Here’s the handout I gave to my students this term. It’s a big experiment, and it grew out of the fact that at the end of each term, I have to rank, categorize, and label all of the unique human beings I’ve gotten to know over the course of a semester. I want to be a collaborative educator, and that piece doesn’t feel very collaborative or educational. So I did some reading (cited at the end) in order to justify quitting that part of my job. So far, it feels great.
Edit: At the end of the term, which happened to include an unplanned global pandemic, students expressed gratitude for this grading policy/philosophy. The glitches in this system I believe were due to my own lack of diligence in setting expectations. Some students spoke of a “lack of deadlines” which was surprising to me. I have since updated the document to emphasize that deadlines do still apply. A handful of students (mostly relatively privileged, mostly male) failed to do any of the outside-of-class assignments but insisted that they had learned a lot and deserved an A. For future semesters, I will be more diligent about group-sourcing grade guidelines early in the term and revisiting these midway through. Students may still choose their own grade in the final conference, but large discrepancies between their labor and their chosen grade will invite a conversation about their individual situation and its relationship to the community-devised rubric.