By Kevin Cheung, Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics
As a new academic year is about to begin, many instructors are in the process of drafting course outlines.
When I was a student, I always went straight to the evaluation scheme as soon as I received a course outline. I suspect that many of my peers did the same then. After all, the evaluation scheme often provides an indication on the workload during the term and what it takes to obtain a desired grade.
Having taught more than a decade, I thought coming up with an evaluation scheme for a course would simply be a matter of routine. But some recent experiences compelled me to consider what is known as “flexible evaluation.” As the name suggests, flexible evaluation offers flexibility in how students are evaluated. The most extreme form of flexible evaluation is to allow each student to come up with his or her own evaluation scheme (subject to approval of course). But many flexible evaluation schemes are in the form of offering different predefined pathways for earning grades (see this article for a discussion on the bento approach and the buffet approach).
Advocates of flexible evaluation schemes argue that students learn differently and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all evaluation scheme. However, when course grades are used for determination of awards and learning-outcome assessments, the issue of consistency cannot be ignored. For example, if a student gets a C+ under a flexible evaluation scheme, what does that say about what the student has learned? This is a question that instructors must be able to answer.
My motivation for considering a flexible evaluation scheme comes mostly from the idea that students learn at different speeds. For the courses that I teach, the term is a period of formation. It often makes little sense to give students (especially early on in the term) a C for poor work on an assignment covering something that they have just learned. I feel that grades on term work should not have a huge negative impact on the final grade.
One approach to minimizing the impact of poor term grades is to assign no weight to formative activities. I have seen that done in some courses and what ended up happening was that hardly anyone would do the work. Another approach is to allow students to submit revisions to their work to improve their grades. Unfortunately, such an approach is often logistically infeasible, especially in a large class. A more practical approach is to assign marks to term work as usual but transfer a portion of the marks lost to the final exam. In other words, students who have done poorly on assignments will have their the final exam to be worth more. With this approach, the incentive to do the work is not entirely lost because having a good term grade eases the pressure to perform well on the final exam.