With the 2022 TBLC Meeting just around the corner, we would like to bring attention to one of our featured workshops: Improving How We Grade: Motivational Tiered Assessment. This session will be presented by Mark Serva from The University of Deleware. We hope you enjoy this session!

Title: Improving How We Grade: Motivational Tiered Assessment
Presented by: Mark Serva – University of Delaware
Date & Time: Wednesday, April 13th, 2022, 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern

College grades are supposed to differentiate the exceptional from the competent and the competent from the incompetent—yet students, employers, and even faculty struggle to connect a specific set of skills to a specific grade. Employers complain that GPA fails to differentiate once students are hired. Traditional grading is time-consuming, frustrating, and prone to inconsistencies across students. Grade inflation has become so problematic in academia that most students are no longer just above average: most are exceptional.

To address these assessment concerns, this workshop will introduce motivational tiered assessment (MTA), a new grading approach that builds on specifications grading. For grading assignments, MTA eschews partial credit in favor of simpler credit/no credit approaches. MTA also integrates opportunities for student revision and learning from mistakes. MTA reduces faculty workload, because faculty need only to assess assignments against a list of specifications—not use partial credit. And to add meaning to letter grades, each letter grade is assigned to a competency tier, which reflects specific levels of student achievement.

We hope you enjoy this and our other exciting workshops.