My pedagogy is about to change again. I have been basing assessment mostly on three deliverables: a skill-building worksheet, a midterm paper, and a final paper. Now I think the optimal mix might be: skills worksheet, midterm, two papers. Here is my thinking.

It has been roughly three years since I fully adopted rubric grading. This has come with a predictable change in how some students view grades: as “points off” or not rather than indicators of mastery.

Meanwhile, it now feels like misconduct to not give an exam. I replaced exams with papers in late 2019 or early 2020, mainly to address complaints about “test anxiety.” This resulted in a class with two papers, which worked well as long as I could design the assignment to make students reflect on course concepts (e.g., by discouraging citation of off-syllabus readings, which were creeping in via Google searches). It also allowed me to focus on teaching students how to write. Now the incentive is to cheat on such an assignment, likely by feeding the readings’ texts into a large-language model. I like the idea of giving an exam not so much because it’s cheat-proof but rather for making a good final paper easier to write. The exam rewards memorization of concepts, which are then easier to think about and manipulate on the fly. The essay that results therefore should be a test of mastery. It might even be fun to write.

The problem in replacing a paper with an exam is that students don’t get as much writing practice. In particular, they don’t get a chance to make a second paper better than the first. I also don’t get to give writing feedback until late in the semester. Writing therefore becomes less central to any course thus structured. However, writing needs to be central if a course is about integrating concepts to answer a “big” question (as mine are).

The solution seems to be to give an exam and two papers. So, the sequence of evaluations might be: skills worksheet, short paper, exam, second paper.

I am open to suggestions. I read a bit about “ungrading” as a solution to the “points off” perspective. It has merits but introduces other issues (different form of stress) and seems hard to do with classes larger than seminars.