As I mentioned in this term’s first workshop on “ungrading” and alternative modes of assessment, I’m rolling out a “contract grading” system in my “Intro to Theory” course this term. I’m mostly pleased with the approach so far, and I wanted to share my experience of the midterm, while I’m in the midst of assessing students’ work (read: procrastinating).

I kept the same basic shape of the old midterm: I used to give them a take-home exam, giving them 48-72 hours to provide answers to 5-6 short answer questions that need a short paragraph to respond, plus an essay of several paragraphs on a more synthetic question. I would estimate that it would take a well-prepared student two hours, though many students report taking much longer.

Generative AI slaughtered my exam, with an assist from the long, poop-encrusted tail of superficial videos on theoretical topics on TikTok, YouTube, and the like. So I dropped some blue books on students, cut out the essay (which kind of hurts me), and gave them a more robust selection of short answers, since I think those do the best job of demonstrating who has attended and participated faithfully in class: out of 18 questions to choose from, B contracts were responsible for 7 answers in 75 minutes, and A contracts for 9.

The wrinkle I wanted to share was a last-minute change inspired by one of my ninth-grade son’s teachers. For his midterm, the teacher permitted students to bring a single page of notes of any kind, and that’s it. I have a dim view of the way this kind of testing prioritizes speed on the one hand and the capacity to fill a cache of memory quickly and then (presumably) dump it after the assessment is over on the other. But I thought the one-page restriction might give students a helpful aid to memory, pushing them to consolidate their learning in advance and avoiding the potential anxiety that might attach to the paper shuffle of the open book-open note exam or the panic of rolling into a demanding exam with nothing.

The early returns are good. I’m responding more or less the way I would with a graded exam, with qualitative comments sprinkled in. Instead of numbers and calculations, however, I’m giving a simple “satisfactory,” or a + or – for exams that, on the whole, show extra pizazz or significant problems clearing the bar. One exam thus far seems to constitute a “breach of contract,” and I’ll have to work that out with the student in conference.

The mini-revelation has been the value of the one page of notes. I required them to turn the notes in, partly to police whether they’d plugged the answers into a chat interface to copy and partly out of curiosity. It’s a fascinating window into parts of their process that I wouldn’t ordinarily see or think about, including:

• the quality and range of their class notes (or those they could scrounge from a friend)
• areas that many students find confusing or opaque
• how students approach studying, whether they study at all, and how they individually approach the challenge of synthesizing a lot of material

Given that recopying and editing notes demonstrably aids in committing them to memory and/or understanding the material they cover on a deeper level, I wonder whether the imperative to create the single page and share it with me doesn’t sneakily nudge them towards better preparation. I think I’ll try it again. Hat tip to the formidable Steven Mazie at Bard Early College High School!

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.