Robert Talbert, a leading voice in alternative grading practices and co-author with David Clark of Grading for Growth, discusses concerns with grading attendance and participation and proposes alternatives focused on engagement.
One of several problems with traditional grading of participation:
Goodhart’s Law. This states that when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law haunts traditional grading generally speaking, but when applied to “engagement” – when we attach points to it and make it part of a grade – we actually get disengagement. Students will go through the motions and appear to be engaged but actually they’re just grinding (in the video game sense) and are not really present with their work.
His alternative still involves a grade at the end, but attaches smaller points to what he calls “acts of engagement,” which will add up to 100 at the end if a student comes to class and completes the pre-class work. Attendance and participation, he argues, are more effectively valued, not merely graded.
In the course design process, I picked out some standard “acts of engagement” such as attending a class meeting, doing satisfactory work on a pre-class assignment, and working through an optional online homework set. In the syllabus I attach a point value to each thing. The standard is 1 point for class attendance and 2 points for completing a class prep4. Other items were more valuable. For example, completing the “startup assignment” (described here) was worth a whopping 30 engagement credits. Overall, I scaled the point values so that earning 100 engagement credits would be easy if you just came to class and did the pre-class work.
Read more in his post, “Promoting Student Growth with Engagement Credits.”
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