 And I'd like to welcome everybody to this workshop on implementing alternative grading practices. And my name is Sarita Jangiani and I will introduce everyone who's a part of this workshop and the planning committee in just a moment. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to begin with the land acknowledgement. Okay, we'd like to begin by acknowledging that UBC, we've got both UBC Vancouver and UBC Okanagan. So I'd like to begin by acknowledging that UBC Okanagan is located on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Silic's people. And that UBC Vancouver is located on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. And today I'm joining you from the unceded and traditional lands of the Squamish and Swarovative nations. And if you'd like to take a moment, you can also share where you're joining us from today. It's always nice to see all the different lands that we have. And I'm gonna begin by providing you with an overview of what we'll be doing today. So I'll begin with a welcome. So again, I wanna thank everyone for joining us today for this workshop on alternative grading practices. For this workshop, we're gonna focus on alternatives to traditional grading. And for us, we'll give us an overview. So we'll talk about systems like standards or competition-based and we'll go through the different alternative grading approaches that are there. And this is an approach that specifically de-emphasizes grades and focuses on feedback to support student growth. Just a little background in case this is something new for you, alternative grading practices have been shown to allow students to be more deeply engaged in the learning process, to take more risks and decrease the fear and anxiety that's often brought on by traditional grading practices. And alternative grading practices also highlights how grades reinforce bias against marginalized students. As we wrap up today's session, we'll also talk about some of the risks and challenges that are associated with this as well. So I wanna take a moment now to introduce everybody who's been working on this workshop and helping with the planning. So if you wanna unmute and just say hello as I say your name. So we have Dr. Faraz Nasouvi, who's a lecturer in computer science, mathematics, physics and statistics department at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Hi everyone, nice to see you all looking forward to today. Thank you. And we have Dr. Jacqueline Stewart, an associate professor of teaching in the Department of Chemistry and the associate dean, academic in the Faculty of Science. She specializes in teaching general chemistry, organic chemistry and science communication. Hi everybody, nice to see you here. We also have Dr. Christina Hendricks, professor of teaching and philosophy and is also the academic director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at UBC Vancouver. Good morning. I'm happy to talk with you and learn from you as well. And I'm Seria Jangiani. I'm an assistant professor of teaching the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology and Special Ed, it's mouthful. My area of focus is on gender, culture, post-colonialism and development. I'd also like to thank our graduate assistant who's been helping us as well, Martin Dammert, who's here. He is a master's student in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology and Special Education and we'll meet him in a bit as well. So a little bit more about what we'll be doing today. In just a moment, we'll start with Faraz who'll give us an introduction to alternative grading. We then will move on. We have two breakout rooms, one where we can talk about, if you have any activities or assignments that you want to brainstorm and workshop and how you can move them to alternative grading. And we also have another breakout room where if you have questions about logistics, maybe this is something you've been practicing or you have some questions and you're new to it, that will be our second breakout room and I'll give you more information about that when we're there. We also have a student panel today. We have three amazing students who will share their experiences with alternative grading. And then we have a wrap up and next steps and we'll conclude with a question and answer session. So thank you everyone. And we're going to move on to Faraz who will start with an introduction to alternative grading. All right, thank you everyone. So some of you may have joined a session a couple of weeks ago with some lightning talks where folks from UBC have been doing alternative grading practices in sort of the real classrooms. And this is kind of an extension of that. We'll review kind of a more formalized description of some of these different methods, but it's important to realize that many of these are very flexible and you can kind of take bits and pieces of what you like and sort of put it together. So we'll review some of the common alternative grading systems, but before we can talk too much about what alternative grading is, I think it's worth it to talk about what traditional grading looks like. So traditional grading is what we all practice. Many of my courses are still using traditional grading. I'm slowly moving away from them, but currently many of my courses still use traditional grading where I assign weights to each activity and award points, marks, the letter grades depending on how you do it, and then tallying it all up in a spreadsheet. Other features include rubrics, rigid deadlines, late penalties, extra credit assignments, regrade requests, things of that nature all fall into what traditional grading typically is. There's also some a large emphasis on using tests, quizzes, midterms, and exams as summative assessments. These are all features of traditional grading, and all of this, I'm going to call it objectivity theater, is all in the names of fairness and rigor, which is sort of how we have, that's how I went to school and that's how I learned it and that's what we're sort of continuing to propagate. So this is what I would consider some traditional grading practices, and that's kind of an introduction to what we will then go into what alternative is. So anything that's different from that, it's under this broad category of growth-based learning, where instead of having a fixed mindset, you now have a growth mindset where you then create an environment where students can learn and grow and succeed and move beyond what you sort of regimentedly said was a distribution that you're expecting. So systems in this growth-based learning umbrella include standards-based assessments, competency-based assessments, specifications-based assessments, contract grading, portfolio grading, labor grading, on grading, and actually some traditional grading can actually be under the umbrella of growth-based learning depending on how you structure it. Really, you need to de-emphasize a lot of the points and grades, but it is still possible to do things in a somewhat traditional manner, that's why I put it kind of in brackets. And maybe it's useful to kind of see, you might think this is basically everything falls under this growth-based learning. Well, there is a subset of systems that do not fall into this umbrella, and I've put those in the corner here in red. This is not a judgment on, well, it's on a general judgment that it's bad. I personally think it's sort of not conducive to student learning, but you may have your own opinions and that's totally reasonable. There's definitely space for that. But these in particular are not growth-based learning systems. Grading on a curve, you know what that is, the bell curve, you kind of shift the distributions year by year, force distributions. So this is the number of A's, this is the number of B's we'll be giving out. Norm reference grading and relative grading. So the top student in the class will get this grade and then everything else will fall into line underneath that. There's also this, you know, people do all sorts of things like competitive grading where it's kind of like a competition and then it's, you know, imagine like a tennis match or a basketball team. You kind of like pit students against each other and then they compete on various, you know, elements and then at the end of the year, if you place first in class, you're the top student. So all those types of systems are, I would say not growth-based systems and kind of do not belong under the umbrella of alternative grading systems as we sort of refer to them. Okay, so let's get into it. What I'll do is I'll start with each system, maybe highlight two or three points that are sort of crucial or central to it and then I'll give an example. Most of this is designed as a reference so you can follow these links later but at the very minimum, these are kind of elements of each of the systems that we've put together to help you situate where they actually lie. So standards-based grading involves or standards-based learning involves assessing students based on their proficiency, on explicit and previously defined standards. Students have different and often multiple opportunities to achieve proficiency on those predefined standards and behavior is importantly not considered in the grade. Only their eventual proficiency in the specified standards. SPL reports, a feature of standards-based learning is that there's these reports that are given to the students and they describe the students' performance on each individual standard and includes information on the extent to which the students have achieved those standards. And again, a concrete example of this is from Dr. Stephen Klontz from the University of South Alabama. This is a second year linear algebra course. This is just two modules but there's a whole bunch of them in his actual full course. There's two checkboxes here. This indicates that there are two that the students have to demonstrate proficiency twice on each of these learning outcomes. And one example is I can translate back and forth between a system of linear equations and the corresponding augmented matrix. So this is a very defined standard. It's students get this in advance and they have to demonstrate proficiency twice on each of these before the course is over. And this is kind of a standard-based course. And then what does it mean to meet expectations? That is when the outcome is recorded as mastered. If it's not quite mastered, it requires revision and then students can submit revisions. And then there's another one that shows progress but further study is needed. This is kind of another requires revision but it's a signal to the student that they need a little bit more work to put into that, to demonstrate mastery of that particular content. And then insufficient evidence of progress that's essentially saying this work is not great at the moment. Please go back, work on it some more and show it to us again so that we can evaluate whether you've met the expectations. So the bar is raised considerably on what it means to meet expectations and the idea behind standards-based grading is that students don't scrape by collecting a bunch of partial points from sporadic understanding of different content in the course. Okay, so the next one is very related. It's a close cousin. We call this competency-based grading and this one involves a combination of skills, abilities, attitudes, values, and knowledge. So not just knowledge but also attitudes and values that are needed to perform particular tasks by the student. The key differentiator of competency-based learning and standards-based learning is that standards-based learning demonstrates understanding of concepts and ideas, whereas competency-based learning is a demonstration of practical skills or tasks. Okay, so this is again a key differentiator between standards-based learning. CBL or competency-based learning permits students to progress through material at their own pace. And here is a very, again, concrete example of what that looks like. If you ever go to a first aid course, that would be what I would consider to be a competency-based learning environment where you have to demonstrate particular skills, like open the airway, check airway breathing circulation, place the hands in the appropriate position to do CPR. And it's just binary, yes or no, right? And if you demonstrate those competencies or those skills that you have demonstrated that you can then do everything that's required, for instance, to do CPR for an adult or child. In a more academic context, you might think of engineering as a discipline that might do competency-based learning where you have to do these specific skills, build a building, and maybe there's 100 different competencies that you have to hit to get to that level where you can be qualified to build a building. All right, zipping through these because some of this might be review for some people. Okay, specifications-based learning. This is another grading system that involves assessing students' work in a rigid binary fashion. Full credit or no credit. Full credit means that they meet all carefully thought out and carefully and thoughtfully written specifications. No credit is anything else, right? So before we saw four different levels, now it's just two. Full credit or no credit. There's flexibility and redemption that's possible in specifications-based grading, and it's typically achieved using a virtual token economy where students are given, say, three or five or 10 tokens at the beginning of the semester, and they can use them at any point in the course to do a resubmission or hand things in late. It's essentially the idea that it's a limited quantity of tokens that's given out, and students can use it at any time for a variety of things that the instructor usually decides. And course grades are determined by preset bundles that students pick from. So imagine you're going to McDonald's and you're trying to order a meal, so there's like eight options or six combos that you either get to choose from. Each of them costs a different amount, and that's kind of what specifications grading is. These bundles that require more work are more challenging to do, or both earn students higher grades. And a concrete example of this is by Dr. Rebecca Kelly in her introduction to geographical information systems from Johns Hopkins University, where it's sort of, to get an A, you need to achieve objectives one to eight. To get a B, you need to achieve objectives one to seven. You need to do two articles, two critiques, and 11 responses, et cetera. So essentially it's bundles that you select, and this gives instructors the ability to say, well, everyone that graduates or passes my class, even with a C, has these particular concepts that I deem essential to the course. And again, it kind of increases the bar on what students leave the course with, because they have demonstrated mastery on a particular set of concepts that you decide are important. So everyone who graduates from that course has at least that level, and then the B and the A sort of go above and beyond that. All right, contract brace grading. So contract grading involves a shared process of assessment between students and instructors. It's based on a self-assessment of the student's strengths and limitations, and will determine what students need to do to achieve a particular grade. Contract grading can be used for a specific assignment or a task. It doesn't have to be for the entire course, but it can be used for a whole course as well. And this is an example from one of our own at UBC, Dr. John Beasley Murray from their RMST202 course, Romance Studies Modernism to the Present, and they've provided, I think they're here in the session as well, so if you have questions, feel free to use the chat. So if they do four of these crucial readings, their final letter grade would be a C and their percent would be between 60 and 63, and that kind of escalates all the way up to 11 texts read and blog posts written. And in this link, there's a whole bunch more detail on how that contract is done, what the buy-in process was, and I think John is also working on a paper to kind of show some of the findings of his course here. So this is a contract based, so each individual student signs a contract or agrees to a contract on what they're wanting to do in the course, and then they get a corresponding grade or letter grade or percent grade, depending on whether or not they accomplish the details in their contract. Okay, so a close extension of that is labor-based grading and labor-based grading is a set of social agreements amongst everybody in the class. So contracts were individual, so each student signed one contract. Labor-based grading is an agreement with the class on what determines how much time and how much work is determined for a student to get a particular grade. There's only one agreement for the entire class, but the entire ethos, I mean, it's important to take a step back and realize that the ethos of labor-grading is to pay no attention to judgments of the quality of writing and it de-emphasizes white language supremacy. So it's rooted in a very different mindset than what the contract grading is all about and in general, labor-grading was intentionally designed for language and literacy classes and one of the original authors of it essentially said, just because labor-based grading is not practical in an engineering class doesn't mean it's not perfect for language and literacy classes. So this particular grading system is sort of intentionally designed for language and literacy. However, some elements of it can be used in other courses as well, as is the case with any of these. An example of labor-based grading, this is sort of how much labor have I produced by week over time and so they're just counting the number of minutes they've spent over time. And this, again, different people do it differently. Labor sometimes people think of as the outputs and the eventual end results of what they produced. Other folks use the actual time that's been spent on this course and then they also have an assessment of the engagement of how much they've been engaged in this so that it's not just the amount of hours spent if those hours are not spent productively or in a very engaged way. So there's a reference here aside, Inouye, labor-based grading resources from Arizona State University. This is kind of the original person who proposed labor-based grading if I remember correctly. All right, we're nearing the end here. So portfolio grading is a holistic process that involves careful and purposeful curation of artifacts that weaves a particular narrative in the course. Students must also reflect on their learning processes rather than just document or collect previously submitted work. So importantly, this is not collect everything that students have done over the term and submitted as a portfolio. Students individually select a subset of them to tell a story. So, I mean, I'll show an example of this, but really it's about whether if I'll leave that for the example. The final course grade is awarded based on the instructor assessing the quality of the portfolio and the reflections against a series of standards and requirements. And again, two examples of this, if you're building a growth portfolio, you want to show growth and change over time. You may want to show early pieces of work and later pieces of work, early scores and tests, later scores and tests. If you want to identify strengths and weaknesses, let's say you hone in on a particular skill that you know you've been working on, you can talk a lot about what you did to change where you were at and where you are now. Another type of portfolio is a showcase portfolio where you show at the end of the year or at the end of the term, what you were able to accomplish with the knowledge that you gained at each point in the course. And so you show samples of your best work, you show how much each week's worth of content has affected your final product that you show. And this is by Dr. John Miller from North Central College, Authentic Assessment Toolbox. There's a whole bunch of examples of how this particular individual does portfolio grading in their courses. Okay, and finally we have ungrading. So ungrading is a series of practices and pedagogies that aim to dismantle historical power dynamics and hierarchies in education. The role of points and grades itself is de-emphasized in the ungrading pedagogy where possible. And instead there's a focus on feedback, intrinsic motivation and growth. And when grades are necessary, for instance at UBC, when they're mandated by our Senate, student agency is prioritized and grades are determined or negotiated collaboratively with a lot of reflection and justification. And we have an example of this by Dr. Celeste Leander who's also here in this session, Biology 342. It's a upper year lab course. And I'll just read out a couple things here. Congratulations, you've made it to the term. We have shared a long and involved journey this semester. Because you are the one who has spent time learning this material, you are best able to authentically evaluate your progress, gather everything you did in the course and there's a series of questions they have to go through to ensure that this is a guided reflection. And then at the end, please suggest a grade for yourself with comments. One of the key components of this exercise is for you to learn how to be a good judge of your own work. Be careful not to underestimate your score in the way of modesty, humbleness, laziness or even out of fear. Similarly, be careful not to overestimate your score out of overconfidence, laziness, arrogance, pride or a false sense of ability. So the student writes down their grade and then provides a thorough justification for why they're at that. And Celeste's course is linked again in the, I'll link it and if she's here she can just put the link in the chat. So she's written a lot about how this course works, how she spends time and how the students spend time and what sort of the outcomes are at the end. Okay, so those are the systems that I would consider are alternative grading. There's not a complete list. There's all sorts of variations that are possible. But I want to switch gears quickly. I probably have five minutes where I want to talk about some dimensions that we want to compare alternative grading systems. And so things that I think are important are flexibility which is accounting for diverse learners and varying starting points. Students in our courses come from different places not just geographically, but also academically and how personalized is your course? Structure, what students have to submit when? What instructors do when? And learning, this is a dimension but admittedly it's a very nebulous concept. It's hard to measure. Competition, this is the propensity for students to fight for each other, fight each other four grades not physically, although sometimes physically but just engaging in behaviors and things that promote competition, not helping each other, actively sabotaging other people. That's sort of the competition dimension. Student agency, this is the capacity or ability for students to have a say in their own learning. Instructor effort, that's kind of self-explanatory. Instructor student collaboration, this is a degree of collaboration between instructors and students during the course. And then student effort, the degree of student effort, students doing the assigned work. Okay, so these are the dimensions. I've got three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So, warning, okay, maybe before I get to the morning, I wanna ask you all, maybe in using Zoom Stamps, I want, so I just picked two, student agency and instructor effort. So I want you to evaluate where you are at the moment and where you want to be. And so I will use the annotate feature here, the stamp. And then I'll say with a check mark where I am currently, so I would say in terms of instructor effort, I'm here, but I don't give my students a lot of agency yet. So I'll put my check mark here. And where I want to be, I'll use a heart and I'll say I wanna be maximum student agency and it would be nice if I could put a little bit less effort into my courses because currently I'm putting in a lot. So this is mine, but let's use the green check mark to say where you are currently and then the red heart to where you want to be. So let's take a couple of minutes to think about this student agency and instructor effort. See where we are and where we wanna be. Just hide the names of that. So Mehran's asking what would the negative value be? It's not necessarily a negative value, it's just think of it as scale of minimum to maximum, right? There's no numbers. But yeah, negative student effort would mean you get a TA to teach everything. All right, thank you everybody. So it sounds like a lot of people wanna give students more agency in their learning, but of course there's, so one challenge with this is that okay, well, at what cost do you give students more agency? And so this is where, let me just take a screenshot of this and then I'll just pause the annotations and clear them because otherwise my slides will be all messed up. Okay, cool, so now I'm putting more annotations on there, great. Okay, so warning, the next slide is in beta and it's very opinionated, but one of the problems I hope you saw was that just picking two dimensions, it's very easy to say, okay, well, I wanna maximize this and minimize this, sure. But there's always hidden costs and hidden things that come into making that decision. So those other eight things that I sort of talked about, those other dimensions, it is worth looking at all of these systems on each of those axes. And we don't have eight dimensional brains, so we have to kinda look at these two at a time. So these are very opinionated, but this is where I would sort of put some of these systems in terms of flexibility. We sort of get lots of flexibility with portfolio grading, but there's also very little structure because each one is unique. And of course, you can add structure to any of these things. So that's why I kind of have these, like in the next version of this, I'll probably have some sort of error bars that say, okay, well, this is the range of which, but of how you can use that particular system. But the problem with that is that it gets very messy, so I'm still trying to figure out a good way of doing it. But in terms of flexibility and structure, this is kind of where things lie. There's other dimensions like learning and competition, and so traditional grading is very high on competition, and I would argue lower than the median or lower than the mean in terms of actual learning because students are trying to optimize completion of tasks rather than learning or retaining that learning. In terms of student agency and instructor effort, again, a lot of these things can be done with less student effort or more productive student effort, I would say, by also giving students more agency. And then in terms of instructor-student collaboration, all of these, it kind of falls in this range. Standards and competency-based gradings don't give students a lot of agency in what goes on with their learning. So there's predefined sets and sets of standards, and students have to hit this many to get an A, this many to get a B, but something like contract or portfolio, there's a lot more flexibility in how what students decide to do and what grade they get at the end. Okay, so anyway, lots of these things, and maybe this, yeah, John says objectivity theater. Maybe this is objectivity theater too, but it sort of helps me put these things on a map to see where we are, and it may not work, but at the very minimum, we kind of see these in relation to each other, and these are probably subject to change. Okay, cool, so I will stop there and pass it back over to, actually maybe we'll take questions again. Okay, so I'll pass it back to Sarita, go ahead, Sarita, take it back. For us, before we go, are there any questions that anyone wants to ask before we move on? The chat was lively. And yeah, we'll share these slides because a lot of the references is where you may wanna explore some of these things, and I've kind of presented them as individual boxes, but lots of flexibility. So Irvin has a question, I'm concerned about burdening students with so much labor. Is that a weird way of thinking about student flexibility? Yeah, absolutely, so that's why I think student effort is an important one, and you'll notice that all of these systems are all to the right of traditional grading, which means that for students, this generally means more work. And so, yeah, that is certainly a feature of these different systems, but the hope is that because students have more agency, they're more intrinsically motivated to do some of this stuff, and it's more interesting to them. However, the downside of that is that it may exacerbate some equity issues, if students are working part-time, or if they have to have people to care for at home, they may not be able to spend that much time. So I guess the flexibility is good because then they can also say, I just wanna see because of this, this, and this reason, and so that's what they get. That's kind of what you would get with specifications, but on the other hand, it also gives instructors flexibility to take into account each individual student's different circumstances and sort of incorporate that as part of the eventual grade to get at the end. So you started at a different level than everybody else, and with a different amount of time available, and so because of the amount of work you've done, we can compensate or account for those other things. And so there's checks and balances, and you gotta, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And yeah, as John says, it doesn't have to mean more work, but generally in my experience, and in those of others as well, students end up spending more time on average. Sally, go ahead. Hi, just to play the devil's advocate, I mean, obviously, as you mentioned, this is an opinionated piece of alternative grading systems, and we'll have to wait and see for the evidence. Of course, it will depend on how well we do these things, but in particular with the XY axis, I mean, to take the devil's advocate, how do you remark about the concept that not only are you putting more work on the students, but you get away with doing very little. That's another issue, and the level of creativity that's required for some of these alternative grading systems is quite significant. So just a word about that, and that that's sort of way of putting it in this graph, which suggests something very mathematical when there's really a lot in sport, it's kind of important to point out, we're just exploring, right? Yeah, absolutely. So you're exactly right. So it's important to note that the instructor effort I'm talking about is during the course, and as you astutely pointed out, this does not mean that the overall instructor effort is gonna be less because the amount of preparation, coordination, prior work before the course even starts required to do some of these things is enormous. And so I decided just to highlight on the instructor effort during the term to say that you're doing different work. You're not necessarily doing less work, you're doing different work, and that's work you might find more aligned with your philosophies. So nobody wants to sit in front of a spreadsheet and crunch numbers, but everybody, I think everybody would agree that giving students feedback is a very important skill. So if you're looking at a piece of work and you're saying, oh, this is a five out of 10 or a six out of 10, I'm spending a lot of cognitive load trying to understand what's a five out of six and what five out of 10 or six out of 10. But instead, if you could just get rid of those numbers instead, just give the students good feedback, that I think is a more productive use of your time. So the type of work shifts, and I think people in the audience that are doing this type of work will argue with me till the cows come home that it's not less instructor effort. In fact, more. I would agree it's more work and particularly in very large classes and here is how you give genuine feedback. And that's always been the issue. Large universities, large classes, how you genuinely assess students in any particular method, particularly whether they're that many of them. Thank you so much. We will now move on to the breakout rooms. So you can choose what breakout room you decide to go into. And for the breakout rooms, if you're going into track A, so you'll be able to choose from there. Track A will focus on transforming a traditionally graded activity to being alternative grading. So we can workshop, talk through that. We'll provide some examples as well. So that is if you wanna go into track A. Track B is to discuss general logistics and challenges. So Amy, this might be a good place also. One of the questions was, in the end we need to submit numerical grades to UBC on a particular scale. How do we reconcile this? Great question, I grapple with that often. So if you have questions, if you've been practicing, if there are things that you're kinda grappling with, how do I deal with this? Or you're new and you're like, what about this or that? How can I embed this into my course? That's a great track for that. So I will let you choose what track you'd like to go into. You can pick A or B. We will meet you in those rooms and we'll go from there. So next up we have a student panel and we've got three students who are gonna talk about their experience either in a class or as teaching assistants and with grading. These are the three kind of questions that they'll broadly be speaking to. Each student will speak for about five minutes. We'll give them a little prompt when they're getting close to that time. So I'll let you read the three questions on there and I'm going to introduce our first speaker. Our first speaker that will be speaking to their experiences as a teaching assistant is Tessa Blanchard. Tessa is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of Zoology where Tessa is studying the effects of temperature on early development in Fischer. She became, Tessa became involved in alternative grading this past year while Tessa was a teaching assistant in a course Biology 342 Integrative Biology that was taught by Dr. Celeste Leander who is here with us today as well. This is mainly a lab-based course where students get to learn various scientific techniques and conduct their own scientific projects. This course took the ungraded approach where students were provided feedback rather than grades on their assignments and reports and decided their own grade at the end of the term. Tessa's role as a teaching assistant was to provide a lot of critical feedback and help students reflect on their work and progress in the course. So I'm going to hand this over to Tessa now. Hi everyone and thank you for the introduction, Sarita. As she mentioned, I am the senior TA for Celeste for Bio 342 and I've had about a year experience of going in an ungraded format where typically the last three years before that were typically a graded traditional classroom. So the first thing, my experience and what I find is that this type of grading actually impacted me in a way that I view teaching and how my roles are as an instructor. So it actually really changed my perception about learning that you don't always need grades sometimes to evaluate students. I, when I went to undergrad and my master's I was always given grades and being on the other side and not giving grades to students was actually a nice change. I've found that students were able to learn from their mistakes and improve on them through feedback and just have a space where they don't have to worry and they just can focus on their learning. It does change my role as a TA as we've talked about the effort and roles as an instructor. Sometimes it actually does come a bit more work involved. So rather than just assigning grades my role was to give a lot of feedback and way more feedback than I've ever given before on students, positive and critical to help them improve on especially if they were gonna resubmit any of their work. But I find the benefits of doing this extra work for providing way more feedback outweighed the costs and that it actually reduced my stress. Cause sometimes as an instructor in a course you have to decide whether students deserve a 74, a 79 or a 60 based on a very strict rubric that we have. But rather than thinking and the stress involved and trying to decide what the student deserve I was able to focus more on just providing that feedback to help them improve. Moving on to more of the second question I actually really enjoyed my role as a teaching instructor in an ungrade classroom. It completely changed how I view my roles now and actually changed my relationship with students. So typically students would come up to me they'd be afraid to ask questions or they'd penalize if they made a mistake but now they realize my role is just to help them learn. So I've realized I got more questions from students they were not afraid to approach me I got way more emails cause my role now was there to help them direct them in the right direction provide them with feedback and help them continue to grow and learn the classroom. I also found it had an impact on my teaching evaluations. So rather than students making comments about maybe I'm graded too hard or I wasn't fair at the grading or it wasn't consistent I now get feedback as she was there to help me with my feedback. I wasn't afraid to approach her she was always available to answer my questions. So I think not only does it change in the classroom it has also changed my evaluations for the better and I found it just kind of developed a way better relationship with students. If there are any areas of growth we've talked about this before was you get a lot of uncertainty in students who have never experienced this type of ungraded classroom. So they feel overwhelmed but I feel like especially in our classroom once they got the hang of how to do the ungraded format they really enjoyed it and it was a big adjustment but once they got to the end of the course they found it very beneficial. For any advice if you want to try out alternative grading I definitely say try it out. Celeste had me read a book by Susan Bloom about the ungraded that I highly recommend. I could put it in the chat afterwards if you're interested in reading more about the ungraded format. You can also slowly transition into this role you don't have to convert completely. We did a 180 and completely changed our course to ungraded which I loved. Make sure you advise your teaching assistants on their new roles. There might be a bit more work in terms of feedback but I found it's very rewarding even talking with other students that have started this ungraded format in a lab based course found there was more work but it was also rewarding. It will not be perfect right away. You will have to make adjustments as you learn and go but the main thing I took away is at the end of the semester we actually had students come up and thank us for allowing them to have this ungraded classroom and the space to learn and not over feel overwhelmed by stress and the anxiety of grades. So I felt this being a teaching role in this position was very rewarding by allowing students to kind of have this space where they can fully focus on learning and rather than grades especially at a third and fourth year level where everything comes down the grades and the anxiety is high. This classroom created an environment for them to really learn and just kind of have less stress involved. So that's kind of my roles but I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to next year with Celeste as well doing an ungraded term. Thank you, Tessa. That was a very apt overview of the experiences and students responses. We'll come back for questions and answers after the panelists are done. Our next panelist is Julia Geist. Julia is a first year master of education student in the area of human development learning and culture in the faculty of education. She's completing specialization in social emotional learning. Julia is a practicing elementary teacher who is passionate about offering experiential, meaningful and authentic learning opportunities to her students and she's gonna reflect on her experiences with collaborative grading. Hey, good morning everybody. So as Rita mentioned, I bring a little bit of a different perspective this morning. I don't have any particular training or going into this course with Rita that I just completed. I didn't really have a conscious awareness of this idea of ungrading. So I'm going to share some reflections with you all that are just authentic reflections about my learning process without any context of the idea of ungrading. So the assignment or the assessment type that I did as a student in Serena's class was something called me, you, them reflection papers. So in short, what that looks like is there's a topic of the week. You write your initial reflections or your initial thoughts on that topic and then you have a conversation with peers and sort of take note of how your ideas changed or did not change after having a conversation with others. And then you move on to reading an assigned article for the week and then you sort of integrate your initial thoughts and the conversations that you've had with your peers with what you've learned in the article and then reflect on how those ideas and what you've learned can be applied in the classroom or in my case in the classroom in whatever professional context you might be finding yourself in. So initially I was a little bit overwhelmed by this assessment. I typically prefer sort of assignments with a little bit more structure but by the end of the term, I found I really appreciated the MIT papers and in particular the self reflection component of each assignment. So part of this assignment, the number four throughout the term was to complete a self reflection and assign yourself a grade based on certain criteria. Throughout the term, I found these papers helped me discover more about myself as a learner about how I think and how I process information. So while reading, sorry, while the self reflection components of the paper initially felt a little bit tedious to me, it proved to be quite beneficial as it helped me work out what aspects of my approach to writing these papers I wanted to continue to include in the future and what areas I wanted to change or improve on. So essentially throughout this assignment, it was repeated four times with different topics and I felt my skills strengthening each time I repeated the process and I found myself doing a lot of metacognition is the word that keeps standing out to me. So while this metacognition built somewhat forced in the first MIT reflection, it became much more natural with each subsequent paper. So by the fourth paper I wrote, I found that I already had a great deal of self awareness and reflection and analysis happening in my mind before I wrote the self reflection component. So I really enjoyed that experience because the metacognition became a lot more innate and a lot more natural as the term progressed. So I noticed myself actually improving these skills which are really important, especially in my role as an educator. Those are things I want to be having. So overall, I think the MIT papers were a valuable learning experience. Like I said, they helped me improve my metacognitive and self reflection skills. I really enjoyed exploring the content of each week in a way that was meaningful to my life and allowed me the space to focus on the elements of each topic that I found the most interesting or most important or most relevant to my life and my work with my students. So this was a really unique way of engaging more deeply with the weekly course content. That's all for me. Thank you, Julia. I loved your insights, especially talking about the metacognitive aspects. And I'm going to move on to our final speaker in the student panel and we have Martin Gamert. He is an MA student in human development learning and culture again in the faculty of education with a concentration in self regulated learning. He's a licensed educational psychologist from Peru with previous experience as a research assistant, university teacher and tutor and a teacher at both high school and university. Martin is currently interested in exploring social perspectives of learning and teaching and studying motivational phenomena across diverse educational settings. So Martin is going to share his perspective again as a student and a teaching assistant. Hi everyone. Thanks, Rita. Yeah, so today I'm going to share some thoughts and feelings about what I found appealing about alternative grading. Last time I had the chance to share with Rita's, I'm going to share some comments based as a student but at the same time what I was able to observe in class as a TA when applying these types of assessments. So first of all, of course as a student, alternative grading is appealing as it recognizes the student as a lifelong learner. And at the same time it offers them a lot of flexibility and a chance to personalize their learning journey. And of course this takes into account not only students strengths, but also their weaknesses, their experience and personal or academic goals they may have in the different courses. At the same time, these alternative grading systems that we have been discussing today allows students to offer the possibility to collaborate with others and these others can be peers and at the same time TA's teachers and other instructors. And it focuses on learning as a process rather than just focusing on achievement or on the actual outcome. And of course for some this can also be more engaging and more fun throughout the process. As a TA these last term I have been able to see some of the impact of low states assignments on student achievement and at the same time on their confidence. And of course what I was able to observe throughout these weeks was that students felt less stress throughout the course as they saw these minor components and minor assignments rather than seeing a major like summative task at the end that was like a make it or break it kind of deal. At the same time it gave many of the students an opportunity to collaborate with others and they were able to meet new peers, new friends and even change the different people that they were working with throughout the different projects. And it was a chance to offer them flexibility and to recognize that all of our students have many challenges and many other elements going on in their lives outside the class. So taking into account who they are as an individual rather than just seeing them as students that are coming completing task assignments and leading the course. But at the same time as you all are I am aware that shifting from these like traditional grading assignments to more alternative grading system does require a lot of efforts and specific competencies and support and time. So I just want to finish this presentation sharing some advice that I would give instructors. Of course I'm no expert in the field but based on my previous experience I have found that this specific advice could be useful for us. And the first advice that I would share with you today is that we should try to choose specific alternative grading systems that are relevant for our course or for our assignments or for the task. And we should try to adapt them and adjust these for the specific needs of students and for the specific needs of our course rather than choosing one main prototype or one way of how the system can be used. And at the same time after identifying the goal behind the system being used we should also take into account that we can share our expectations and the rationale behind these with students. We remember that students have probably also been used to these traditional grading systems so maybe they are finding this new tool. So it would be important to share the rationales behind these systems and at the same time, offer them structure throughout this process. Some may find it interesting, some may find it hard, some may find it challenging. And for others, maybe it could be like a complete waste of time because they probably don't have much information about the systems. But of course sharing these expectations might be super useful for all. And besides giving feedback which is something that Tessa and Julia have already mentioned in their presentation I think it's also important for us as instructors or TAs or teachers to try to collect feedback throughout this process. Collecting feedback from students if possible could be used to adjust the grading system being implemented during the specific term of the course. But at the same time as Tessa was mentioning adjusting the course and another assignments in the future. So collecting feedback from the users could be essential. And finally my last piece of advice will be to encourage you all to collaborate with colleagues to share resources. And of course ask for help when needed as this will allow all of us to implement alternative grading systems in a meaningful way. Thanks. Thank you, Martin. Thank you to our student panelists. Tessa, Julia and Martin really appreciate that you shared your insights with us. It's really rich to have student perspective and teaching assistance perspective when it comes to alternative grading practices. I am mindful of time and about three minutes to wrap up and answer any questions I may be lingering. So if you have any questions for our student panelists I would ask if we could use the chat for that. And if there's time at the end, we'll bring up and discuss any of the questions that you have. I just wanna take a few minutes to also wrap up and I wanna thank everyone for joining us today. But before we go, just also wanna highlight that we also, and I think in the discussions and the breakout groups, some of the risks and challenges were also discussed there as well. There's an article that was in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was by Chevella Pittman and Thomas Tobin. And I just want to highlight that because they brought up an interesting question in their article about being cognizant of the pros and cons with any practices that we adopt. And they highlighted that student-centered practices like flexible deadlines, alternative gradings, that the practices can vary and the outcomes can vary depending on who the instructor is. And so they're talking about who has the authority to give power away and to consider who the instructor is in these situations. So in their article, and I'll provide you the link to it, Chevella and Thomas both had similar policies with flexible and alternative grading, but the responses that they got from students were different. So Thomas was a male, a white male professor. Chevella is also a professor. She is a black female. And they had very different reactions. With Chevella, there was a lot of resistance, confrontation, whereas Thomas had a different experience with questions and curiosity about what the process would be like. So I wanted to highlight that. I will share the link for you because I think it's an important article and highlights a lot of questions we need to think about. And the other thing I want to let you know, and I think maybe Faraz has put the link in there. We also have a Slack group. So kind of where do we go from here? If you're interested in joining the conversation, please join our community of practice. And if you're interested, we also have a channel for research because one of the questions that was brought up in the beginning is what about the evidence, right? There's a lot of experiential feedback that we have, but it's also important to have some evidence. So if you're interested in being involved with scholarship teaching and learning, if you want to collaborate on some studies or get feedback, that's a great place. If you want feedback just generally on your assignments or activities that you're thinking about, the Slack group is a great place. So I just wanted to highlight that for you there. And we're at 10.29, so we got in. Faraz and I can stay for a bit longer if you have any questions that you want to bring up or share with us, we can stay behind and answer that. And we're out of time for questions, but if you want to stay, we can have some questions. And I want to thank you all for being here. We appreciate this and we'd love to keep the conversation going because there's so much interest in this. Thank you. And thank you to everyone who helped with the workshop, Faraz, Christina, Jacqueline, Martin, to our student panelists, Julia, Tessa and Martin, thank you. Thank you to all of you for being here.