[Let me start with a caveat: I stole this idea. Like so many good classroom practices, I picked it up from a mentor, a colleague—maybe even from a friend on Twitter. If the person I stole this idea from is reading this article, I apologize that I couldn’t give you due credit. Please claim that credit in the comments.]
Grading participation is notoriously tricky. Students often perceive participation grades as arbitrary, and teachers like Derek Bruff and Ladysquires argue that grading participation damages the social contract of the classroom. Nevertheless, in classes where regular student input is expected (or necessary), many professors see value in assessing students’ contributions to class discussions and activities.
Last May Brian shared how he grades students’ class participation. At the end of that article, he speculated about crowdsourcing participation grades. I haven’t quite crowdsourced participation grades this semester, but in my College Writing class I’m experimenting with a more dialogical approach to the process. The way it works is simple.
I’ve set aside twenty minutes for in-class writing assignments three times during this semester—the first of these fell last week. The assignment sheet for these classes is simple: on it I’ve printed the class participation policy from the syllabus. I ask students to write a one-page essay in which they:
- Propose what grade they deserve for class participation thus far, and
- Defend their proposed grade with evidence from the classroom.
I tell students that their actual participation grade will be determined by the persuasiveness of their essays. I advise them that I won’t find an essay persuasive if it misrepresents its evidence—just as I wouldn’t find an essay about Moby-Dick persuasive if it cited Ahab’s heroic victory over the whale. “If you have trouble finding enough evidence to make a case for a good grade,” I advise, “use your essay to describe instead the specific steps you will take to improve.”
Having collected one round of these essays, I’m ready to tentatively declare the experiment a success. By and large, my students were honest—perhaps even too exacting—in their self-evaluations, and participation has noticeably improved in the weeks following the exercise. I like asking students to evaluate their own participation for a few reasons:
- The assignment forces students to revisit the guidelines laid out in the syllabus, which strikes me as a useful exercise in and of itself.
- The assignment encourages students to reflect critically on how they’re working to meet those standards—to substantiate their actual contributions to the class, which often differ from their perceptions of how they’ve contributed. Students who only come to class have difficulty arguing that their mere presence satisfies expectations.
- The assignment challenges the idea that professors randomly (or worst, vindictively) assign participation grades by exposing the process of evaluating participation to students. My students quickly understood that we were working with a standard—the syllabus—that could be effectively compared to specific classroom activities or moments.
- The assignment asks students to practice the central skill that this course seeks to develop: building persuasive arguments based on evidence. The twenty minutes they spend writing these participation essays (sixty, if you count all three evaluation days) are minutes in which they’re fully invested in the rhetorical process.
There are, of course, potential problems with this approach to grading participation.Some students are too hard on themselves, assigning grades far below what they’ve actually earned in class. Others err in the opposite direction. One of my students, for example, argued that she had earned an A- for participation, despite the fact that she regularly texts in class, rarely lifts her eyes above her laptop screen, and had only contributed twice to classroom conversation over ten class sessions. If you plan to try this method for grading participation, you must be prepared to comment more extensively on essays when students’ self-assessments veer wildly from reality. I must say, however, that in a class of twenty I only had to correct two students: one who dramatically undercut herself, and one that dramatically oversold herself.
This assignment could also pose problems for students with disabilities. Students who need accommodations for timed work, for example, might need to complete the essay outside of class.
Overall, however, I’ve been impressed with the way self-assessment reframes the issue of class participation. This assignment helps students reflect on their class citizenship, and reconsider how their professors assess a course goal that might otherwise seem subjective or arbitrary.
How do you assess participation? Do you grade it at all? Tell us about it in the comments.
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user Michael 1952.]
