Completion Grades Are a Great Way to Hold Students Accountable
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why completion grades serve a crucial accountability function — ensuring students do the work before it's graded for quality.
Key Takeaways
- Completion grades ensure work gets done - Grading for completion first establishes the baseline expectation that students must do the work
- Doing the work is a prerequisite to learning - Students can't improve if they never practice; completion grades enforce participation
- This isn't lowering standards - Requiring completion is the foundation on which quality expectations are built
Transcript
I love completion grades because they allow you to hold students accountable for doing the work but at a point when it wouldn't be appropriate yet to assess students for mastery and this is the one thing that I've never heard standards-based grading advocates really explain like how would you take the place of completion grades what I have heard a lot of people do is try to make teachers feel bad about giving completion grades like it's some sort of distortion of of the purpose of grading to grade for completion.
Personally, as a science teacher, if you're a math teacher, if you're an English teacher, whatever you teach, there are probably times when you don't want to assess students for accuracy or mastery because they're not expected to be there.
yet right.
You're doing something along the way to that learning that you ultimately want to take place, that you ultimately want to hold students accountable for and hold yourself accountable for making sure that they get there.
But they won't get there if they don't do the work, right?
Like students have to put forth effort along the way to arrive at the learning and the mastery that we want them to have.
And it makes total sense to me that we would use completion grades to keep students on track, to let them know that their effort matters.
And if you've ever had a student ask you, hey, like, is this for a grade?
You know what they mean by that.
You know, is this for a grade means I'm not really going to try if this is not for a grade.
And like, yes, sometimes students don't try as hard as they might otherwise if they know something is a completion grade, but they at least do it.
They're at least going to get some of the benefit and ideally all of the benefit of putting forth effort.
And I've heard standards-based grading advocates say, well, we can report on effort and behaviors like that, but separately from learning.
We have to report it separately from learning.
And my question then is, how do you hold students accountable for two different things?
How do you hold students accountable for learning, but also for trying?
And what happens?
Here's the thing.
What happens if you have a student who learns?
They meet all the standards, they master the content, but they don't try very hard.
They just kind of phone it in.
Are you going to fail that student for not really trying if they learn everything that they're supposed to?
That is a complete non-starter.
So I think it works really well to have traditional grades that recognize learning, but that also recognize effort.
And I think standards-based grading doesn't really have an alternative to that.
I could be wrong.
Let me know what you think.