vela said:
I'm curious if anyone has tried "ungrading" in their STEM courses and if so, how it worked out. The idea is to get away from the using points to determine a student's grade and use different types of assessment that better motivate students to learn.
https://www.jessestommel.com/why-i-dont-grade/
https://www.chemedx.org/blog/ungrading-what-it-and-why-should-we-use-it
My interest arises from my experiences since classes went remote because of the pandemic. Like many other instructors, I saw the mysterious increase in performance by many students on exams (as well as obvious signs of cheating in some cases). To reduce the incentive to cheat, I replaced most of these high-stakes assignments with low-stakes weekly problems, where students had to write up a solution where they had to identify the relevant physical concepts, explain their problem-solving strategy, and finally solve the problem. It wasn't enough to just write down a bunch of math, which they could easily find on Chegg or somewhere else on the internet; they actually had to articulate the reasoning involved. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the write-ups from some of my students.
There were some problems, however. The main thing was assessment. I developed a rubric, but then it would sometimes end up resulting in a grade I didn't feel accurately reflected the quality of the work. Over time, I've modified the rubric, but I've never been happy with the results. This semester, I'm considering just giving them scores of "satisfactory," "needs revision," and "not submitted," and record audio feedback on what I thought they did well, what could use improvement, etc. I'm still thinking about how to translate these results into a letter grade that I have to assign at the end of the semester.
Anyway, I would love to hear any comments or idea, tips, and about anyone's (student or faculty) experiences with these types of assessments.
vela,
Like you, I too had to adjust quite a bit of my assessment while conducting online or remote classes. The problem of "cheating" is certainly an issue with online exams. As with you, I had to de-emphasize exams, making them less than 50% of the total grade.
My assessment comes in different forms. Since most of the classes that I have taught during the past couple of years had been the General Physics courses, they had lab components. I upped the percentage of the grade from labs (up to 25%) after I was introduced to Pivot Interactives. I find them to be the best solution to "virtual experiments" because of two things: (i) other than actually performing the experiment itself, the students had do their own measurements of a real observation (data had all the errors of a typical experimental data), and (ii) I could modify the instruction to include a large portion of the material. It made it easier to test their knowledge of the topic by asking specific questions that I would have done in an exam. And they certainly could not look those up on Chegg or any other online websites since this often depended upon what they were observing.
Another form of assessment came from weekly discussion forum. This, I will admit, took a lot of effort and a lot of planning ahead, but sometime, there were happy coincidences. For example, it was the week that we were about to start a lesson on magnetism when the news reported on the testimony of that nurse in Florida claiming that the vaccine caused her to become magnetized. I immediately scrapped my planned topic for that week and instead, used the news report to ask the students to analyze scientifically every single claim made. They were to write their discussion post based only on the physics and not to make any kind of moral, social, or political judgement. And oh, the kicker was, this was a physics class for bio, pre-med, and life-science majors, so they knew a bit about physiology. It was as if they stars aligned and dropped this topic right on our laps at the right time.
Unlike the instructor in the video, I did not "ungrade". Rather, I emphasized some things that I did not normally do in f2f classes, and de-emphasized other things that normally would be a huge part of f2f classes. I had extensive training and got certified by the school as an online instructor, meaning that I could teach the courses that are exclusively online, so a lot of the ideas, techniques, and philosophy of teaching remotely came from what I acquired from that training. I learned that there are many different ways to student engagement in remote classes, and a variety of methodologies to assess their achievements (Bloom Taxonomy galore!). What I had mentioned above are only some of the things that I have done. Since most of my classes during the pandemic were synchronous, we also did a lot of graded "activities" as part of the online lessons.
BTW, my technique in combating rampant cheating during the exams for online classes is this: (i) all my questions are original and came out of my head (ii) my exams have strict time limits and only open over a specific window of time, usually during the published class time for synchronous classes. Let's say that I designed an exam that should take them 90 minutes. I will open the exam for a specific 2 hour window, say from 1 pm to 3 pm, and they can take the exam at any time in that time period, but they have only 90 minutes from the moment they start, with a hard stop at 3:00 pm no matter when they start.
Now, I have told them that they should treat the exams as if they were closed book exams, even though I specified that they were open book (restricted to only using the text, class notes, and everything from our LMS page). I also warned them that if they continuously needed to keep referring to their notes and text, they would run out of time. In other words, if they had to run to Chegg each time, there was no chance that they'd finish the exam. Texting each other for help to solve the questions also won't work all the time because I had a bank of questions that randomly assigned different questions to different students.
The result so far seems optimistic. Other than Spring 2020 semester when all hell broke loose, the percentage of A's, B's, C's, and D's in my classes haven't showed significant differences than my previous f2f classes (I got trained as an online instructor over Summer 2020 and started implementing what I learned in Fall 2020). I'm still refining and modifying my courses each semester, and just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, we've moved back to mostly f2f classes.
Zz.
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