All members of the courses work together to determine evaluation and assessment criteria because it allows full ownership of the learning that happens within our courses. Evaluation is a valuable process, and providing feedback to peers is a life skill that is necessary for everyone to learn as they move forward in their professional careers. Assessment is based on criteria designed by the members of each course each time the course is administered because the learning activities are different for each course. All members must contribute to the assessment and grading process, meaning students and conveners must all have a role in the assessment. Conveners may not count more than once in the process, meaning they may not be part of a peer section AND a convener section, but must be one or the other. Once implemented, if the process is not working as expected it is the responsibility of the class to re-assess their approach to change the process accordingly. However, once the grading and assessment process is finalized for the final grade, the process must be enacted and the final grade may not be changed by ANY individual.
Grading and evaluation can be viewed as a learning opportunity, in which scholars consult new literature (self-assessment, peer-assessment, multi-modal expression) to discover and create authentic assessment strategies. Together students and faculty are responsible for the key steps in grading and evaluation: (1) setting the criteria for judging the work, (2) selecting the evidence, and (3) making judgments about the extent to which the evidence meets the criteria. Discussion of these key steps often turns to broader questions of importance: How does one discern quality? How can the “evidence” be sensitive to different learning styles? How can different voices be counted in the “judgment” step? The co-deciding of "criteria, evidence, judgement" is from Biggs, J. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. 2001. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press. p. 157. It's an example of how we rely upon scholarship to inform our practice.
Because co-creating grading and evaluation processes is a challenge, it is essential that enough time be reserved for both the design and implementation throughout the semester, not just at semester’s end. Discussion about grading and evaluation should be iterative and include, at the minimimum:
The Bailey Scholars Program developed a Learning Assessment Model not only for the core courses, but for each experience associated with our community, Middle Twelves, Co-Curriculars, and otherwise. You will find this here. In an effort to ensure that we continuously learn from our work, it was set up to be an intentional and critical process. Beginning with “Envision,” we think about what it is we hope to gain from an experience. Moving through “Prepare,” we think about what it is we need to do in order to prepare for the experience personally and as a community. Moving onto “Do,” we actually go through the experience intentionally and think about what it entailed. Upon completion, we “Gather” and examine our evidence, artifacts, information and thoughts from the overall experience. We then “Reflect,” and think about the overall experience; what we gained from it; how it relates to the Declaration, our 5 Questions, and Guiding Principles; and how it has affected our own individual journeys. Then we “Connect” the experience to our overall work, thinking about how this will affect our greater work and our own Learning Vision Statements. It is a cyclical design, meaning we are constantly learning from what we do and embrace the process of assessing how we go about our work together in community.
Regardless of grading and evaluation system that is co-created, the MSU policy for grading and evaluation must be followed. That is, three written assessments must be produced at the end of every course: (1) student grades assigned by the course instructors, (2) written evaluations of the course, and (3) written evaluations of the instructors. University forms (SIRS or SOCT) are available for course and instructor evaluation; however, conveners have found qualitative evaluations to be a much richer source of feedback.