We received a number of thoughtful responses. I wanted to share two that underscore the many factors that can influence grades:
Elizabeth A. Manwell, a professor of classics at Kalamazoo College, saw several drivers of rising grades. “Here’s the plus side: The longer I teach, the better I get at this: I create better assignments, I refine what students really need to know, I think more intentionally about assessment,” Manwell wrote. “And many of my younger colleagues leave graduate school much better prepared in all these ways than I was. I also think that some of these ‘high-touch’ contacts work — as well as having a more diverse professoriate, more attention to student (mental) health and need for accommodations, willingness to credit high-impact practices, and overall greater attention to student learning. When, for example, I write a paper prompt and students say, ‘I loved writing this paper’ — and it gets students to the same place that the boring prompt — well, they are going to engage more, spend more time, and probably do a better job.
“Here’s the down side: Cheating is crazy high. This was especially true during the pandemic, but the opportunities and ways to cheat seem to grow exponentially every year, and ChatGPT is just the latest thing. This is perhaps less troublesome for me at a SLAC [small liberal-arts college], but my friends who are teaching giant lecture courses — I think the struggle for them is real. And I would also be lying if our college president didn’t begin every faculty meeting telling us how it’s OUR job to hold onto students, and OUR job to bring in the next class, and that we are in danger of massive cuts. So how do you get students to stay? Well, one way is to pass them when they shouldn’t, and to give them a higher grade than you might have in years past.
“And here’s the middle: I think a lot of us are tired. So a student is on that cusp at the end of the term, and in those halcyon pre-Covid days, you would have given them the B. But this term, when you are inputting those grades, and you yourself are at a breaking point and can barely get out of bed in the morning, you might look at that 86 percent a little charitably, and just bump them up to a B-plus.”
Deborah A. Abowitz, a professor of sociology at Bucknell University, raised a few potential factors that hadn’t occurred to me. “I have been struggling against the tide of rising grades from two other, more structural sources,” Abowitz wrote. “The first is participating in a writing-across-the-curriculum program. The second is the implementation of labor-based contract-grading schema in some of my undergraduate courses.
“If WAC programs focus on teaching writing as a process, as ours do, they require students in writing-intensive courses to write multiple drafts, revising and resubmitting their work. Many of my colleagues who teach these courses provide just formative feedback on drafts and assign a ‘grade’ only to the final paper, leading to higher grades overall. Who doesn’t do better when they get to rewrite their work?
“After a few years following this model (recommended during the faculty workshop that helped prepare me to participate in our WAC program), another externality of this approach became clear to me — more students began ‘phoning it in’ on early drafts, saving their time for the last stage (since only their final paper ‘counted’ for their grade). This approach allowed them to avoid accountability for often deliberately inadequate efforts on early drafts. In response to this growing problem, I made every draft ‘count’ in my writing courses. Students still get a lot of formative feedback and get to write multiple drafts, honing their work, but the grade at every stage factors into the final paper grade. Now most (not all) students take the early stages of writing assignments more seriously, and it helps mitigate the problem of rising grades. If every stage counts, you rarely see everyone getting an A (or B) at the end, but yes, I do see more A’s and B’s than I used to 10, 20, 30 or more years ago (even in my WAC courses).
“Another factor that may contribute to rising grades is the increasing frequency of labor-based contract grading. When the rubric for an A in a course is just the ‘satisfactory’ completion of all course requirements, and students have the chance to redo and resubmit unsatisfactory assignments, grades are going to rise. This system may promote greater student engagement and create a more-inclusive learning climate, something we all seek to achieve, but with the opportunity (or requirement) to redo all poor/unsatisfactory work and get full credit … well, we end up in Lake Wobegon, ‘where all the children are above average.’
“I do use a form of contract grading in some courses, but with a rubric that sets ‘satisfactory’ completion of the course work at a B. Students have to turn in better-quality work on a number of assignments to earn their way up to an A. I admit, I used to set the bar for ‘satisfactory’ course work lower, at a B-minus, so I guess I’m living in the suburbs of Lake Wobegon too.”
I remain fascinated by grades. One thing on my mind: Whose work is measured by grades? Students’ grades measure their performance. Yet when instructors try to improve their teaching, the outcome they’ll usually use to evaluate their own success is whether students’ grades went up. If you’ve got thoughts or resources to share on this topic, please send them my way: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Creating conversations
A recent newsletter article guest-written by our colleague Luna Laliberte described a five-step guide to creating livelier asynchronous online discussions. We asked readers about how they approached student participation on discussion boards, and got some thoughtful advice. Luna has rounded up some of their suggestions:
- Gamify discussions. Seth Matthew Fishman, assistant dean of curriculum and assessment at Villanova University, uses a Blackboard plug-in called YellowDig to encourage students to use discussion boards. “It has nifty features like students earning weekly points for engagement in our discussions, and automatically gives gentle nudge-mail reminders for those not actively engaged,” he wrote. Instructors can use similar strategies without a plug-in. Attaching points or extra credit can help encourage student participation.
- Approach through the lens of “ungrading.” Daniel Guberman uses a very different method. The assistant director of inclusive pedagogy at Purdue University changed his class structure to an ungraded approach in 2019. He wrote about working with students to reflect on individual goals that captured what they felt was meaningful participation. Guberman said that “because I specifically don’t have a rubric or points, I perceive students reporting more value from participating and reading others’ contributions to the discussion … Back when posts were required and got points, I often found myself so bored reading the discussion boards because it was clear many students just felt a need to write anything to satisfy the requirement.”
- Facilitate live discussions inspired by discussion boards. Tim Wolter, a humanities professor at St. Petersburg College, prefers asking students to contribute what they want class discussions to be about. “Students are tasked to submit two discussion questions related to the topic read. I read all submissions and then choose three to six of the best questions to use in our actual live class discussion,” he explained. Using discussion-board replies as conversation starters incorporates work students already did into live class meetings. And if your class has a synchronous component, asking students to pose questions or guide discussions includes them in the process of learning and connecting with their peers.
Thank you to everyone who reached out!
Bookshelf
Throughout the summer, we’ll be passing along readers’ responses to our question about what book has helped shape their teaching. Want to suggest a book to newsletter readers? It’s not too late: Please use this form.
Here’s the first set of reader recommendations, all of which connect brain science to the work of teaching:
Michael Rogers, an associate professor of mathematics at Oxford College of Emory University, recommends The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning, by James E. Zull. “I found it helpful to understand the basis for many of the practices I thought were effective,” Rogers wrote. “It is also helpful to be able to explain to students why the things I ask them to do help them learn efficiently. It gives the students another reason to commit to the activities.”
Ann M. Davis, a lecturer at Texas Woman’s University, recommends Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation, by Saundra Yancy McGuire. “I come from a family of college graduates, and I attended a college-prep high school, so I arrived in college already prepared with strong academic skills,” Davis wrote. “This book was a wake-up call that most students don’t come to us with that knowledge, and yet having good academic skills is a huge part of college success. I now include metacognition and study strategies in my introductory biology course throughout the semester, and I have had a lot of students thank me for it.”
Bill Goffe, a teaching professor at Penn State, recommends Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (second edition), by Daniel T. Willingham. “This book does a fine job describing what cognitive scientists know about how humans learn,” Goffe wrote. “I use what I learned in this book every single time I step into the class. Parts of it are summarized with pithy statements; three are “People are naturally curious, but not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.” “Memory is the residue of thought.” “We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.”
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
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