By Emily Rabung, OSU College of Forestry
Resilient Teaching Voices Series
If resilience means sticking with it through a disruption and remaining generally well while doing so, we often think of the resilience our students and ourselves need to keep teaching and learning through a global pandemic or a personal emergency. However, in my experience, the teaching and learning process comes with its own disruptions that need to be weathered. For students, struggling through a particularly challenging change in how they approach a problem is an important part of the learning process. This requires resilience for students to keep going and stay positive about the gains that come with such a struggle. And for instructors, we often require resilience to keep up with the deluge of grading that shows us how students are doing in that process, especially as class sizes continue to grow to accommodate increasing enrollment.
Alternative grading practices have been a way for me to think about and create resiliency for both of student and instructor classroom struggles. Alternative grading describes a suite of various grading approaches (like ungrading, standards-based grading, specifications grading, contract labor-based grading, etc.) that diverge from the traditional grading system, which uses the allocation and averaging of points to determine a final grade. My alternative grading approach centers around the learning tasks students perform in the class with the final grade reflecting the number of tasks in which students are able to demonstrate a beginning mastery of the associated learning outcomes.
When I am focused on looking for evidence of learning more broadly, I find myself able to engage more with the students’ ideas. My task is not to assign points but to have a conversation with the student as I give personalized feedback. My actual conversations with students about grades become richer as well.
Emily Rabung
For students, I feel that this alternative grading approach encourages resiliency in one major way: it encourages students to stay with the struggle of learning without being penalized for doing so. For each assignment that assesses learning, students are marked as either meeting the learning outcome or not and given personalized feedback about their performance. Students can then take that feedback and revise almost every assignment for full credit towards the final grade. Ultimately learning is about trying something to see how it goes and adjusting to get better. It is how we learn to ride a bike, cook a new dish, or play a sport or instrument. Why should classroom learning be any different? I have found that this process does two things. First, it encourages students to keep trying because only good things can come from trying again. Second, it gives every student who meets the learning outcomes by the end of the term the credit they deserve regardless of whether it took them more tries than their peers. My experience so far has been that 100% of students were able to meet the intended learning outcome(s) after revising using personalized feedback.
As for the struggles on the instructor side, grading can still be rough, but the experience has gotten significantly better and produces less anxiety. I now longer sit and worry if the somewhat arbitrary number of points I am giving to each student is fair. When I am focused on looking for evidence of learning more broadly, I find myself able to engage more with the students’ ideas. My task is not to assign points but to have a conversation with the student as I give personalized feedback. My actual conversations with students about grades become richer as well. Now instead of asking why points were lost they ask what they need to master a learning outcome, which is a conversation I am much more excited to have. And when I hear from students that something isn’t working for them, this grading system is much easier to make the needed adjustments without worrying about how the carefully weighted points will be impacted.
When I first started thinking about resilience, I was thinking about community and human connection much like my colleagues. These are so important for building resilience through the benefits they offer. But eventually I started to think about what things can make resilience harder. Grades are a common complaint among both instructors and students for so many reasons, so it made sense to me to think about how they might be transformed in a way that made them an asset to resilience rather than a liability. These are some of the benefits I have found from alternative grading but there are so many more. Much of what I have learned about alternative grading comes from the Grading for Growth blog that I would recommend to any instructor aspiring to try out alternative approaches to grading.
About the author: Emily Rabung is an instructor in Forest Ecosystems and Society in the College of Forestry. As an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, she teaches courses about decision-making, consensus building, and policy in the field of natural resources.
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of guest posts about resilience and teaching strategies by members of the Fall ’25 Resilient Teaching Faculty Learning Community facilitated by CTL. The opinions expressed in guest posts are solely those of the author.
Top image generated with Microsoft Copilot.
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