Teaching: Does alternative grading work?
Advocates for alternative grading say it comes with many benefits. Their course expectations are clearer. Students’ stress is lower. Feedback is more valued. Students perform better.
I’ve reported the stories of several faculty members who testify to the benefits of moving away from points-based grading. But what does the research show? That’s where things get tricky.
As pedagogy experts know, it’s challenging to do research on teaching. Classrooms are not laboratories. An intervention could work well one semester and not the next, depending on the students you have in front of you. Fidelity of implementation is also an issue. Professors may start with the same recipe but add a few ingredients here and subtract others there. And many studies are small, focusing on a few dozen students across a couple of sections of a course.
I recently spoke to Marilyne Stains, a chemistry professor at the University of Virginia, about these issues. She has long been interested in alternative grading — specifications grading in particular — and has looked for ways to measure its impact compared to conventional grading.
Specifications grading is more commonly used in STEM courses, and Stains uses it in her own teaching. Instructors design activities and assessments so that students either meet them or they don’t (nothing is graded). Based on the feedback they receive, students are allowed a limited number of attempts to meet the outcomes if they don’t on first pass.
One of the ways in which specifications grading is distinct from other forms of grading is that various assessments are bundled together, and a student’s final grade is determined by how many of those bundles they effectively complete. Designs can vary significantly. Stains says she finds herself adjusting how to bundle and weigh various learning outcomes in her classes.
She and her co-authors designed a survey tool called the Perceptions of Grading Schemes, which they describe in a 2024 paper. It evaluates some of the benefits that specifications grading is supposed to provide for students, as outlined in a seminal book on the subject. They include:
- Diminished anxiety
- Clear expectations
- More accurate reflection of student learning
- Useful feedback
- Increased motivation to learn
In a recent study, not yet peer reviewed or published, Stains and her co-authors deployed the survey across 15 chemistry courses covering more than 6,400 students at five universities. The researchers asked students to compare their experiences between courses that used points-based grading and those that used specifications grading.
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Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system has experimented with “standards based grading”….
