(519b) Adventures in the Alternative Grading Retinue: Use of Standards-Based Grading in a Core Engineering Course

Standards-based grading (SBG) is one form of alternative grading, or a type of grading that does not rely on quantitatively scoring and summing individual assessments to determine a final student course grade. SBG historically utilizes the following three principles:

1. Students’ final grades are directly based on them demonstrating proficiency of student learning outcomes (standards)
2. Students receive frequent feedback on their assessments so they can understand how to improve on student learning outcomes in which they have not yet shown proficiency
3. Students have more than one opportunity to demonstrate proficiency of student learning outcomes

Through these three principles, SBG focuses on student assessment, instructor feedback, and student review and practice until they can achieve the student learning outcomes of the course. This work provides an example of how SBG has been implemented in an upper-level core kinetics/mass transport course for biochemical and biological engineers, how students and instructors have responded to this course, and adjustments that have been made throughout four semesters of implementation. In this course, student learning outcomes were converted to ‘course metrics’ (CMs). In the most recent iteration of this course, students were evaluated on their ability to complete CMs via pass/no pass or pass/revise/no pass quizzes nearly every week with the opportunity to retake quizzes that were not passed multiple times throughout the semester, including during the final exam period. Other CMs were evaluated outside of class, including a CM for class participation and homework completion, a CM where students had to write and solve their own problem synthesizing material from multiple parts of the class, and a longer take-home quiz encompassing two CMs that could not reasonably solved during an in-class quiz.

This work aims to capture three different perspectives when considering the impact of SBG in this class, including areas of success (and ‘opportunities for improvement’): the perspective of the instructor (via reflection), the perspective of students (via end-of-semester evaluations and focus groups), and the perspective of peers (via an instructor-led mid-semester formative evaluation, and conversations between the instructor and other faculty members). Overall, this work hopes to offer one example of how to implement and continuously improve the use of SBG in core engineering courses, including potential challenges.