Lower-Stakes Assessments
Intent
Mastery or proficiency-based grading and other equitable grading systems can enable summative assessments that are faster for educators to create and grade (evaluate).
Problem
In traditional grading systems that use points-based assessments without a process for allowing students to revise work, exams and quizzes are high-stakes activities. There is also a disincentive for students to take an assessment if they are not sure they can earn their desired amount of points, which can potentially lead to cheating as students weigh the risks versus rewards. Furthermore, because assessments under traditional grading are so high stakes for students, creating and grading these assessments becomes a high-stakes endeavor for educators and assessment designers too. For example, when creating a points-based assessment, significant attention is put toward assigning point values to represent student knowledge, carefully designing rubrics to account for all appropriate forms of partial credit, pre-testing the assessment to ensure all details are polished, versioning exams to ensure security, and examining assessment score distributions after grading for consistency.
Solution
More equitable grading systems such as mastery or proficiency-based grading relax many of these assumptions. Because students are given opportunities to revise or retake an assessment, the assessment is no longer framed as a high-stakes activity. Instead, it can be directed towards learning, which simplifies the creation and grading of the assessment. Despite reducing the stakes of the exam, students can still be motivated to do well on their first try in order to determine what they don’t know and where they will need to improve to meet the highest course expectations.
Applicability
Lower-stakes assessments depend on revisions or retakes, so having multiple versions of an assessment (or an alternative activity to revise work) may be necessary as students will be eager to discuss assessment results with each other. This discussion is a form of learning, but it requires a different activity to revise work other than simply retaking the same assessment again.
How to Implement
Lower-stakes assessments do not require as stringent processes for creation. Depending on the exact details of how the assessment will fit into the final grading scheme, there may not even need to be points assigned to any of the questions; the significantly reduced incentive to cheat relaxes some of the more time-consuming exam security mechanisms such as versioning exams; and rubrics can be designed around the expectation that students should revise and resubmit. If students are expected to discuss the assessment with each other afterwards, then grading (at a minimum) can focus on flagging whether each question needs a revision or not, so rubrics may not be necessary. Work that is borderline can default to requiring a revision. In this case, the authors suggest sharing common mistakes with the class.
See Also
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Source
Source: Anderson Trimm. 2023. “Mastery Grading in Secondary Mathematics.” Presentation at the Institute Day. https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1477&context=proflearningday
Source: Katzman, Shoshana & Hurst-Kennedy, Jennifer & Barrera, Alessandra & Talley, Jennell & Javazon, Elisabeth & Diaz, Mary & Anzovino, Mary. 2021. “The Effect of Specifications Grading on Students’ Learning and Attitudes in an Undergraduate-Level Cell Biology Course.” Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education. 22. 10.1128/jmbe.00200-21.
Described by: Kevin Lin
References
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