Working Group Facilitators: Kylie Korsnack (Richmond), Nancy Chick (Rollins), Nisha Gupta (Centre) and Kitty Maynard (Richmond)
Description: In Grading for Growth (2023), Clark and Talbert ask: “What if there was a way to think about grades built on growth over game-playing, learning over letters and numbers, and productive relationships over adversarial ones? What if we could address, if not entirely repair, so many of these problems, through a quiet revolution in the everyday task of grading?” (3). As they suggest, alternative grading systems that emphasize growth and feedback provide one such way. Moreover, alternative grading creates more inclusive and equitable learning experiences for students by mitigating some negative outcomes associated with traditional grading (see for example: Covington et al, 2017; Feldman, 2019; Kohn, 2011; Malouff & Thorsteinsson, 2016). However, for many faculty, making the leap from traditional grading to alternative grading requires significant investment of time and labor.
This working group aimed to meet this daunting task by co-creating an ACS course design institute (CDI) that provides faculty structure, support, and resources to take that first brave step towards alternative grading. Informed by Specifications Grading (Nilson, 2015), Grading for Growth (Clark & Talbert, 2023), and the recently published, Developing High-Impact Course Design Institutes (Troisi et al., 2025), the proposed CDI prepares participants to design a course using specs-grading. Meeting the ACS’s priority of advancing our understanding and implementation of inclusive and innovative pedagogies, the CDI outline and proposal serve as a resource for other ACS institutions and educational developers to adopt verbatim or as a model for developing their own specifically-tailored CDI to meet the needs of faculty at their respective institutions.