Is Specifications Grading Right for Me?: A Readiness Assessment to Help Instructors Decide

Abstract

Specifications grading is an alternative grading scheme that prioritizes transparency and progress-oriented feedback, with the goals of increasing student motivation, fostering clear communication, and achieving educational equity. Despite its recent, rapid increase in popularity, little attention has been paid to the forms of support faculty need to implement specifications grading successfully, and to the personal and professional circumstances that shape instructors’ experiences with specifications grading. To fill these gaps, we have created a readiness assessment tool that prompts instructors’ reflection on how institutional culture, identity, and course/curricular contexts may pose or alleviate the risks of adopting nontraditional grading practices.

Keywords:

• Alternative grading
• readiness assessment
• specifications grading
• transparency

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank their colleague, Dr. Dorothe Bach, for her feedback throughout the readiness assessment’s many stages of development, and for her encouragement to frame specifications grading within the context of equitable practices.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial or non-financial competing interests to disclose.

Notes

1 A professor at our institution successfully implemented specs grading in a course with over 200 students. The professor overcame the challenges of giving feedback and working with TAs by making the specifications for each assignment so detailed and precise that they constituted a checklist. The specs themselves thus served as a form of feedback because they were granular and straightforward. Importantly, this course was an intro-level course for non-majors; it may be more difficult or impossible to render specs in such concrete and binary terms in more advanced courses.