podcast with Bonni Stachowiak. Bonni was interviewing

Karen Costa

, who does fantastic work on a number of topics, including online learning, supporting students with ADHD, and Climate Action Pedagogy. Another of those topics is the educator’s scope of practice, which Karen and Bonni discussed at length in the episode.

In her book chapter on the topic, Karen draws from healthcare fields (and yoga therapy), where a “scope of practice” defines what a practitioner is licensed to do and what they’re not licensed to do. She speaks about a scope of practice for educators as the intersection of what we are “qualified for” and what we are “responsible for.” What I’m both qualified for and responsible for is “mine.” What I’m not qualified for or responsible for is “not mine.”

Defining and delimiting what fits within one’s scope of practice is especially useful for moments of crisis, like the onset of the pandemic, when instructors’ duties seemed to expand in many different directions. It’s also useful for conversations about how instructors should approach student trauma or struggles with mental health. For example, I am qualified and responsible for responding to students with empathy and referring them to mental health resources—that’s “mine.” I am neither qualified nor responsible for providing students with mental health therapy or counseling—that’s “not mine.” Karen suggests that developing our own scopes of practice can guide us toward “greater balance, freedom, and clarity” in our working lives. 

In the show notes of the podcast, Karen also provided a really handy scope of practice template. I used that template to create my own scope of practice for grading and assessment, shared below. This is still tentative and, like any scope of practice, may change with time. But I think it captures the direction of my thinking at the moment. I’ll follow up below with some thoughts about the process of drafting it and invite you to share your own thoughts as well.

NB: In the left-hand column, you’ll find the things I consider “mine”; on the right are the things that are “not mine.” If you’re on mobile, you may need to click through to see the entire table.

Why this was useful

I found this activity helpful for a few reasons. The first is that the process of grading and giving feedback can be really overwhelming. I talk to graduate students all the time about how to assess student work without letting it take over your life. Accomplishing this requires getting to the root of what we’re responsible for and not responsible for as instructors. Establishing a scope of practice can help us do that. 

Just as importantly, the activity can help us clarify what our qualifications and responsibilities are (or should be) from a more philosophical angle. It’s important to understand what we’re doing when we’re grading, the reasons we’re doing it, and who we’re doing it for, particularly if we want to make principled choices about our assessment schemes. Getting our scope of practice really clear may even be the first step to making broader changes in grading and assessment, both on individual and systemic levels. Grading reform will be a lot more difficult if we don’t agree on our primary purposes, audiences, and commitments as people who evaluate student work. 

Relatedly, I found this activity useful because it helped me separate my scope of practice as an educator and assessor from the functions I’m expected to serve as a grader, or at least the functions that the grades I assign are expected to serve. Here’s what I mean. When I assess student work, my first commitment is to my students, and I consider it my job to provide assessments of their work primarily for their benefit. But the assessments I provide, particularly in the form of letter grades, are also expected to make the work of admissions committees and employers easier by neatly ranking students and sorting them into buckets. If it wasn’t already clear from the above, I consider the former task, assessing students’ work to help them improve, within my scope of practice. And while it may also be within my scope of practice to share my assessment of student work with external entities (in a limited way), it’s not within my scope of practice to provide those assessments in a format that external entities find convenient—especially if it hampers learning for my students. This is another way of saying that while assessing student work is within my scope of practice, I don’t think that assigning final letter grades ought to be, at least not in the way that we’ve imagined that process.

Other tensions that emerged

Clearly one tension in writing all this down was the tension between what admissions committees and employers want and what my students need. I’m not super conflicted about this tension because my loyalties lie with students. Insofar as I can support both parties, I will; at the moment the requirements of the two groups diverge, my students come first. That doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about preparing students for their future careers. It just means that I’m mindful of the distinction between ensuring students have what they need to pursue their own professional goals and ensuring employers have what they need to turn a profit. 

But there were other tensions I’m less clear about, and one is the tension between serving students and collaborating with other groups who also serve students, like colleagues who teach in other disciplines or who teach my students’ subsequent courses. I think the “not mine” column sometimes sounds a bit more fiercely independent than I actually feel. Very likely, this is born of defensiveness, both about my subject matter and my grading system. First-year writing sometimes gets a bad rap from instructors of higher-level courses who are dissatisfied with their students’ writing abilities. And of course not all instructors are happy about alternative grading methods either. In truth, I do think it’s critical to work with the entire community of educators at an institution to make sure our students are adequately supported. But I can’t allow someone else’s pedagogy or beliefs about what should or should not be covered in first-year writing to dictate my own decisions, which are based on what I believe to be most beneficial for the students I have in front of me right now. 

And finally: some tensions also emerged as I was thinking about how much of this scope of practice was specific to me and my context to what extent these ideas might apply in other contexts. While I wrote it with other educators in mind, I found on reflection that it skewed pretty heavily toward my own discipline and position. To take one obvious example, this is the scope of practice of a college educator, not a K12 educator who would, I believe, be more connected to the community of teachers in their institution and the parents or guardians of the students they serve. And even the things that I anticipated would be generally applicable in the scope of practice may be more context-dependent than I at first believed.

Which brings me to my next point…

A community practice

The final step in Karen’s template is to share your scope of practice with your community. I invite you to create your own (un)grading scope of practice, and share it with the rest of us. What did I miss in the table above? What did I get right or wrong? What’s similar or different from where you’re standing? I think the alternative grading community would really benefit from talking about our individual and collective scopes of practice—especially as more and more people experiment with alternative grading and we start to think about grading reform on a larger scale.