Discusses the benefits of a "Pass/Revise" grading system. (DD)

Author suggests that undergraduate colleges and universities should seriously consider the consequences before expanding the use of satisfactory- unsatisfactory grading systems. (Editor)

Cautions are listed following an examination of the difficulties inherent in the teacher's task of student evaluation and distribution of grades on specific testing devices. (JS)

Letter grades should be abolished in favor of personalized and detailed evaluations of each student. (CK)

An application of conversational programming is described by means of which an instructor may use the computer for the calculation of course grades for a class of up to 100 students in a course with up to 10 components of varying weights. (Author)

This paper presents a grade 10 mathematics teacher's in-depth description of the process she uses to determine the final grade for the report card within a standards-based context. Her case was part of a three-year comparative study of grading practices of teachers from two Canadian provinces that differ in their level of standardization of…

Students at the University of Edinburgh do almost all their work on computers, but at the end of the semester they are examined by handwritten essays. Intuitively it would be appealing to allow students the choice of handwriting or typing, but this raises a concern that perhaps this might not be "fair"--that the choice a student makes,…

For an inquiry-based alternative to lectures and recall tests, I encouraged learners to become "geotourists"; that is, learners researched and developed a geologic guidebook to a United States National Park of their choice. Over the course of a semester, students wrote chapters on plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic history,…

If a liberal arts education should prepare our students to participate in a meaningful way in democracy, what does that mean for how we design our courses across disciplines? In this paper, I first address the question: who should teach democratic skills? Using an upper-level course in Canadian politics, I then illustrate how to explicitly…

The purpose of the study is to investigate rating behavior between Korean and native English speaking (NES) raters. Five Korean English teachers and five NES teachers graded 420 essays written by Korean college freshmen and completed survey questionnaires. The grading data were analyzed with FACETS program. The results revealed Korean raters'…

After examining some of the pros and cons of traditional grading, the demands colleges make on grading practices, and the responses of people interested in grading, a number of examples of operating alternative systems are given. The alternatives include a dual (pass/withdraw grading in some courses, traditional grading in others) system, a…

"Quality Counts 2012," the 16th edition of "Education Week"'s annual examination of issues and challenges facing America's public schools, takes aim at topics high on the policy agenda, from the White House and Congress down to the level of local school boards and chambers of commerce: the nation's international standing in…

In this article concerning grade inflation, the author restricts his attention to the college and university level, although many of the tools and ideas developed here should be useful for high schools as well. The author considers the relationships between grades instructors assign and scores they receive on end-of-the semester student…