Work in Progress: Examining Engineering Seniors Students’ Perception of Justice and Fairness of Grading Practices

This work-in-progress paper reports preliminary results about engineering students' perceptions of the justice and fairness in grading. The paper quantitatively compares students' perceptions between a specifications graded and traditionally graded capstone class and analyzes qualitative comments about students' overall perceptions of grading. Specifications grading is a system of assigning grades primarily characterized by grading each assignment as pass or no-pass (i.e., fail) and is proposed as a way to increase students' learning, motivation, and autonomy while also modeling real (engineering) workplace practices. The results of this work in progress suggest a number of interesting findings primarily the difference between the quantitative and qualitative findings. The quantitative results suggest a positive perception of specification grading while the qualitative results suggest a more negative outlook. Future work is needed to better understand this difference.