Points-Based Grading for Growth: Helping Students Understand Standards-Based Grading

This paper describes a new approach to standards-based grading that uses points to help the system feel more intuitive and familiar for students accustomed to points and traditional grading. This implementation is suitable for use in a variety of courses, particularly in mathematics. Individual problems are graded using a small range of points, along with a mark indicating minor revision is needed. The grade bundles are converted to point totals for both learning outcomes and homework that must be achieved separately. The use of partial credit, final grades, and DFW rates is compared between traditional grading and two standards-based grading approaches: one without points and the new points-based approach described here. This paper also details the experience at the final exam for both instructors and students, personal advice on maintaining reassessments, and presents several student comments from course evaluations. Examples of this implementation are described for elementary statistics and calculus 3.