Seems like a pretty weird question, eh?
Marks = assessment
Or do they?
Are you using marks for behaviour modification?
- Do you give marks for regular attendance?
- Do you give marks for “participation”?
- Do you give marks for anything else that is not a measure of having learned something?
If so, your marks are not all about assessment.
They are rewards in a behaviour modification scheme.
How do you react when I put it that way?
- Does it make you squirm?
- Do you get defensive?
- Do you want to resist that descriptor?
- Do you feel like that isn’t the way you want to be described?
Well, stop doing it.
I have more posts up my sleeve on related issues.
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Twitter: enkerli
says:
Well… I see what you mean and where it’s coming from. But I do have grades for engagement/contributions in many of my courses. It does relate to expected behaviour, especially in terms of contributing to the overall learning environment. As I try to explain, it’s about doing something with the learning experience. It’s the “how would the class be different if you weren’t there?” dimension.
It did start out as a grade for participation and I do have a participation/attendance grade in an online course I teach (with a fixed syllabus). But my current approach is quite different from that, though it does take participation into account. One thing is that it replaces “extra credit,” which is the thing I personally oppose in my teaching.
In several of my courses, students assess their own contributions at the mid-semester point, with justification, which really helps them to show how involved in the course they are. At the end of the semester, I assess their contributions in view of this self-assessment. One thing is that it allows me to highlight efforts and improvements during the second part of the semester.
Much of this is about coping with a “culture of entitlement” which is so pervasive in North American universities. Especially on prestigious campuses in the United States, but also at Canadian universities of diverse types. Even if, for a lot of students, it’s all about getting by, retaining core information, and getting high grades, there’s still hope for things like peer-learning, critical thinking, collaborative behaviour (!), and even creativity. It can be a hard sell for some people who are convinced thst what their parents pay for is a value-proposition degree, but from what I’ve seen, it seems to do a lot in terms of lifelong learning and all sortsmof important skills which can go beyond vocational training (though they can be part of very practical training in a highly-skilled profession).
Also, much of this has to do with the latent functions of formal education. Not that we force people to comply to rigid and narrow models of proper behaviour. Not that we’re trying to create university professors. But there are some aspects of formal education which go much beyond “cramming for the final” or “regurgitating scholarly references in a paper to show awareness of key parts of the literature.” Not that these aspects need to be graded but they can be rewarded and those who might benefit from them are likely to perceive grades as a reward mechanism. So it’s a bit like turning the system “on its head” to get these very people to understand that there’s more to their time at the university than grades, networking, and parties.
Speaking of grading schemes, mine is rather idiosyncratic but it does relate to the way I approach assignments and exam questions.
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