It’s that time of the semester: when a professor’s fancy turns to grading. You can see exactly how much attention is being paid to this subject by taking a glance at Twitter. Today, however, I want to talk about grading one particular thing: participation. Most syllabi that I have looked at in the last 10 years include a student’s participation in the final grade of the class. What’s more, participation often makes up a significant portion of a student’s grade in humanities classes, where I teach. My experience suggests that it’s standard to have participation count for 10% of the final grade, but it’s not unusual for upper-level seminars to put that percentage at 15% or 20%.
For those who are just at the beginning of their careers, grading of any stripe can be quite fraught with fears about whether one is doing it wrong or not. Even those who are a bit more advanced in their careers occasionally express anxiety over and dissatisfaction with the process, as Duke’s Cathy Davidson expressed last summer. (Inside Higher Ed posted a follow-up piece on Davidson’s crowdsourced grading experiment just this week.) But grading participation is perhaps one of the stickiest of the grading wickets. After all, there’s not an object (a paper, test, class project) that you are evaluating. Instead, you are assessing a student’s performance in a relatively nebulous activity that stretches across an entire semester. In the interest of making visible some of the assumed knowledge of academia (a core ProfHacker activity), I thought it could be useful to discuss why and how one academic–myself–grades participation.
Why grade participation?
I’ll acknowledge that student participation in class might not be important in every single field. (And if it isn’t in yours, please let us hear about it in the comments.) But in my primary fields of literature and writing, I think that it is imperative. As is the case in all disciplines, class is not just about knowledge acquisition but is instead about learning a process. For my classes, this process is learning how to closely read literature, interpret it, make an argument–written or spoken–about the text in question. To my mind, one learns to do this by doing it yourself and watching others (classmates and the instructor) and getting feedback. In other words, if I’m grading the analytical papers you write for my class it makes just as much sense to me that I should be grading your in-class efforts at analysis.
I also try to let students know why I’m grading their participation. (Actually, I try to tell them why I’m giving them any assignment with the hope that contextualizing the learning process will encourage that learning to take place.) This involves talking through the points I make in the previous paragraph on the first day of class and driving that home with provisions in the syllabus. For what it’s worth, here’s the participation policy for the 400-level, senior seminar I taught for this semester:
This is a class based on collaborative discourse. As such, being prepared to participate in discussions is a course requirement. This entails having read, annotated, and thought about the complete assignment carefully before class starts. Furthermore, you must bring your copy of the text to class every day. Since we will be engaged in closely examining the texts we read and the language that they use, if you don’t have your text then you aren’t prepared for class, even if you have read the assignment. Naturally, this admonition applies to the texts that you will find online.
More broadly speaking: Ask questions. Be curious. You are more than welcome to have a different interpretation of a text than a classmate or me; just be sure to share your perspective in a productive and supportive manner. Since the course will be conducted as a seminar-and not a series of lectures-the substance of our class meetings will primarily consist of your responses to the course texts (such as general questions, impressionistic responses, or interpretations of particular passages) and, secondarily, my engagement with your responses. Your thoughts and questions will provide the starting point for our discussions. Your active participation will be consequently factored into your final grade for the course. If you’re reluctant to speak up, please talk to me and we’ll figure out a way for you to participate.
To be completely honest, another reason to grade students’ participation is so that they will come prepared to class and ready to play along. Teaching is hard no matter what you do, but experience shows me that it’s a lot more difficult to do when students aren’t ready to respond or interact. Grading their participation is a stick to the carrot of learning that helps the students stay engaged.
How I grade participation
I imagine that there are as many ways to grade participation as there are professors who assign it in their classes. Some may prefer to keep track of who speaks and how often one speaks in class. That process doesn’t work for me nor do I feel that it is a valuable use of my time. Furthermore, I don’t want students to feel like they need to compete with one another to get the most things said. Instead, I grade students’ participation across the whole semester. The grade represents my overall assessment of their participation in the class. If they are actively participating every day, they get a perfect score. While active participation is easiest to measure by those students who speak in class and contribute to discussions, I also consider those who are clearly following the conversation and being thoughtful about it. If you don’t regularly participate in class, your score drops. Those who never participate in class but have perfect attendance will end up with a score around 60-70%.
I’ll admit that this process can be fuzzy at best, and it always seemed so to me when I was a student. As such, I started something new this fall by grading students not only at the semester’s close but also during midterms. At that point, I give the students the grade that they would earn if the class were to end at that point. Once I’ve made them available to the students in the campus’s LMS (Blackboard, in my case) for a week, I erase the grades. I do not keep them, and they do not have any bearing on the grades at the end of the semester. Instead, they serve to give the students an indication of where they are at and allow them to make a course correction (pun intended) before the semester closes. If they don’t like what they see, they can choose to become more active in the class. I find that giving the students a sense of where they’re at helps relieve anxiety about what tends to be a fuzzy procedure across many classes. And I also find, as Erin observed previously when writing about encouraging student participation, that offering such a “reality check” tends to get more students involved in the class.
At the end of the semester, I make it a point to grade participation before I grade the final projects for my class and again make these grades available to students. I feel very strongly about these last two points. As I see it, if I make participation a significant part of a student’s grade, she should be able to see what score she has actually earned. Moreover, if I’ve made participation a significant part of her grade, I also believe that it should not only serve as something that bumps a student up or down if she is right on the borderline. If I enter participation very last, my own tendency is to try to goose the numbers so that students end up where I “think” they should end up. Grading participation before I finish grading other assignments allows me to avoid this problem.
A Final Twist: Crowdsourcing the Grade
In most of my classes, I use a modified version of Jason’s wiki notes assignment (you should also see Jason’s two ProfHacker posts on wikis in the classroom, here and here). I’ve said before that theft makes for good pedagogy, and I stand by it. One of the modifications that I’ve made to the assignment is to allow students to grade how well the members of their group–including themselves–participate in creating the class notes. Since students tend to dislike group work in part because each of them feels like he does all the work and all of his group member slack off, I’ve found that letting them evaluate their own participation in the project alleviates this anxiety. Building on that, I’m wondering whether I can apply the model to grading overall class participation in the future: combining their views of themselves and of classmates (?) with my own. If you do something similar to this, I’d be interested in hearing what approach you take.
Do you grade students based on participation? What method do you use? To what extent does participation contribute to student assessment in your field?
[Creative Commons-licensed photo by Flickr user johnny.hunter.]
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16 Responses to How to Grade Students’ Class Participation
kaitlinwalsh - May 5, 2010 at 7:11 pm
THANK YOU!!! Grading class participation is one thing I always find difficult. I try to spell out the types of things that count towards participation, like posting to the Blackboard discussion boards, but I always feel like participation is the easiest grade for people to contest.When I was in high school, one of my teachers would grade participation by putting a tick mark next to students’ names each time they talked. He actually kept a running tally throughout the term. I hated this because you could see him do it, and it seemed like people would raise their hands just to make sure they got enough tick marks for the day. I like having my students grade each other in group projects, and I’ve adapted a good rubric from a colleague for that purpose. But I do find that some students are too generous in their grading: their comments will say that the person didn’t do the work, but they’ll give them an A- or a B+ while the rest got As. Does anyone have a good way to avoid things like that?
rswolff - May 5, 2010 at 7:35 pm
I grade participation in all of my history classes; it constitutes 10-20% of overall course grades. I tell students that for me participation means not the quantity of their speech but the quality of their contributions to the scholarly work of the class. In practice, this means that I allow students to earn ‘points’ (although I do not actually tally them) by contributing in the ways that best suit them. Some students are voluble in class. Some will ask thoughtful questions but rarely risk declaring their opinion. Others engage best in small groups. A few are never happy speaking but are willing to put lots of effort into peer review of written work. Before I adopted this system, some students felt penalized because they weren’t willing to engage in large group discussions. Now I rarely hear any complaints about participation grades. (I should add that I also given students a mid-term heads-up about their participation grade thus far.) Now if I could only get them to understand that more reading is good for them. :-)
jason_b_jones - May 6, 2010 at 12:23 am
@kaitlin: I usually use peer grades as advisory, rather than absolutely determining, so if several people said, “X didn’t do the work,” but still give an A-, then I can re-calibrate that.The wiki, or, say, Google Docs, is particularly nice in this regard, since you can see who has done what, and when.
englishwlu - May 6, 2010 at 6:43 am
I require participation and grade it. It’s worth either 10% or 20% of the grade depending on class size. Once a class gets up around 22 or more students, it’s hard to guarantee participation in every class discussion for each individual, thus the lighter weighting of 10% for larger classes. 50% of that grade is attendance. A person who comes to every class but never contributes earns a 50. A person who contributes to every class but never says anything of value–working for that tick mark–gets a 75. I tell shy students who protest that they don’t “like” to talk that I am certain they have classmates who don’t “like” to take exams or write papers. Don’t like the policy, don’t take the course. I send around a clipboard at the end of class for students to claim their participation and I keep weekly records. This all translates into real grades–not quite a bell curve, but stand outs and freeloaders earning their As and Ds, with various shades of B and C for most. I keep them informed about how they are doing on participation, mainly encouraging more sharing of their good ideas, integrated into a paper comment. Because I give an objective final examination that verifies careful reading and engagement with course content, I have many years of records indicating that the participation grade (calculated before the final) _predicts_ the final exam result.
profe1 - May 6, 2010 at 6:56 am
I teach literature in three languages and participation is important for all three. About half way through the semester I give students a self-evaluation to complete, where they grade themselves on their participation and assign themselves a grade. I comment on their self-evaluation and return it to them with my comments. I keep track of what they gave themselves and use it as a point of comparison at the end of the semester. I find that the self-evaluation raises students’ awareness of what participation means and how well they are achieving its goals. I also encourage attendence at out of class opportunities for addition to participation.
ksledge - May 6, 2010 at 7:49 am
I taught cognitive psychology as a lecture and I still thought that participation was important, even though the students weren’t used to it mattering in this field and class size (100). Because the class was so large, there were many ways one could participate. First, there were oral contributions (Q&A in class). Second, all students had response clickers and there were questions using these clickers every day in class. Third, there was a chat room and a discussion board online for Q&A and exam review. Questions and answers were counted towards credit. Fourth, there was a wiki page to make review sheets for the whole class. I assigned point values to each of these segments, and they added up to 12 out of 10 points. You only needed 10/10 for a perfect score. If I were to do it again, I wouldn’t make 10% of the grade dependent on class participation in a class that size, but otherwise I’d keep the system the same. And it did make for some pretty good participation/discussion in the lecture!
dn871263 - May 6, 2010 at 8:00 am
I’m one of those that keeps a seating chart and makes a tick mark for each comment by a student, a “star” for each comment that shows the student has read the material beforehand, and a “d” for a class disruption (talking to neighbors, letting the cell phone go off, doing crossword puzzles, passing notes, etc.). Students start the semester with an “F” in participation, and end up that way if they don’t show up or show up but don’t speak. At the end of the semester, I add the three components together and to 50%, the beginning score. Before ading, I apply a weight to each of the three components (and each component is raised to a fractional power), with a negative weight for disruptions, and work with the weights and the powers until the grades across students correspond to what I think each student should have received. Thus, students who participate more, and with more preparation, will always receive better paricipation grades, although there are diminishing returns. Those who talk just to talk will do better than those who make fewer comments, but not much better, and they won’t do as well as those who make fewer, but well-prepared comments. I used to have students hitting on me at the end of the semester all the time for more participation points, to get their grades raised, but since I adopted this system, that very seldom happens. The point system is rationsal, data-based, and encourages class participation and preparation. I just point to my tick marks, stars, and disruption notes, and the student has no argument. The downside, of course, is that I have to make all the little marks, which is a bit intrusive.
briancroxall - May 6, 2010 at 9:19 am
@kaitlin When I ask students to evaluate themselves and their group members for the wiki assignment, I tell them, “Please use the whole point scale. Don’t think about it in terms that a 7 is a 70% and therefore a C. If someone didn’t do any work all semester, they should not get a 6 (which you might think of being a D). Instead, they should get a 1.” I also tell them that they should write 2-3 sentences about why they give a particular grade to the group members. I find that framing it this way makes for a more accurate assessment of how people have actually done. And as Jason notes, I can always see how the students have done individually by looking at the history of the wiki page. And I reserve the right to tweak these grades if something goes terribly awry. What is most interesting about this process is that people tend to rate their group members–provided they did some work–higher than themselves. Many people grade themselves more harshly, in other words, than their group members.@profe1 I have a grad school friend that asks students to write a persuasive argument about why they deserve one grade or another. The key portion of this paper is presenting evidence that helps build the case. I haven’t found the occasion to try the assignment in my class, but he seems very happy with it.@ksledge Thanks for the perspective on grading participation in large classes. My largest so far have only been around 35, so between Q&A during regular class and small group work, I haven’t had to try new approaches.@dn871263 This sounds like a spreadsheet-intensive calculation. But I agree that having a rational system in place can be very helpful. And providing students transparency in the process is something that I’ve come to value.
knjpg00 - May 6, 2010 at 9:21 am
In my upper level engineering classes, I just have a spreadsheet with on box for each student for each discussion day. I mark ++, +, -, or — for good prep and insightful comments, participation but not preparation, down to no prep and lots of listening. Of course, no mark means absent.This also allows me to reward those who actually “use the text” rather than only reflecting on their experiences and opinions – a recurrent problem for me.I tend to make marks throughout the discussion, rather than just when XX talks, to avoid the “raise your hand to get a check” reaction. But normally by the second or third comment a student makes, I can categorize them for the day.I don’t quantify this, but I can normally glance across the sheet @ the end of the semester and see a trend. I strongly agree with computing/recording participation before tallying final grades!
v8573254 - May 6, 2010 at 9:27 am
First, I agree with all your reasons for including participation in the grade as well as with the sometimes problematic nature of same.Long ago, I developed a rubric — yes, I know — which students received at the start and used at the end (mid term would have been a good addition). I read their ratings and comments, answered and put my grade on it. Each section of the rubric had a unsatisfactory to excellent description of behavior. Group work was one of the sections. Of course, I saw only the latter when it was done in class or when I read response sheets which came in with drafts, etc.Some students did not like this, but at least they knew in advance.
mralfred - May 6, 2010 at 10:21 am
I agree with many of the comments above however feel that there needs to be some specific guidelines to grading participation. Students need to be aware of how they are being graded. Teachers and professors are not considered authority figures like they once were. Students today will challenge some grading practices especially if they feel that they are arbitrary and based on a teachers own feelings.
philosophy - May 6, 2010 at 10:22 am
Something missing here (unless I overlooked it) is asking students questions, directly and by name. When a student responds, you can ask others, “Do you agree with that?” or “Do you have anything to add?” or “Can you think of a different approach?” etc. Of course class size limits this approach; more than 25 is problematic.An extension of this approach is to daily, or at least often, to require brief written (printed) responses to one or more “thought questions” about the reading assignment. Then students will have responses to every question, which they can read to the class, discuss, compare in small groups, etc.
amyshuffelton - May 6, 2010 at 11:35 am
I do grade participation in my education classes. I’d add that if participation is graded, it’s important to provide some variety of formats — large group discussions AND small group discussions, and maybe also a class blog — so that students who aren’t used to the classroom culture of discussion (which not all high schools promote!) have a chance to get their feet wet in small groups and build up the confidence to make their points in front of everyone. Depends on class size, of course, but worth keeping in mind. Learning to share one’s ideas aloud is important, but it does need to be learned — and requires support from the professor.Along those lines, also extremely important (if participation is graded) for the professor to keep the discussion civil, open, and hospitable to all opinions.
briancroxall - May 6, 2010 at 11:57 am
@philosophy Thanks for bringing this approach in. I like to call on students specifically at times, since there are only 30% or so in each class that will volunteer for such an assignment. One tool that I have at my disposal to make sure that I do this equitably is the Attendance app for iPhone/iPod Touch (http://web.me.com/dave256/MobileMe/Attendance_iPhone_App.html). Not only does it help me keep attendance records, but it will randomly select a student or groups of students, which is a great way to choose small groups besides just telling them to work with those they are close to, which is always already self-selected. You can read Jason review of Attendance at http://www.macworld.com/article/138961/2009/02/attendance.html.@amyshuffelton Thanks for bringing up this point. One of my best undergraduate professors had a real talent of being able to take any comment and morph it into something that related to the discussion at hand. He made you feel like you *were* contributing. Helping students contribute and feel that their contributions are worthwhile is a great way to encourage participation.
philosophy - May 6, 2010 at 12:37 pm
@amyshuffelton: to elaborate a wee bit, it helps to start the semester with a little song-and-dance about collegiality, politeness, profs can learn from students, students can help each other, “right answers” aren’t as important as thoughtful responses that display a serious effort to interact with the assignment, etc.And despite my best efforts, my approach doesn’t always work well, although it usually does. I find that 1st-semester freshmen are often the most reluctant to participate.
tdberg - May 12, 2010 at 9:59 pm
I’m thinking of trying something a colleague of mine does. He has students post a short precis each day, in which they must state what the author’s argument is and how s/he defends it. 4-5 sentences tops. Some of their participation credit comes from this work and the other part from their verbal participation in class. Students have told him this makes them read more carefully, that they are getting more out of the reading, and that they feel that even if they are shy they can get some points for participating by writing these precis. My colleague says that after he started this class discussions improved greatly. Students were better prepared and thus felt more confident in speaking up. I tested this during the last two weeks of the semester and it shows promise. Food for thought.