TITLE: What Grades Mean
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 27, 2008 12:25 PM
DESC: 
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My younger daughter entered seventh grade this year,
and at the orientation session last week the teachers
made a point of saying that timeliness matters.  If a
student turns in late work, they will be "docked".
My mind ended up wandering away as I thought about what
this means for her grade.  If she ends up with a B,
what does that say about her mastery of the material?
About her timeliness?

Perhaps I was primed for this daydream by a conversation
I had had recently with a colleague who teaches one of
our CS1 sections.  Traditionally, he has had a very lax
policy on late work: get it done, even late, and he would
grade it straight up.  His thinking was that this would
encourage students to stick with assignments and get the
practice they need.  In past years, this policy has
worked all right for him, but in the last year or so he
has noticed more students putting off more assignments,
many students turning in several or all of their
assignments at the end of the semester.  Not surprisingly,
these students do poorly on the exams for lack of practice
and so do poorly in course overall.

He and I contrasted his policy with mine, which is that
late work is not accepted for grading.  I'm always willing
to look at a student program after the deadline, but it
will not count for credit.  This is one of the few ways
in which I draw a hard line with students, but I find that
it encourages students to take assignments seriously and
to get practice regularly throughout the semester.

Until I heard my daughters' teachers talk about their
policy, I'm not sure I had realized quite so clearly:
My late work policy conflates <STRONG>mastery of content</STRONG>
with <STRONG>professional work habits</STRONG>.  A student
can learn everything I want him to learn and more, yet
earn a low grade by not submitting assignment on time.

To be honest, that's probably not a problem.  In our
current system, it is not entirely clear what a grade
means anyway.  Across universities, across departments
at the same university, and even across faculty within
the same department, grades can signify very different
results.  Conflating the evaluations of knowledge and
behavior is only one source of variation, and almost
certainly not the most significant.

Employers who hire our graduates want employees who
know their discipline and who deliver results in a
professional many.  Still, I can't help but think what
it would be like to offer two grades for a course, one
for content and one for all that other stuff:
timeliness, teamwork, neatness, etc.  Instructor:
"Johnny, you get a B for your understanding of
operating systems, and a D for behavior, because you
don't color within the lines."  Employer: "We really
need someone with the right professional skills for
this position; let's teach him what he needs to know
after he gets here."

Increasingly, I am drawn to a competency-based scheme
for grading what students know.  West and Rostal have
been advocating this idea for a while, as part of a
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-10.html#e2005-10-17T21_54_33.htm">
   larger overhaul</A>
of CS education.  It takes some work do right, but the
effect on what we expect of our students might be worth
it.  Unfortunately, within the broader university culture
of grades and effort and time-delimited courses carved
out of a discipline's body of knowledge, moving in this
direction creates logistic costs that may be larger
than the pedagogical ones.

In any case, I've been thinking of ways I might change
my grading scheme.  I'm not likely to change the "no
late work" policy, at least not for upper-division
courses, and to be honest I find that very few students
have a problem getting their work in on time in face of
the policy.  (Whether the work is complete is another
matter...)  Still, I might consider changing how the
homework grade figures into the overall grade.  Perhaps
instead of counting homework as 30% of the grade, I could
count it for "up to 30%" and let the student select the
percentage.  Students who would rather not bother with
falderol of assignment requirements could stake more
or all of their grade on exams; students who worry about
exams could stick with 30%.  Perhaps having that be their
choice and not mine would motivate them even more to make
a good faith effort at completing the entire assignment
on time.

I suppose that my real concern in all this thinking is
with my seventh-grader.  She, my wife, and I already
pay close attention to her work behavior, trying help
her develop good habits.  She's already a conscientious
student who just needs to learn how to manage her own
time.  We also pay close attention to her understanding
of the content in her classes, but her assignment and
test grades are a big part of how we track that
progress.  As the grades she receives begin to include
both elements, we'll want to pay closer attention to
her understanding of the material in other ways.  I
guess I'm in the same position as the employers who
hire my students now!
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