Course Assessment
Grades have been purported to be an unbiased way to evaluate students in a course, but many studies have found that grades have the exact opposite effect - they can lessen a student’s motivation to learn, they can create a competitive classroom environment, and they have been shown to be inconsistent (Schinske and Tanner 2017). Additionally, grades have an underlying assumption that every student is the same – in their preparation, in their learning styles, and in their reasons for taking the class (Robinson 2020 TED Talk). Students take Bio131 for very different reasons, and many have specific goals they wish to pursue.
Bio131 is based on labor based contract grading, which aims to reward the process and practice of learning, encourage risk-taking, and give students agency to learn concepts that they are the most interested in. In contract grading, students have agency in choosing what success means to them. Some students, for example, might be very motivated to learn about programming skills and want to use this class as an entry point to computer science. Others might be more interested in the biological questions that have been “solved” by computational methods and in the questions that remain unanswered. Still others might be drawn to the connections to society and social science aspects of the topics. These are all good reasons for being in the class, and there is flexibility to dive into what you are most excited about.
Contract grading clearly outlines the criteria for success for each type of work in the course and how that culminates in a final grade. If you have done all that is asked of you in the criteria for success, you have completed the work. I will be giving you lots of feedback along the way, but this feedback is designed to be decoupled from your completion of the work (with some exceptions). I will check in with you about your progress throughout the semester, so we are on the same page regarding your grade.
Labor based contract grading has been extensively described and used by Asao B. Inoue at Arizona State University. For more information about labor based grading for writing classes, refer to his “Where Does Grading Come From?” blogpost series.