Posts

Two Years of Ungrading

Let’s talk about ungrading. I’m 4 semesters into trying it out, so what have I done and what have I learned? The first two times I taught my Math and Redistricting course, I had a loosely traditional grading system, with different categories of assignments being worth a certain percentage of the final grade (there were never quizzes or exams). But really, this class was not about grades at all. The whole point and motivation for creating the class in the first place was to spark interest and promote true learning through an authentic interdisciplinary context. So after reading more and more people on Twitter talking about ungrading, this seemed like a natural fit for this particular course. Fall 2021 – Math and Redistricting First, I did not change the content or assignment structure of the course in any significant way other than adding more opportunities for reflection. To facilitate feedback, I moved everything to Microsoft Teams instead of Moodle which added an optio

Revisiting Grading

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Fifteen months later I’m back writing again and sharing my grading journey. If you are curious about the whole evolution, take a look at my earlier posts with this tag. First, I’m sure you could imagine why I haven’t written in a while but I finally feel that I’ve moved past the overwhelming sense of burnout from this past year and am ready to continue my quest of revolutionizing the college math classroom. For the purpose of documenting progress and continued steps and changes I do want to share how I handled assessment over the last year. To provide some context, all of the classes in which I used mastery grading last year were in a hybrid format (some students in classroom, some joining via Zoom) and naturally, the format of the class impacted the way I handled assessments as well. I continued to use and modify the grading system in the same Math and Politics class described in the previous posts and I also incorporated the system in a Statistics course which I taug