Feedback First Classrooms: Rethinking Grades in College English

How many of us have had conversations with students in which the only goal was to clarify how we assigned points, percentages, or grades to individual assignments or to the overall course?  It was years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.  I had just handed back graded essays in one of my first-year composition courses, and almost immediately one of my students approached me with a concern about her grade.  The essays were worth a total of 25 points, and the student earned 24 points.  She set the essay down in front of me, pointed to the total, and asked why I had “taken off” that one point.  At first, I was speechless, but after several minutes of a back-and-forth with the student, I just gave in and let her have a perfect score on the essay.

After that experience, I thought, What have we done to our students when they are so worried about one point?  Surely, there must be a better way to do this.

I soon learned I was not the only instructor in my department frustrated with the usual ways we grade student writing, and yes, I mean rubrics–especially rubrics that lead to final grades.  One of my colleagues, Dr. Susan Cosby Ronnenberg, had stumbled across the work of Jesse Stommel and Susan Blum and read their ideas regarding reducing or eliminating grades in the classroom.  She shared these ideas with me, and I soon found myself piloting “ungrading” in one of my classes.  After that experience, I was hooked.  The very next semester, I went as gradeless as possible in all my courses.

In her book Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), Blum writes:

My reasons for wanting to get rid of grades were numerous: I felt as if my students were fixated on grades above all else.  In fact, as I reported in my book, students told the research team that ‘the purpose of college is to get good grades.’  Most faculty conversations with students include some discussion of grades: What do you want?  What do I have to do to get an A?  How can I improve my grade?  What are the criteria for grades?  And the professor takes on the role of judge rather than coach, acting as all-controlling widget producer instead of companion on the road of learning…Everything focused on pleasing the professor. (54-55)

Is that the purpose of college?  Are students not in school to learn?  Blum, of course, argues that no, that is not the purpose of college, and that people are perfectly capable of and enjoy learning in various settings without being graded (56).  So why do we continue to grade?

I wish I had a list of answers, but honestly, I do not.  What I do have is information I found on the problem of grades and ways I tried to address those problems in my own classroom as I transitioned to focusing on providing feedback first, that is, providing as much feedback as possible on student work before we ever discuss grades.

Definition of Grades

Let us begin by defining grades; what are they?  Many of us are probably grading student work in some way and think we could have a simple, straightforward answer to this question.  We could generate responses related to grading scales, rubrics, and objectivity.  If a student gets all A’s in their classes, what does that mean?  We might say the student showed up, did the work, followed the directions, submitted all their work on time, studied hard for tests, and spoke up or participated in class, but does it mean they learned how to become sophisticated writers and thinkers?  Stommel argues that the invention of grades has a more negative origin and intent when he states, “An ‘objective’ approach to grading was created so systematized schooling could scale–so students could be neatly ranked and sorted into classrooms with desks in rows in increasingly large warehouse-like buildings” (26).  Ranking and sorting.  That does not sound like something I want to be part of as I try to help each of my students become better readers, writers, and thinkers.

The Problem with Grades

Education researchers who have started to rethink the way we assess student work raise numerous concerns with grades, but I will focus on three.  First, grades alone are not helpful feedback to the students and do not provide adequate information regarding student learning and progress.  Blum, Stommel, and Blackwelder all argue that providing students with written or verbal feedback on their work is more effective than relying on rubrics and grades to communicate that information.  In fact, Blackwelder compares his own experiences with providing grades and comments on papers to the findings of Ruth Butler’s 1988 study.  Butler found that students who received only comments consistently outperformed students who received only grades or grades plus comments. Blackwelder confirmed this in his own classroom: providing only comments helped students focus on the learning and improving the work rather than focusing on getting a good grade, which works to reinforce their identity as either a success or a failure (Blackwelder 46-47).

Second, while they give the appearance of fairness and objectivity, grades are actually neither.  Blum states:

students see the rules as arbitrary and inconsistent.  Different professors have different scoring — participation, homework, teamwork or no teams, tests, showing your work, partial credit — all which appear to be plucked out of thin air and make no sense, as I found in my research on plagiarism.  Citations?  Sharing?  Page length?  Number of quotes?  Consult notes or closed book?  Students have to figure out in each case what the professor wants.  It all seems arbitrary, and therefore unconnected with anything meaningful or real. (56-57)

And, even if we think using a rubric helps us grade each individual paper objectively, we are kidding ourselves.  As Johnson points out, all our decisions about writing are wholly subjective, and students are aware of this.  For example, it is much easier for a student to argue with an English instructor for more points on an essay than to argue with a math or science instructor to mark correct a test question they marked wrong.  There just are not a lot of wrong answers when it comes to writing.

Finally, grades are not an effective way to motivate students, and grades stifle creativity and risk-taking.  Blum and Stommel both argue that this turns our classes into a means to an end.  Students do the assignments to get a grade rather than learn and grow.  Stommel points to a quote from Peter Elbow: “‘Grading tends to undermine the climate for teaching and learning.  Once we start grading their work, students are tempted to study or work for the grade rather than for the learning'” (qtd. in “How to Ungrade” 25). In other words, the student’s real goal is to do whatever necessary to get a good grade, which does not always reflect any meaningful learning or knowledge. Sackstein agrees with this by stating, “Even high grades end the learning process as placing a label on learning as an act of completion. It is a judgment that says the work is done enough to be scored. If we want students to keep pushing, revising, learning, we must continue to provide feedback without a particular grade” (78). As a result, we need to change our practices to help students become more than “compliant players in the game of school” (Sackstein 78).

A Critical Pedagogy Foundation

Most of us in the humanities are familiar with Paulo Freire and his work with Brazilian working-class citizens as documented in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In it, he argues that education should go beyond providing people with functional literacy, a kind of literacy that allows them to function in their current place in society.  Instead, it should also develop people’s critical literacy skills by empowering people to develop a “critical consciousness” in which they can read both the word and the world.  This kind of education should enable people to understand power relations and societal structures, see their place in those structures, and influence changes in those structures.  In a 1999 interview, critical literacy theorist Ira Shor, who also co-authored research with Freire, argued that “Wherever human experience includes a meaningful encounter with texts…then rhetoric has subject matter to examine. Thus, a writing class is really about critically studying our social experiences with discourses broadly conceived” (qtd. in Tinberg 169). In other words, the writing classroom should be centered on the notion that students need to understand the way language both shapes and is shaped by particular social norms and should empower students to use their own language to influence and change those norms.

For educators, this idea should go beyond just deciding which assignments to give students.  Developing a critical consciousness should be an assignment we give ourselves to use our own research and writing to examine social structures, not to just negatively criticize, but to also offer thoughtful suggestions for improvement that benefit both our students and society in general.  Stommel argues:

…grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education.  And they are the thorn in the side of critical pedagogy.  John Holt writes in Instead of Education that competitive schooling, grades, and credentials ‘seem to me the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions.’ Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible (or at least, unlikely) in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another. (27-28)

But how do we combat the factory or banking model of education, which is transactional in nature? We can begin to refocus our own students’ attention on learning and developing metacognition skills rather than obtaining grades or playing the game of college.

In my doctoral program, I came across the Latin root of assessment, which is “assidere,” and means “to sit beside.”  This succinctly represents my own view of assessment.  I have revised the way I teach to become someone who sits beside the learner and focuses on their needs, guiding and supporting them as they grow in their knowledge and skills.  This view of teaching and learning is not new or unusual.  As Backvelder states, “Learning is something done alongside others, not something imposed on them.  If the learning is essential, then students need to be pushed until they get it.  What makes teaching difficult is that it requires the teacher to care for the student and see value in the student.  Because what is truly important is the child, and this is the lesson that must be learned” (50). Here, Blackwelder reminds instructors that their goal should be to support and care for each student to push them to do the work of learning.

What is “Feedback First?”

As a result of my desire to work with and beside students as they learn, I created my own steps for helping students through this process in my classes, but I took inspiration from both Blum and Stommel, which became my feedback first approach. I should note here that the term “feedback first” is not my own.  In the private Facebook group Grow Beyond Grades, I read that a group of high school teachers who were going gradeless were using the term in their letters to parents, and I thought it represented my ideas quite well also. My system requires students to set their own goals, track their own growth and progress through reflections, and propose their own grades at the mid-term and final points in the semester.

At the start of the semester, I use the syllabus as a place to introduce my evaluation philosophy and methodology to my students (see Appendix A). In these paragraphs, I explain to students that I will not assign grades to individual assignments, but instead, I will provide them with feedback regarding what they are doing well and what they can improve. They can use those comments to either revise the current assignment or apply them to the next assignment; it is their choice.  My university still requires a formal final course grade, though, so I do explain to students at the start of the semester the way that grade is determined as well.  I have experimented with self-evaluations in both portfolio and essay forms and have not yet determined which one works best (see Appendix B). However, for both, students propose their own grade based on the descriptive grading criteria I provide in the syllabus (see Appendix A), and they provide evidence from their own learning to support their grade proposal. I collect those at the end of the semester and meet with each student in a conference to chat about their self-evaluations and, if needed, negotiate that final grade.

After introducing students to this kind of evaluation in the syllabus, I spend time in the first few weeks of class discussing with them grading and various approaches to grading student work. I have used several articles as a basis for these discussions, but two I share most often include “Grades Hinder Learning. What Should Professors Use Instead?” by Beckie Supiano, and Stommel’s “Ungrading: An Introduction.” Both provide a concise overview of the problem with grades and offer alternative assessment practices. For most of my students, reading these articles is the first time they have ever considered the idea that grades are a social construct, and as with any social construct, we can change it if it is not working.

The final step I take in setting up the course at the start of the semester is to ask students to write two learning goals and create a goals-tracking chart (see Appendix C).  For this assignment, students have the opportunity to think about what they personally want to learn from the course instead of always focusing on what I want them to learn.  They spend a little time reading the syllabus, previewing readings and assignments, and skimming the texts, and then they generate two goals they work on for the first eight weeks. At the start of each week, they write what they plan to do that week to work on each of those two goals. Then, they put that plan into action and reflect on their progress at the end of the week. At mid-term, they include their progress on their goals in their self-evaluations or portfolios; then, they reset their goals for the second half of the semester and include progress on those in their final evaluations.

Throughout the semester, I integrate additional opportunities for students to think about their own learning and growth by asking them to write reflections at the end of each unit. The following are examples of questions I ask:

• What did you learn about your topic?
• What did you learn about yourself as a reader, writer, and researcher?
• What were your successes?
• What were your obstacles, and how did you overcome them?
• If you had to do the assignment over again, what would you do the same, what would you do differently, and why?
• Take five minutes to track your writing goals for this week.
• How did working on these goals help you with this assignment?

My hope here is that by the end of the semester, they will have developed the language to clearly and concisely describe their skills and knowledge. This helps them move beyond saying, “I am good at writing because I got an A in English” to saying, “I am a skillful writer because I can make a claim and support it with appropriate evidence,” or whatever they identify as their own strengths.

Feedback First Is Not Contract Grading

To better understand what feedback first is, it might be helpful to also explain what it is not. In Blum’s book, the term “ungrading” encompasses a range of practices instructors can implement to de-emphasize grades in their classrooms. Among them is probably one of the most recognized forms of going gradeless: contract grading (Katapodis and Davidson 105-122). Using this method, instructors create a contract that contains a set of criteria required for students to achieve an A, B, C, etc. in the course, and students contract for their desired grade at the start of the semester. If they fulfill the requirements of the contract, they earn the grade. The advantage of contract grading is that students decide how much work they want to do in the semester (111).

An enthusiastic advocate of contract grading, Asao Inoue, takes it one step further and works with his students at the start of the course to negotiate and agree upon the contract.  In his view, because grading students’ writing against a standard perpetuates white language supremacy (5), “It’s better to separate the course grade from how and what students learn in the course” (126). His labor-based grade contract, then, is comprised of four main elements: participation and attendance, submitting assignments on time, submitting complete assignments, and attempting all the work (127). He requires students to track their own labor using a spreadsheet, and he has provisions for the unexpected, such as when a student fails to meet contract requirements or when a student exceeds labor expectations.

Feedback first, however, is different from contract grading in that students’ grades are not determined at the start of the semester, and the student does need to provide evidence of progress toward the course learning outcomes as opposed to the labor-based grade.  I share many of the same concerns Inoue has, though, regarding outcomes and have asked myself his same question, “… but do our grades really measure outcomes that students have learned?” (190).  This is why I might experiment with contract grading in the future, but for now, I ask students to use their mid-term and final self-evaluations as places to provide and explain their own evidence for meeting the course learning outcomes.  This helps me understand why students made particular choices about the language they used to address a certain audience or the decisions they made to include or exclude source information when crafting an argument.  Finally, as I state in the next section, “Successes and Challenges,” it helps students articulate what they think are their own writing skills and strengths.

Successes and Challenges

So, what have I learned so far?  I see both successes and areas that could improve.

The most important success of focusing on feedback first is that in their self-evaluations, students share with me the learning I would never know from reading one of their papers. For example, in the learning outcomes for every writing course I teach, getting the students to understand the relationship between audience and purpose is included. The self- evaluations allow me to see if the students can articulate this relationship, and they often do.  For example, in one of my journalism courses, I asked students to work in groups to write a magazine geared toward an audience of their choice.  One group chose to write helpful articles for their fellow college students.  In their final course self-evaluation, one of the students in that group admitted that writing the feature article for the magazine was when they finally understood what it meant to write for a specific audience.  They stated that their focus on hiking as an inexpensive and fun way to de-stress was ideal for college students who usually do not have extra money to spend.  At the end of their explanation, they indicated that by finally understanding how to tailor a piece of writing to meet the needs of the audience, they had the confidence to do that in future writing assignments. By stating their own thoughts on the audience/purpose relationship, the student most likely learned more than if I had simply assigned a grade to their feature article.

I often wonder, Should the grade include the learning that students encounter beyond the learning outcomes? This is the gap that self-evaluations fill. For example, I would never include a learning outcome like “Students will demonstrate spiritual growth in the writing process” in any of my syllabi. However, in their self-evaluation, one of my journalism students reflected on conducting an interview in which they were surprised by the spiritual aspects the interviewee brought to the conversation. They felt this gave their writing purpose and reminded them to be peaceful. This is the learning beyond the outcomes that I could not ever predict but is just as or even more important than any aim established at the beginning of the course, and in completing a self-evaluation, it can be included in the student’s grade.

A few students, though, especially students in my general education courses who are in majors that are hyper grade-focused, stated they did not “enjoy having to argue for their own grade.”  These comments came several semesters ago and reminded me to be even clearer about the purpose of self-evaluations and portfolios.  I want students to use those as opportunities to critically reflect on their own learning and develop the language needed to articulate their own skills and growth areas.  Based on these comments, my worry is that students may not see it that way and could still view it as a hoop to jump through to get a good grade.

Lingering Questions

After almost four years of using feedback first assessment practices, I am by no means an expert yet and still have several lingering questions I shall investigate going forward.  For example, I know that when the education system elevates the importance of grades and emphasizes the need to obtain high marks above all else, this can cause stress and anxiety in students.  I wonder, though, when I de-emphasize grades in my class, does that help or worsen student anxiety related to grades, especially when students know they will still get a final course grade?  In addition, while I do everything I can to show students the value of the learning that happens in my classroom, what if that is not enough to motivate some students?  What if a student is not intrinsically motivated to learn but does genuinely need some kind of extrinsic motivation?  How can they be accommodated? Finally, grades are ingrained in our schema for “school;” we have used them for so long that they seem inevitable and even necessary. Even though there is a growing population of teachers, professors, and administrators who think differently, how difficult would it be to make permanent changes?  While all the answers are not clear yet, it is imperative that educators keep working to reform the system so all students see the value of learning.

Works Cited

Blackwelder, Aaron. “What Going Gradeless Taught Me about the ‘Actual Work.’” Blum. pp. 42-52.

Blum, Susan, editor. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). West Virginia University Press. 2020.

—”Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments.” Blum. pp. 53-73.

Butler, Ruth. “Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58, no. 1, Feb. 1988, pp. 1-14. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ380489

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder. 1970.

Grow Beyond Grades. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/277181926058422. Accessed 18 June 2024.

Inoue, Asao B. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. 2nd. ed., The WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado, 2022, https://doi.org/10.37514/PER-B.2022.1824.

Johnson, Maren. “Grading for Process: What Grading Alternatives Most Emphasize Process?” Locutorium, vol. 17, 2022. https://locutorium.byu.edu/issues/volume-17-2022/grading-for-process-what-grading-alternatives-most-emphasize-process/

Katapodis, Christina and Cathy N. Davidson. “Contract Grading and Peer Review.” Blum. pp. 105-122.

Sackstein, Starr. “Shifting the Grading Mindset.” Blum. pp. 74-81.

Stommel, Jesse. “How to Ungrade.” Blum. pp. 25-41.

—“Ungrading: An Introduction.” Jesse Stommel Blog. 11 June 2021. https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-introduction/

Supiano, Beckie. “Grades Hinder Learning. What should Professors Use Instead?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 19 July 2019. https://www2.viterbo.edu:2226/article/grades-can-hinder-learning-what-should-professors-use-instead/

Tinberg, Howard. “An Interview with Ira Shor—Part II.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, vol. 27, no. 2, Dec, 1999, pp.161-75. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ598872

Appendix A

Example Feedback First Syllabus Statements

Please note: The Descriptive Grading Criteria I use is adapted from Susan Blum’s work.

I use an unconventional method of evaluation called “ungrading.”  This means you will not receive formal letter grades from me for individual writing assignments. Instead, I will use a feedback sheet to provide comments regarding your writing strengths and suggestions for improvement. You will also receive feedback from your peers during peer-review sessions. You can then use those suggestions to revise your work. In addition, you will start the course by creating your own two learning goals and action plan. Then, you will write informal reflections at the end of each unit in which you log your progress toward those goals and state what you learned in that unit.

For this course, you will compile all you have learned into a Digital Portfolio of Learning and submit that twice: once at mid-term and again at the end of the semester.  In that portfolio, you will have the opportunity to propose your own mid-term and final course grade in your Statement of Academic Achievement.  Then, you will write reflections and include artifacts to support your statement. At the end of the semester, we will also meet during a grade conference to chat about your portfolio and what you learned during the course. By the end of that conference, you will know your final course grade.

You must use phrasing from the Descriptive Grading Criteria throughout your Statement of Academic Achievement and Digital Portfolio of Learning, supporting them with concrete evidence from your work. Please feel free to ask for feedback at any point during the term if you want my opinion on your current grade and how you can improve it.

You’re not assessing “effort” (i.e. “I worked really hard on this”) but “achievement”—and providing concrete evidence from your work to support your claims about your achievement of the learning outcomes.

Even though you will not earn letter grades on individual assignments, I will still use Moodle as a place to track your assignments. Once you have completed an assignment, I will mark it as either “complete” or “incomplete” in Moodle’s gradebook. In order for an assignment to be marked “complete,” you must at least meet the minimum requirements listed on the assignment sheet. For example, if an assignment requires you to write a full four pages, and you submit only three pages, the assignment is incomplete.

Appendix B

Example Self-evaluation and Learning Portfolio

Please note: My self-evaluations are all based on and adapted from Susan Blum’s work.

ENGL 213 Self-Evaluation 2

The point of this assignment is to ask you to use your reflections along with formal and informal writing assignments to make claims about your learning progress this semester. These claims will require evidence to support them from your work and/or readings.

This exercise will probably take you about 1-2 hours. Schedule the time for it. Get comfortable. Assemble your tools (laptop, books, beverage, and a snack).

Task 1: Assemble all your work since the start of the semester with a special focus on work since mid-term.  This includes the following:

1. All pre-writing activities including outlines, notes on sources, etc.
2. All notes on class discussions and/or readings, chapter reviews
3. All formal writing assignments with feedback from peers and instructor
4. All formal and informal reflections
5. Goals tracking chart
6. Feedback from Self-evaluation 1

Task 2: Read it all.

Task 3: Please review your progress toward your goals.

1. Did you create new goals at mid-term? If so, what were they? What progress are you making? If you did not create new goals, are you still working on your goals from the start of the semester? What is your progress? Provide evidence.

Task 4: Please answer some questions about your course engagement with and preparations to be successful in this course since mid-term.

1. Approximately how much of the reading did you do? This includes reading assignment and feedback sheets, chapters assigned in the textbook, reviewing resources on Moodle, and reading your own sources for your Researched Argument(s).

• 90-100%
• 75-89%
• 50-74%
• 25-49%
• Less than 25%

2. Did you participate in class discussions? If not, explain why.

3. Were your assignments and activities submitted on time? Include in this your outlines, rough drafts, and peer-reviews. Number of late assignments, if relevant:

4. Did you talk about the class material outside the class?

• All the time
• Sometimes
• Rarely

5. Which things did you tend to talk about? To whom?

6. Did you engage with course materials in other ways not already listed?

Task 5: Evaluate your work on Researched Argument 2.

1. What are some of its strengths? Provide examples.
2. What are some of its weaknesses? Provide examples.
3. Describe your learning from any aspects of working on RA 2. What are you taking away from working on this paper?
4. What are some of your missed opportunities for learning with this assignment?
   1. If you turned in work late, or incomplete, missed your conference or peer-review, consulted few or no resources—especially the requirements for assignments—you must consider these missed opportunities in your self-evaluation.

Task 6: Evaluate your work on your News Web Article and Magazine Feature Article.

5. What did you do well on these assignments?
6. What were some of your obstacles, and how did you overcome them?
7. Describe your learning from any aspects of working on these assignments.

Task 7: Address the learning outcomes for the class. Rate yourself according to the scale provided. Explain your ratings in the essay you write in Task 8.

Task 8 Essay: Evaluate Your Overall Academic Achievement

In a well-written essay, please propose a letter grade for your work, based on the Descriptive Grading Criteria chart at the end of this document. Viterbo recognizes blends of these letters, too, so you may propose, for example, an AB or BC for your work this semester.

In making this self-evaluation of your work for the semester, you are making a debatable claim, just like the ones you’re asked to make in writing assignments. You will need explicit evidence from your own work to illustrate and support your claims. You should tie your evidence directly to the criteria in the descriptive letter grades chart.

Explain and support your self-evaluation by using direct evidence from your work for the class. Quote from your essay drafts, reflections, peer reviews, etc., OR insert images of the elements you are using to support and/or illustrate your claims. Again, this is just like the evidence, analysis, and interpretation that you are asked to provide in researched argumentative writing assignments. The evidence should primarily come from your own writing.

• You might, for example, show your thesis statement/topic sentences/analysis from the first draft of your Researched Argument 1 or 2 and your final drafts and write about how they differ and why; what do they provide evidence of you learning how to do or do better? Explain what the comparison shows.

• You might, for example, quote writing from a first draft to show how you integrated source material into your own writing and compare that to an excerpt from your final draft to show what your improvement with this convention of academic writing. Explain what the quotes show.

• If you did not make revisions using peer or instructor feedback on drafts, account for that. Explain why.

Please note: I reserve the right to change the grade you’ve given yourself based on the evidence of your work in both completion and quality in relation to the standards of the class student learning outcomes.

Warning: While I always appreciate your hard work, you should not use hard work or effort as evidence for your grade. (i.e. “I worked really hard on my assignments, so I should get an A.”)  I will stop reading if your essay makes this argument. You need to evaluate your academic achievement.

Descriptive Grading Criteria

You must use phrasing from the Descriptive Grading Criteria throughout your self-evaluation, supporting it with concrete evidence from your work.

You’re not assessing effort (i.e. “I worked really hard on this”) but achievement—and providing concrete evidence from your work to support your claims about your achievement of the learning outcomes.

You may write your essay here. Please double-space and use Times New Roman 12pt. font.

ENGL 104 Digital Portfolio of Learning

From the Syllabus:

Throughout the semester, you will use Microsoft OneNote to compile a Digital Portfolio of Learning that will include several components. First, it will include a Statement of Academic Achievement in which you will propose your own grade in relation to the Descriptive Grading Criteria described later in this syllabus. Then, you will include reflections and artifacts from your own learning to support your proposed grade. You will submit this portfolio twice: once at mid-term to determine your mid-term grade and again at the end of the semester to determine your final grade. In addition, we will hold a conference together at the end of the semester to chat about your portfolio and the learning that occurred for you in the course. You will know your final course grade by the end of that conference.

Requirements:

1. Using Microsoft OneNote, you will create an electronic portfolio that helps you build an argument for your course grade.

For Submission 1 at Mid-term:

1. Include a Statement of Academic Achievement

1. 1. Propose your own grade and tie it to the Descriptive Grading Criteria (table below). You may propose any grade Viterbo recognizes, which includes A, AB, B, BC, and C.  If you think you have not met the course expectations by mid-term, you could propose an incomplete, but then we would work together to get you back to a satisfactory grade.
   2. Use concrete evidence from your learning in the course to support your claims

1. Readings
2. Discussions

• Writing (research, process, peer-reviews, etc.)

1. Reflections
2. Feedback from instructor and peers
3. Goals tracking from weeks 2-8

1. 1. For each Descriptive Grading criterion you write on in your Statement of Academic Achievement, you should include or upload at least one course-related artifact.
   2. Provide an explanation for each artifact articulating how it shows what you learned and connecting it to the Descriptive Grading Criteria.

Descriptive Grading Criteria:

Address all three grading criteria in your Statement of Academic Achievement.

1. Course Engagement Reflection: Answer the following questions.
   1. Have you submitted all your assignments?

1. If you’re missing assignments, which ones? What prevented you from submitting them?

1. 1. Did you submit all your assignments on time?

1. If not, which assignments were late? Explain why.

1. 1. Did you submit complete assignments?

1. If not, which assignments were incomplete? Explain why.
2. Did you revise and resubmit any incomplete assignments? Explain why.

1. 1. How many absences do you have? Include absences for any reason such as illness or athletics. Please explain why you were absent and how that affected your learning.
   2. At the start of each class, do you regularly have all your materials out and ready, or do you what until the instructor asks you to get out your class materials? This includes your textbook, notebook and writing utensil, and a computer or tablet (if you’re using one).

1. If not, explain what prevents you from being prepared to start class.

1. 1. Have you completed all the reading assignments?

1. If not, explain what prevents you from completing the assigned readings.

1. 1. How do you participate during class? For this, participation includes contributing during discussions, taking notes, asking questions, following along in the text when applicable, etc.
   2. When it comes to being engaged in class, what are your strengths, and what would you like to continue to improve?

For Submission 2 at the End of the Semester:

1. Updated Statement of Academic Achievement
2. Updated information for Grading Criteria 1, 2, and 3 with additional artifacts from weeks 10 through 14.
3. Updated Course Engagement Reflection

How to Access OneNote:

1. From Viterbo’s website, go to MyVU and login to your Microsoft 365 account
2. In the upper left, click on the dot grid to view all apps
3. Choose OneNote
4. Click +New Notebook

How to Use OneNote (these are links):

• OneNote Video Tutorials from Microsoft
• How to Use OneNote
• OneNote Tips and Tricks

Appendix C

Example Goals Tracking Assignment

ENGL 104 Goal Setting

Directions: For this course, you will need to begin the semester by setting two clear learning goals. When writing these goals, consider writing you’ve done in past semesters and think about areas you could improve. You can also read through the course description, course learning outcomes, and course readings and assignments to think about goals related specifically to writing we will do this semester.

Due Dates:

• Week 1: To earn a “complete” on this assignment, you will need to state your two learning goals and have your goal tracking system set up (you can use the table below for yourself or create your own) and have your week two “plan” section completed for each goal.
• Week 4: In-class check-in
• Week 9: Submit progress. Reflect on first half of the semester in your Digital Portfolio of Learning first submission
• Week 10: Continue working on these goals, or create two new goals
• Week 12: In-class check-in
• Week 15: Submit progress. Reflect on second half of the semester in your Digital Portfolio of Learning second submission

Resources:

You will also need to think about which resources you’ll use to help you reach your goals. For this course, you have the following resources available:

1. Me- Ask questions during class, visit my office hours, send an e-mail, or make an appointment
2. Your textbooks
3. Our Moodle site
4. The library
5. The OWL at Purdue
6. ARC
7. Google, Google Scholar, YouTube

Example Goal Tracking:

This article was peer-reviewed in a process that made both author and reviewer anonymous.