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Help designing college course grading system
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3 exams, each of which are 25% of your grade. Homework / quizzes / attendance are worth 25% of the grade. Then break down what percent each quiz, homework, attendance is worth.
Anything more complicated than that is needless, and probably detrimental to the student's well being. The system articulated in the OP is double plus ungood.
On a practical note, I would suggest that your wife talk to the person in charge of the department, or the relevant dean. Community colleges usually mandate specific grading systems for a class. I would be very surprised if an administrator looked at your system in the OP and thought it good.
Edit: Another practical issue. Imagine at the end of the term a student challenges their grade. Would your wife feel comfortable presenting the grading system in the OP to the deans / administrators in order to explain how the student got its grade?
Edit edit: Just looking at the OP again...
I'm imagining defending that sort of thing to an administrator in a grade review meeting. "Well, I wouldn't let Sally retake the final because she only have 4 tokens." And...no. That shit won't fly.
There may be privacy issues with this - a lot of schools require that a students performance be kept confidential between teacher and student.
1) I had a graduate course where homework was optional. However, completing all of the homework and turning it in allowed you to get a 5% bump in percentage on the next test, not allowing you to go over the maximum points.
2) A physics course I had in undergrad gave out homework but never checked it. Instead, his policy was this. Every test had 4 questions, each worth 25 points. 2 questions were taken directly from the homework, so if you did your homework, you pretty much got these points. 1 question was a question in the book not assigned, but if you did the others, this was routine. The 4th question made you think a little about what you learned so you could apply it. For example, one test had us deal with sound frequencies and amps I believe. The homework always had us deal with it from a single source. The test gave us 2 sources, but if you drew out the sources and their outgoing soundwaves, you could see it simple doubled the sound at the areas he wanted you to calculate.
That said, I'm very skeptical that many students would get excited about a 'game' of a grading scheme. Maybe something like that would go over well in a small & close knit AP / Honors class in High School...one full of overachievers who really care. Unless something has changed since I was in college, students in a general calc class don't give many shits.
The 'game' and 'high score' are getting the final grade for learning calculus. By creating too much of a 'meta' game people you distract from the purpose of attending the class in general.
I'm a gamer, but if I'm paying $$$$ to take a class that will affect my future, I want the grading to be clear and something I can figure out in advance. The game fails if as a student I have to think 'well, I can retake this quiz, but then I might not have enough tokens to retake the final exam if I bomb it'.
If you are going to require some 'currency' to retake tests / quizzes, students should never be forced to decide between using the 'currency' now, or saving it for later when they may need it more.
Yes, there have been several studies that have shown similar. This is probably the main reason for trying to bring outside incentives other than grades into the system. I'm actually somewhat surprised to see so many people in this thread insisting that the grades alone should be enough to motivate students and there aren't any better systems than what is currently in place, as the data doesn't really support that view. I wonder if we have a sampling issue where the people who post on the forums aren't representative of the majority who do need outside motivation.
Earning raffle tickets for doing homework could work pretty well. No direct impact on the grade, the more work you do the better your odds of getting a reward, and everyone overestimates the value of a lottery ticket!
I agree, but as long as everything is still tied to having to perform on the tests, they have to study and learn the material. I actually think making it more game-like should be an advantage. Everyone* hates the idea of taking a math class and having to study, but if you can change the perception and make them have fun doing it, maybe they will get an even better understanding than otherwise. Keep in mind that knowledge retention data from 'traditional studying' is godawful, its not like it can get much worse.
I try to encourage students to think of their grade as something they earn, a reflection of their performance in the class.
A gaming system doesn't seem to foster that same mentality of earning one's grade through mastery of the course material. It trivializes the grade system, and so trivializes the grades.
Suffice it to say that I am quite opposed to the notions expressed in the OP.
If I get a high score on strategy game or a puzzle game, I definitely feel I've earned it through mastery of the mechanics of the game. I have to think and practice and work at it until I can get a high score. I absolutely will rub it into my friends that I kicked their ass in Hexic and they can't touch my score.
I'll agree with you on a chance-based game (ie Diablo) where success is driven mainly by RNG, but if the score is tied directly to your knowledge and understanding of the underlying material (ie a test), do you still feel the same? Also, by having scores that far exceed a normal 'A', I would hope that you could make students feel they have achieved even greater mastery than would be possible by a straight scale.
To your last point: Scores generally range from 0% to 100%, and, in my understanding, indicate a student's mastery of the material. Getting a grade higher than 100% would mean they learned more than 100% of the course material. That seems strange, and possibly breaks down the notion that grade percentages relate to one's understanding of the material.
That's one of my concerns with the system you suggested: It complicates the relationship between class performance and grade. Telling a student that they answered every question correctly, and so received 100% maintains the relation. Adding tokens and multipliers and higher-than-A grades obfuscates that relationship. Their final grade ceases to directly correspond to mastery of material, and instead incorporates both material mastery and a bizarre gaming system. This goes into your first point, and my issue with it...
Presumably we can make a distinction between:
1) The course material.
2) The mechanics of the grade-game.
Students are in the class to learn the course material. They aren't there to learn the grade-game system. It's possible that some aspects of the grade-game utilize material covered in the course. That's awesome, but it would be better to take the grade-game system and turn it into a classroom project, which is then assessed via a very clear and simple rubric for grading.
To the competitive tone of your post: It's fine to try to foster competition between students. This can easily be done by grading on a curve. If you just want students to compete for high scores grade the class on a curve. You don't need tokens and score multipliers.
If your wife wants to try this, and the deans / administrators / faculty chair is cool with it then that's fine. I just think the whole notion of gaming grades is problematic and fundamentally confuses what grades do. Most students already think of grades as meaningless, or hoops they have to jump through, or something teachers / professors give them, rather than something a student earns. Adding tokens and achievements doesn't seem to help the situation.
"You answered 90% of the questions correctly, so you earned a 90%." is simple and sensible.
Adding a bunch of tokens and bells and whistles just confuses the relationship between one's learning of the material and one's grade.
I think the idea is similar to what I posted previously. You're trying to make the grades into the game, rather than what you actually want the students to learn. In your game I get a high grade by managing my tokens well. I could suck ass at math, but if I play the game well still get a decent grade. To be fair, in order to get tokens I have to practice math, so there is some tangential results of learning more math to get a better grade. But the way the game is formulated makes it seem like the focus is on manipulating my grade without necessarily getting better at the math. This is not what students want, and is not how you want to use the idea of gaming in education. Instead you want the game to be about the math. Playing the game should involve doing math. Specifically the kind of math you are trying to teach. Then a high grade (or high score if you will) is related to playing the game well, but still directly related to how well you can do the math.
Then set-up the first quiz in such a way that if a student hasn't done their homework, they are totally screwed (E.G. missing a key formula they would have gotten from doing an assignment on their own). Watch the sweat drip on quiz day. Hand out "F"s the next day, and remind them that their single lowest quiz score will be dropped. Maybe they should do their homework assignments from now on.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar... but you catch the most with excrement.
For every study you can cite that shows external motivation works, I can throw an equal number at you that show intrinsic motivation works even better.
I'll provide a counterpoint that's not opinion based. I recently had a colleague that tried the external incentive system, e.g., monetary award. It blew up in my colleague's face when some students decided they did not want the money and actively worked to make sure they didn't get the prize. The majority of the students didn't care about the prize and only wanted to pass the course. Some perhaps did care, but the group that eventually won the prize was, surprisingly for my colleague, the group that exhibited none of the characteristics of the being the gung-ho competitive win-the-prize type, and just wanted to pass the course.
The main thing people are saying is not that grades alone should motivate, but that at the end of the day, everything you're doing is still going to be grade based, no matter how much sugar coating you put on it. If that's the case, simpler is better than complex. It can still be a game, just a simple game.
I'm going to be trying out an achievement-like system to incentivize doing extra work outside of class for my Composition course. Most of the awards are silly and provide benefits for the student, but are not necessary to pass the course. For instance, one of my achievements requires students to complete 2 group assignments outside of class and present their findings. If successfully completed, they earn a title, "studentscore" and also the ability to choose who they work with whenever we have group work in class (with restrictions of course). Another achievement gives the student the ability to sit in the teacher's chair for one class (the student doesn't have to teach) or another gives them a pass from peer review.
The goal is to get them to do their own research/work in English on things they want and still have it benefit the course in one way or another. One of my stipulations though is achievements can not directly influence the student's overall grade. But with this system I'm able to give them a "studentscore" so they can compare "achievements" to each other without violating any student/teacher confidentiality thing. Do I expect most students to participate? Nope. But I'm hoping it will provide an incentive for those students who have a passion for writing/English to pursue that passion.
At the end of the day, teaching is mostly motivating students and grades are a terrible way to motivate most students.
If it's the first, but the students are mastering the material/learning outcomes that they're supposed to, then the grading seems tangential to what's going on.
If it's the second, then it seems like it isn't a question of gamifying the grading system, but of trying to figure out how to meet the learning outcomes more successfully.
If it's the last one:
A more extreme idea might be to try a flipped classroom, where the homework is to watch a few videos where the teacher explains how to do the problems. Then when students come to class, they work on what would originally have been the homework, but this way the teacher is there to help them with it if they have questions. You could have students turn this homework in at the end of class and that could be their grade for their homework.
Another idea that I've read about are to create a graduated difficulty in assignments to get students used to expecting to do them. For example, some classes will have an assignment 0 which is worth a bit less than a normal assignment, but which is a formative assessment of what the student's prior knowledge is.
There are some good readings stuff on grading rubricks, creating assessment in courses, etc--if you're interested you can PM me, I don't want to spam the thread with a bunch of references to papers/books/citations.
I am heavily in favor of at least attempting to improve things in school through gamification. It's not like you can't gamify the rest of your life to follow suit! And if it fails, you can just fall back to the status
That video is awful.
2) "Give students skills as they leveled". The shit you learn is the skill you acquire.
3) Reward systems. Learning the material is the reward. That's the point of education: Learning things.
4) On Agency and "I once read a study". Persons had concepts of agency before video games, and can have agency without involving gaming.
5) "this early test by a non-expert showed an impact on a portion of the student body...and i believe bla bla". Modifying education based upon these sorts of claims is problematic.
6) Alternate Reality Game and "make schooling more magical and wonderful by not being schooling." What the hell? Sit down and learn your damn latin, damnit. This section of the video is just bizzare. Convincing students that they want to learn by tricking them into learning via some other system is...screwy.
7) Plot your route game: Wikipedia is no.
8) "Encourages curiosity" That's great, and encouraging students to want to learn is great. However, most classes have specific objectives to reach and particular bits of information that students need to learn. If a student is in a latin class then, sure, letting them to an assignment that focuses upon an area of latin in which they are interested is fine. But the video seemed to go beyond this level of restriction, and that's problematic. There are times when students need to be able to learn material in which they are not interested.
9) "linking ideas": There are plenty of ways to explain relations of ideas to students that do not involve gaming or self-directed explorations. For example, the professor could explain the relationships of ideas to the students. Students don't need to discover the links for themselves if an educator can explain what the links are. Some students might discover new links, and that's awesome.
The video seemed to be a catalog of "things i would like education to be" rather than an actual quantifiable articulation of proven education methods that achieve particular desired results. We don't need to gamify educational systems or find goofy gimicks to trick students into learning. We just need them to sit down and learn their damn latin, damnit. One can explain the relationship of learning the material to their desired career or life path. One can even answer student questions of the relevance of a particular topic.
However, that seems to confuse the situation. It creates a situation in which a student signs up for the class, and then the professor is responsible for convincing the students to learn the material of the course they signed up for. I'm imagining a student saying, "Alright. I signed up for your math class. Now, convince me that I ought to have signed up for this class." And that's not how education works. The motivation to sign up for the class and learn the material happens prior to the class starting. Once the class starts they are in there to learn the material.
The whole gaming approach seems to be trying to answer the question of how to convince students to learn the material they signed up to learn...and that's a non-question.
Edit: It's akin to the OP's concern of how to "better incentivize the students to do homework and quizzes". That's only a problem if you feel a need to convince students to do the work they signed up to do. But there's no reason for a professor / teacher to place itself in that position. An assignment is given, and a student is obligated to do it. If the student does not do the assignment they fail. Problem solved.
If the students are already studying, those aren't the students you're aiming at. So no, how to convince students to learn the material they signed up to learn is not a non-question. In fact, it's the question.
It is, in fact, the question everyone is trying to answer.
A particular student's lack of desire to study isn't necessarily indicative of a problem with the educational system, or even a particular classroom. Their home life, their community, their personal disposition, etc., all may be relevant factors. Turning a Latin class into a jrpg won't necessarily solve the problem.
Moreover, if we agree that some students may function within the "sit down and study" approach, while others do not, then modifying the entire system into a new model probably won't solve the problem, given that the students who function well in the "sit down and study" model may not be disposed towards the jrpg model of teaching.
I'm not denying that some students may prefer the gaming model. Hell, I'm sure students would prefer to receive an A on day one and not have any work required of them.
Student preferences aren't necessarily the best rubric for discerning how best to teach / grade.
I owned up to the class at that point for failing to have an alternative explanation that they could get. My job was to get them to understand the material. Whatever time spent on making some grading plan should be spent on learning how to teach students the course material in the best way possible.
Definately agree with this. Knowing how to explain a concept in more than one way is one of the most important aspects of teaching. There may be a best way that 70% of students "get". The trick is to find ways to explain it to the other 30%.
1) I can move this thread into D&D for a discussion about the upsides and downsides of gamifying various aspects of the educational system.
2) I can leave this here and keep it to "ways to improve this particular setup."
The downside to the first is that while you may get some information about teaching she can use, this will probably veer off pretty quickly. The downside to the second is that most people here already seem to think the whole thing is kind of a bad idea to begin with. I'll discuss it with a D&D mod first, but if I move it you may want to change up your OP a bit.
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
Looking at what was outlined, here's how I'd do this:
Homework - No points, but at least 50% of the quiz problems are word for word from the homework (with numbers changed).
Final/Midterm - Worth the full 100% of the class combined, must pass all 3 to pass the class.
Quizzes - Worth x% of the missed points from the midterm, so long as that midterm was passed.
The incentive to do the homework is better performance on the quizzes. But if the student has an alternative study method they prefer, they can demonstrate its effectiveness on the quizzes and not be punished for it. Student already knows the material, or it just comes natural and they don't need the study? Being in class and doing busy work is wasted on them, just let them test out. The hard working people that freeze up on tests get a way to save their A, everyone is happy. Except the lazy fools that shouldn't be in college yet anyways.