Presentation on thoughtful assessment philosophies in higher education, including thoughts on the role of grade curving methodologies and rubric design in promoting student success.
This presentation will focus on the importance of assessment philosophy and design to student success in higher education, and how educators and institutions might think about these factors when creating and facilitating their classes. Specifically, the session will focus on the concepts of grade curving and rubric design.
Grade Curving - My law school experience was easily one of the most humbling and character-building times of my life. This is because law schools engineer assessments to push the limits of student potential and produce brilliant critical thinkers. Every assessment in every class is designed to be extremely challenging, so much so that rarely does anyone actually earn a passing grade from the raw scoring. Even the brightest and most well-prepared students are taken to their breaking points. But the raw scores are not the final scores. Thereafter, the professors shift the bell curve of grade distributions upward. The highest grade — even though it might be a failing grade to begin with — becomes an A, and every other grade falls in sequence below that A, with the same spread and standard deviations as the original scoring. This is commonly referred to in academia as grading on a curve, and it is controversial to say the least. But having experienced it as a student, having used grade curving for over a decade as a professor, and having heard the worst criticisms of this assessment method, I nevertheless advocate grading on a curve throughout higher education, as a best practice institutions ought to borrow from their law school counterparts. In this session, I will break down the finer points of grade curving and debunk lazy counterarguments.
Rubrics - I have taught for eight higher learning institutions over the course of more than a decade. And in that time I have worked with rubrics for undergraduate and graduate classes and for brick-and-mortar and online institutions, using quantitative and qualitative assessments for a wide variety of disciplines. What I have observed throughout this experience is that many rubrics are far more complicated and confusing than they need to be. Consequently, they serve more to distract from the learning process than to support it. In this session, I will offer three helpful tips for improving rubrics so that they provide the most helpful information to the student without unncessary complication.