In this episode, Sharona and Bosley describe the four decisions that make up the "Grading Architecture" of an alternatively graded course.

• How will you assess your learning targets?
• What type of proficiency scale(s) will you use?
• How will students show proficiency for a specific learning target? (I.e. how much evidence and of what kind to they need to provide)
• How will you wrap up into a final grade?

After introducing the four decisions, they explore some examples of common options used for each of the decisions. This includes:

• What types of evidence of learning will you accept?
• Exploring three common types of proficiency scales - 2 level, 3 level and 4 level scales
• Describing different methods for determining proficiency on a specific target (the Guskey method, N times, and decaying average)
• Evaluating options for rolling up grades, including the simple count method, the bucket method, and the "good to great" method with multiple levels of proficiency.

Resources

The Grading Conference - an annual, online conference exploring Alternative Grading in Higher Education and K-12.

Some great resources to educate yourself about Alternative Grading:

• The Grading for Growth Blog
• The Grading Conference
• The Intentional Academia Blog

Recommended Books on Alternative Grading:

• Grading for Growth, by Robert Talbert and David Clark
• Specifications Grading, by Linda Nilsen
• Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman

The Grading Podcast publishes every week on Tuesday at 4 AM Pacific time, so be sure to subscribe and get notified of each new episode. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - @thegradingpod. To leave us a comment, please go to our website: www.thegradingpod.com and leave a comment on this episode's page.

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Music

Country Rock performed by Lite Saturation

Country Rock by Lite Saturation is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.