Hmmm...students will lead class sessions, and will grade one another. Instruction and grading used to be a faculty responsibilities...Guess I'm just old-fashioned, but seems to me the students should be on Duke's payroll.

Ah, that is the fantasy, isn't it? Actually, if you have ever run a "student driven" course, you know that it is far more labor-intensive than a conventional lecture. But it is incomparably more worth the effort, in my opinion, because the learning experience is unforgettable for the students and, indeed, for their professor, if the professor is humble enough to listen, really listen. I could probably have taught three traditional courses in the same amount of time I put into preparing for my "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" course using this student-driven model, but I would have been far poorer for standing up and saying what I already know--and I know my students would have been too. As with all forms of true interaction and collaboration, the process changes the product. But it does not save anyone any time.

It's basically an industrial model of grading I think. Complete items for the assembly line and you pick up your salary. Complete items for Professor X and you pick up your A grade. The grade is for productivity (and, to a certain extent, obedience); it's not for quality. My advice to students: drop the class and get a professor who expects and demands the best from you.

Every study of peer review shows that students perform at a higher standard of excellence for one another than when expected for a grade. The point of this course is to teach students about the evaluation process, how to be responsible and thoughtful evaluators, how to make evaluation part of the collaboration toward more visionary and creative and important ideas than one person alone might contribute, and how to work across disciplinary boundaries and skillsets toward a higher end. It's an experiment. It may fail miserably and then I'll go back to grading in my normal way. But if we do not test our own boundaries, if we do not try to aspire to something higher, how will we change and learn? I assure you my students rarely feel shortchanged in my classes. Quite the opposite. My expectations are of the very highest order which is exactly why I am looking for a new model of assessment, and new ways of thinking about assessment, that get us beyond the current, accepted, and restrictive models. The real world beyond the academy often requires excellence without anyone there with a grade book. It's not industrial. It's professional life beyond formal education, where the metric is often supplied by one's peers. I aspire to a transitional course that will help my students in the real world. And, if it fails, then there's always the way everyone else does this all the time. If, as educators, we cannot aspire higher sometimes, then we should not be educators. I'll report back and let you know how it went. You may well turn out to have been right, and I promise to let you know.

Prof. Hendry, While I agree that a well run "student-driven" course can be a lot of work, unfortunately, many students have also experienced courses where the "teacher" did not much more than pass a hat around with chapter assignments to be drawn out at random and then sit and watch with very little if any additional input. Therefore, I feel it is inappropriate to dismiss your first commenter out of hand. This person may have a good reason to be suspicious of the final outcome of your experiment. Many a good educational technique has been adopted by the the educational establishment and then morphed into something quite useless. For example, creating concept maps has been proven to be very helpful for learning in elementary education. However, when the teacher simply passes out pre-printed concept maps with only the words missing and then proceds to tell the students exactly what word to write in each and every blank, then all the benefit is stolen away. I have witnessed this very thing in my classroom observations. It seems to be quite common. I wish you luck in your experiment. However, I hope that you will also take steps to ensure that, by the time your methods reach real-world classrooms, they won't be so watered down that the end result is exactly what you so easily dismissed. I do have a few suggestions for your experiment. Do not have students evaluate other students in their same classes. Make sure that everyone in the project understands that their evaluations will not affect the "curve" that determines their own grade. Finally, take as many steps as possible to ensure that the students can't even know who they are evaluating. Simply removing the names from papers is not enough. Students will talk amongst themselves about the content of their papers and "sus out" who wrote what; maybe even before they have even turned them in. Perhaps it would be best to participate with another institution. Have students in similar - or even identical - classes but from different institutions evaluate each other's work. Finally, all the research on "crowdsourcing" that I have seen involved hundreds or thousands of participants. Hopefully you do not intend to use a sample size of only one classroom full of students. Yes, all this would be even more work on your part. But, isn't it worth it to eliminate an entire set of possible comfounding variables. It wouldn't do your experiment much good to have done all this work and then have some upstart like me write a paper challenging your methods, now would it? ;^) Sincerely, Grant S. Robertson

P.S. Please add paragraph breaks where appropriate. I love editors that strip out carriage returns.

Wow, that guy sounds like a real egg head to me! RT www.privacy-tools.at.tc

As a returning adult student, I think the approach has significant merit for students at graduate level who are highly motivated. However, not wanting to be a "rat", peer evaluations of student projects/performance are often inflated by implicit (or even explicit) collusion. Please see studies on academic dishonesty (Dan Ariely-should be right down the hall from you) to know that given the opportunity, there is a bell curve to this behavior. I don't see how this aspect will be addressed. Put another way, the determinant for the winner of the gaming merely shifts from an authority with knowledge to impart to peers with the same objectives. It's all about incentives.

As a recent student graduate of a top-tier school, I welcome this attempt to change the system. Its just the truth that many students turn off halfway through lecture, or simply don't go. The system needs more reform similar to this student-driven style - it needs to incorporate collaboration and learning; having students feel accountable for each other. Every peer I know, upon graduation, has regretted ever spending time thinking about a grade - and instead, prides him/herself on the individual projects that were completed. One other suggestion (let teachers / professors finally be informed!) is that many students know and realize that there is a layer of information out there called the internet, in which many problems have already been solved. Teachers should encourage students to build upon what has already been acheieved in other contexts, instead of preventing them from using such sources and making them solve the same old problems that were solved in the 80's.

Your description of hastac is exactly what I have been doing for the last 10 years, and here is what you will encounter: an overwhelming number of students will, as you predict, outperform students under the traditional regimes, and will be wildly enthusiastic about the system, once they learn it. You will be pleasantly surprised. You will also encounter almost universal criticism (as reflected in these comments) from people who have never witnessed what happens under this assessment plan, who are outside your field, and who are administrators who don't know whether to submit your name to the Pulitzer or fire you (and so do nothing to encourage you). Most educators/administrators cannot imagine such a learning environment when all they know is the "curve." Good luck, and may the force be with you!

A great way to involve students and develop their critical thinking skills.

I would be more interested in this technique, if my class sizes were smaller. Unfortunately, I can barely keep up using "traditional" assessment approaches.

My experience with this approach is that student assignments are always "satisfactory." Therefore, completing all the assingments for an A earn an A regardless of quality.

I presume hastac0708 is Professor Davidson. She says that her approach (which certainly is worth an "experiment") is better matched to the "real world," and that it will prepare students for that real world better than traditional approaches. She adds that the approach is a mode of "professional life beyond formal education, where the metric is often supplied by one's peers." I don't know how much actual work experience she has outside academia, but the outlook here sounds academic, not "real world." In most professional spheres and workplaces, the "metric" isn't a matter of peer review. Once people have been accredited by peers, other evaluations take over. In academia, in the humanities, peer review stays forever.

Mark Bauerlein has a good point. I had another career previous to my academic one. I think it helps students when administration and facuty consider the need to help students bridge the gap between college and real-world job skills, cultures, social systems, expectations, and performance evaluations--but there are better ways to do it. Traditional grading more realistically approximates how a supervisor fills out a performance evaluation form for an employee. * I have experimented with peer evaluation on small projects and found a problem with student outlook as well as with attempts to game the system. Some students are easy to please and give everyone high marks; some won't go above 6/10 regardless of quality. Naturally, they are not very good judges of quality--that's the biggest problem. * I would be interested to hear what this does to an instructor's evaluations. I would predict that many students will complain about the extra work and doing the professor's job for her--unless the grade distribution leans heavily toward A. This description leads me to think that A will mean "competent and complete" rather than "excellent."

Professor Davidson, I am not smart enough to predict the results of your experiment. Rhetorrick above presented a nice paraphrase on Machiavelli's warning about promoting change. I do however, celebrate your willingness to explore. Good luck and please report on your results.

When I was a student at Berkeley, there were a number of courses like these, particularly in the Education department. Students would take these courses when they wanted an easy A, but for the most part we agreed that these courses lacked real intellectual and academic rigor, so we never really took them seriously. An Emory professor, Patrick Allitt, has written a book on teaching that defends the "top-down, hierarchical learning and rigid assessment schemes" that professor Davidson dismisses. Students love Dr. Allitt's courses, and he has won every teaching award Emory has to offer.

I have found that students in the community college are really tough evaluators of one another. If the grades I assigned were based purely on peer evaluation, nobody would get an "A."

I'll be very interested to see the results of this method of grading. I use undergraduates as teaching assistants for my courses, and I find that sometimes even with the answer key and the rubric, there may yet still be areas outside the experience of the graders that cause a disconnect between the quality of the work and the grade assigned to it. We have a mechanism in place for correcting that (i.e. going back to the grader, and if that doesn't satisfy, going to the instructor); is there a similar system in place here? Having the students generate and present the materials will most likely be excellent - I've discovered that student-driven assignments with relatively undefined goalposts tend to produce much higher-quality and more in-depth results from motivated students than assignments with clearly-defined endpoints. And as Dr. Davidson noted - preparing a class for such an adventure takes a great deal more work on the part of the instructor. I've actually started using a wiki system for presenting some of the materials to my class. I wonder if that might be some other way to generate collaboration among the students - the edits themselves could be "graded." Hmmmm......

A couple of issues concern me with this article: 1. In this model, grades appear to be a mere reflection of quantity rather than quality. Do enough assisnments is a "satisfactory" manner and you receive an "A" 2. There is no discussion regarding how the students are trained in evaluation and what criteria they apply to determining the meaning of "satisfactory". 3. As Mark Bauerline points out, this approach does not reflect the realities of the "real world" outside of academia. Having worked in a non-academic field for many years before becoming a professor, I can reflect with a degree of certainty that peer evaluation of a work product is not the important criteria. The needs and desires of the client or boss is paramount and the skill of "second guessing what the prof wants" is an important learning experience. 4. There is no discussion of what the professor wants her students to gain from the course and the article seems to assume that students already understand the meaning of academic rigor.

Why is the Chronicle reporting a professor's plans to pilot something, let alone plans to pilot an approach that many other people have already tried, with mixed results? I'm baffled by what was deemed newsworthy about this story. The number of replies to her blog post?

I am altogether disappointed by the attitudes of people making comments to this article. For years now, we in higher education have advocated more progressive models of teaching and learning focused on collaboration, student centered education, and quality through actual learning. Lots of people here talked about questions of quality, but having been an undergraduate only 2 short years ago, I can tell you, what you seem to consider quality (tough grading, stringent rules, and professor centered education) does not actually foster quality. This is because quality is a relative term. Different professors ask for different things, and when they are more strict ("rigorous?") the result is students give the professor exactly what they want, rather than absorb the knowledge. The point this professor is trying to hit home is that learning is more important than our antiquated notions of what constitutes quality. If a student proves they learned what was supposed to be learned, they get an A. This notion of acceptable learning ("C" Work) versus excellent learning ("A" Work) is relative to each professor and thus motivates students only to give what the professor wants, which is inherently unfair and counterproductive to real learning. So far I've had the opportunity to co-teach 4 classes, and in each of them we applied methods very similar to those of the professor in this article with incredible results. I understand that not everyone is ready to be a part of the new student centered learning paradigm. For professors it's nice to be the center of the academic universe. But we have to let go of our old and outdated notions of quality and rigor, so that we can help students learn and truly appreciate their education.

Cathy Davidson has already said that her new course is an experiment. In experiments we learn as much from what doesn't work, as from what does. Far more disturbing than her rich adventurousness are the comments that assume all efforts to involve students more widely, deeply, & critically in their own education means a professor is shirking work. In 1994, I made undergrad research & presentations a requirement in my courses. Some thought I was trying to shirk lecturing. Guess what? A decade later, students don't remember what they learnt about Chaucer, or even who taught the course, but they remember their research, & will proudly post their projects online. A decade later, Commission 125, a massive evaluative committee on my campus, made undergrad research a top priority. It seems undergrads are capable of amazing research projects. In 2004, I experimented with creating collaborative teaching teams for courses. An administrator worried that each of my instructional faculty would not be teaching a full course by her/himself. Not only was this experiment an extraordinary success, but in 2008 the international, multi-institution Global Middle Ages Projects arose out of this (). Last spring, I experimented with small-group discussions: lecturing half the time, then divvying up the class into 5-person groups for intensive discussions. Revolving rapporteurs reported back to the whole class. Students found the experience so stimulating, they devised extraordinary assignments for themselves: one woman is wearing hijab for a year, & writing about it; another made an 18-minute documentary about the class; yet another created a photojournalist portfolio of 24 hrs at a campus mosque. We experiment because we want to teach better, not because we want to teach less. Please give Cathy Davidson the benefit of the doubt & cheer her on.

First, I do find that the commentaries and responses include a number of unfortunately jaded faculty members' dismissals, and I also agree that the process of building an entirely new curricular model is an immense amount of work. Moreover, I have myself long advocated such rough-ups as a sort of inspired version of the Hawthorne Effect. But whereas at the GE plant in that study, simply raising (or lowering) the light levels was a mechanical version of a placebo effect, in the teaching environment, much more happens in a rough-up: the faculty member throws away the cherished and easy notes and readings and must rethink the course, which leads to a more up-to-date set of readings, a greater knowledge on the part of the faculty member, and a much greater sense of enthusiasm and urgency, which communicates to the students. On their side, forms of empowerment and engagement are perhaps the greatest goads to a better teaching-learning environment. Will there be "gaming?" Over time, probably, and even in some cases immediate clusters of grade inflation. But no system of grading avoids the problem-- faced with 45 blue-book midterms, do I grade more kindly at the beginning or the end? Or more harshly? Of course! Does my level of exhaustion, distractedness, disgruntledness, my overall narcissistic response to a vibrant or a dead class embolden me to grade more kindly or more harshly? Of course! To put the students in the circumstance of experiencing the responsibilities is a great boon for them. *As a department chair, I spend a good deal of my time trying to encourage faculty members to recast, and thus rejuvenate, themselves and their courses. The notion that developing a metric that rewards for simply doing various percentages of the work will discourage more qualitative distinctions and nuances, and flatten the learning process seems to me a relatively poverty-stricken argument. First, having taught at hardscrabble urban state universities and top-end private elites, I have found that the desire to do the minimum amount of work is more common at the elites than the others-- where there is genuine surprise at the ennobling effect of learning, after, for most of the students, utterly stultifying primary and secondary educations. If they do all, or most, or some, of the work, garnering, say, A, B and D in consequence, they are probably already pushing their time, energy and capabilities to the limit in their lives, where they are balancing family obligations, part- and full-time jobs, and skill deficits unimaginable to most of us. At the elites, where the assumption is that a good grade is already earned by dint of being a consumer of an expensive brand-name product (the course), the few students internally inspired by the discipline and the subject will engage fully so long as the learning environment encourages, and facilitates, wonder, surprise, excitement, discovery. And this one does. Go Dr. Davidson!

Nothing like completely abdicating your responsibility as a professor. It does sound "progressive" though, doesn't it? :-)

I'm not sure why an oligarchy of 15 students presumably chosen by the professor is more participatory than the professor doing all the grading. It is simply more bureaucratic and denies the one-on-one exchange students should have with their learning partners, i.e. the professor. A better strategy for encouraging accountability is to require students to grade themselves on each of their projects along with a 2 page explanation of their grade, with the final grade assigned in consultation with the faculty partner. For team projects, such as class presentations, I always require students to submit an evaluation of their partners on all aspects of the teamwork.

First, like many others who have already commented, I see no quality control in Dr. Davidson's approach--in academe, and in the business world, quality control ensures a good product. However, if Dr. Davidson were to provide that quality control, it would change matters considerably, but also considerably make more work for her, and also make her a target for student criticism which she may be trying to avoid. (Might the teacher know a little bit more about assessment than the student? Oh, excuse me for forgetting--we're all equals in the democratic, American college classroom.) In any event, it appears she will not be taking a lot of papers home to grade, including essays, which is the plight of most English professors/teachers, and the most abhorred part of the English teacher's job--especially for those doomed to teach 4/4 loads of writing/first-year composition. Second, her trumpeting of technology does not impress me; in my experience, both as a graduate student and then a teacher, technology mainly produces busy work for the students to complete, and the quality of technology-driven products in the classroom during classtime are poor. Students are fascinated by the technology, the how, and in socializing back and forth by various technological means, and the class's purpose often gets lost or marginalized in the process. Unfortunately, the technology-driven classroom is a telltale sign and a giving in to students who have been PLAYING with computers since their younger years, and expect to be entertained or entertaining rather than educated or educating in the college classroom. I saw this coming into higher education in my grad student years, 1986-1993, when some of my professors complained to me in private that some students were bored by long, seminar hours. The fact is, the professors felt threatened because other grad students didn't have a lot of interest in their courses per se, and jazzing it up with computers didn't change the level of interest, just the intensity of the networked socializing. And these were good professors. If Dr. Davidson can keep the students' attentions on the classwork, and get the kind of active participation she envisons, she should have a good class. However, without quality controls in grading, the class will lack rigor. Her course description reminds me of a talk given some 15 years ago at a conference by a head of Department of English and Humanities at Florda Community College in Tallahassee. The Head described in detail how he left all assessment of English composition papers in the hands of his students, and how this was working out quite well. Someone in the audience asked when he instituted such ingenious crowdsourcing. He replied, "When I became head of department."

Ive seen turnitin say that a student plagarized a work and the work they say that was plagurized did not exhist

My views and practice of assessment align with Professor Davidson, and I have been using a similar approach for more than 15 years in teaching at 3 different universities. I have been teaching courses online since 1998, as well as f2f HE courses integrated with communication technologies. Along with extensive feedback to challenge thinking that I provide in response to each student's work, sometimes in public ways to the full class, there is another aspect that I include. There needs to be evidence of transformative learning. I define what I mean by this in the syllabus. See http://explorations.sva.psu.edu/avl2005/ (and pasted below). In order to earn an A in this class all assignments must be completed and posted on time. In addition, the work should demonstrate an ongoing process of self reflective synthesis of course content including your research and evidence of transformative thinking and learning. That is, clear evidence in growth and depth of thinking regarding how one consciously reads the visual environment around them and makes decisions not to passively accept those messages at face value. SO, if you really want an A, I suggest that once enrolled and able to access Blackboard, then take a peek at the last assignment and its parts. This is a long and complex one that will expose you to new ways of thinking about how you process visual info. This is one area where you CAN work ahead, thoughtfully "sampling" those readings and activities, and thinking about channeling something important you learn in the first three weeks of the course into completing the last assignments. This course, developed with Dr. Jane Maitland-Gholson, is now in the form of a book, which focuses on the pedagogy. Keifer-Boyd, K., & Maitland-Gholson, J. (2007). Engaging visual culture. Worchester, MA: Davis Publications. Students have responded that in taking my courses they are asked to think deeply through an experiential approach to learning, and that this is not typical in university education.

Is it too clever to point out that all the people trashing this course are themselves peer-evaluating? And that the people railing against technology are posting on a BLOG!?

Peers form social groups that slant evaluations toward the preferences of their social leadership. This can create highly biased results. The game becomes one of building narrow social alliances within an isolated social group rather than a real world constituency. Evaluations by students are then based on biased social alliances within an isolated academic environment rather than the combined knowledge, experience and understanding of a wider community or selected subject matter experts. In the wiki model of Crowdsourcing the evaluations of material are continuous resulting in periodic revisions. Are you willing and able to revise a students grade when an evaluation is successfully challenged as socially biased at a later date? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism and then click on the discussion tab to see how that works.

The problem is not peer evaluation, it is permitting those evaluations to impact grades. I regularly require students to write evaluative comments on their peers' papers (papers and comments all posted on Blackboard), but the grading (of papers and comments) is my job. Peer grading is is a breach of faculty responsibility.

Hi, everyone, This is Cathy Davidson writing, after being off the grid for a week on vacation in the Caribbean where there was no wireless. As I've noted elsewhere, I posted my course description for this course and this experiment in grading during a time when our new www.hastac.org site has been scheduled for various repairs because I thought it would have a "sleepy" response. I had no idea that it would become a whole phenomenon. What this signals to me is that we are at a moment when we are all concerned with "grading" and "assessment" and "evaluation." I personally believe that we are long overdue for a systematic overhaul in our thinking about what assessment means, particularly as related to the responsibilities of a collective, interactive, digital age--such as the comments made public in response to this terrific article and my original blog. Returning after a week away, I have found the comments on this posting, on the ones published elsewhere, and on the HASTAC site to be utterly fascinating. Many have been generous in offering up their own experiences, in providing thoughtful feedback, and in offering carefully considered critique, all of which is important for this experiment. Others have been seemingly oblivious to the fact that this course is about civility, collective learning, and collaborative thinking in the digital age and is looking at models of mind for the information age. "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" is offered in our ISIS program (Information Science + Information Studies) and typically attracts brilliant students with double majors in fields such as computer science or engineering and then English, art, Classics, or philosophy. I KNOW these students, and continue to be awestruck and often humbled by their creativity, intellectual ambition, innovation, and willingness to take any challenge, no matter how formidable, and run with it. I push them hard, have a reputation for being a tough teacher and one who takes time to work with her students closely. I push them hard and they always respond. Would I use this experimental form of student intellectual leadership and evaluation in just any course? It would depend on the nature of the course. Do I have any hesitation in using it in this particular class? Not at all. I will report back on how the experiment goes, what I learn from it and, of course, given the course content, most importantly what the students learn about themselves, the subject matter, and the whole notion of "assessment" that, in this historical moment in American education, needs to be rethought. That is part of the polemic, mission, and educational objective of this extremely challenging course that brings together contemporary neuroscience research with sociological, economic, and psychological studies of digitality. And our first assignment? Reading my blog, reading the various articles about it, and reading these "evaluations" of our course in the comment section of all of these online publications. I know they will be interested in the range of experiments others have tried and the results they have obtained. I wonder what students will think about educators who contribute to a public blog on higher education without so much as reading the original blog on which they have firm opinions? That too is an indelible educational lesson. It will be interesting to hear what they think about the range of opinions and the quality of thinking exhibited in these comments. They will learn, in situ, about the practice of collaborative learning that happens on line, and the difference between contribution and snarkiness and where one is appropriate and where the other is. Can you imagine a better way to begin a class where students are asked to think responsibly, deeply, and with evidence on the role of evaluation in our lives, in the responsibilities of assessment, and in the power of collective thinking that the Internet provides to all of us, as it has to the readers of the CHE? I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to read and respond. I have learned much and, more to the point, there are so many object lessons in intellectual exchange here from which my students will learn. I look forward very much to seeing their comments on these comments and will report on the results.

Anyone interested in a historical and philosophical perspective on grading might want to read my follow-up post, "Grading While Off the Grid," on the www.hastac website. Here's the url: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/grading-while-grid

To me, the main issue is that students will be assigning grades. Even disregarding potential (some may argue, inevitable) collusion, the main question seems to be: how do THEY know what is good work (let's not even attmept to address the level of "excellent work" at this point)? I would argue that it is difficult enough for us "experts" to assign a fair grade to a paper. In the proposed class experiment, graders will presumably know just as much about the material as the gradees so what qualifies them to deem a paper as satisfactory? I'm not saying that students will not enjoy the course and I'm not saying that they won't learn a lot. I'm just questioning what exactly they WILL learn if the instructor is not willing to provide corrective feedback above and beyond what the student graders give. The author might consider telling students that their grading suggestions will "factor heavily" into the grade that the instructor ultimately gives. (However, this might negate the whole purpose.)

Whoever said the instructor would not be providing "corrective feedback?" Of course I will! Constantly. The course is about different ways of thinking collectively. Corrective feedback, learning to give it and receive it, customizing one's ideas in a flow with other ideals, learning to express oneself persuasively and respectfully, and learning the two most difficult (and under-taught) skills: how to change one's mind (based on understanding of a different point of view) and learning how to take one's expertise and make it work in tandem with others towards a goal (collaboration). Thanks for expressing these concerns as they gave me yet another opportunity to clarify what is intrinsic to the process in this experiment. Remember, it is just an experiment. I'll report back later.