Making the Grade: Ending Extra Credit
The opening article of this series concluded with Maya Angelou’s famous quote, ““Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” When it comes to grading practices, one of my most significant do betters relates to offering extra credit.
As a young teacher, I spent far too much time near the end of grading periods concocting projects and assignments as extra credit work for struggling students who wanted to raise their grade. I had geography students writing two-page papers on any culture of their choosing, world history students creating historical timelines in PowerPoint, and English 11 students analyzing the figurative language in Katy Perry’s song “Firework.”
My misguided mentality focused solely on student initiative. If a student was motivated to complete an extra assignment or project, it was warranted that their grade should be raised, or they should receive a certain number of bonus points.
But then I read this Rick Wormeli quote, “Grades should not be used as rewards. Nor should they be used as affirmation, compensation, or validation. Grades should represent an honest report of evidence at this moment in time, nothing more. If we make them something more than that, we undermine the student’s maturation and any useful purpose for grading” (as cited in Smartbrief, 2018).
Simply put, a grade is a communication tool to help teachers, students, administrators, and parents understand the status quo of a student’s learning. As soon as we begin muddying the waters of student learning by inflating grades with extra credit, the communication tool becomes inaccurate and ineffective. Additionally, offering extra credit assignments does not address the heart of the problem. If students have gaps in their learning, extra credit assignments that do not directly connect to the learning gap will not close it.
As a golf coach, I would never tell a player that his putting game will improve if he creates a PowerPoint presentation on the history of golf. Instead, I provide him with specific drills that connect to his putting weaknesses.
What does this look like in a classroom? Let’s examine using a fictitious student named Devin. If Devin demonstrates deficiencies in identifying rhetorical appeals in a nonfiction text, I need to complete three important steps:
First, I need to make sure he understands the basic concepts related to rhetorical appeals—logos, ethos, and pathos. Without this understanding, he will never be able to complete the assessment task at a proficient level.
With this knowledge, I will have him explain what he did incorrectly on his original assessment, making sure he can correctly identify examples of rhetorical appeals on his own.
Finally, I will give Devin a different nonfiction text to show he can accurately identify various rhetorical appeals and adjust his grade to reflect what he now understands.
Having students revise and resubmit their work is a far more effective way to close gaps in student learning, and it maintains the grading integrity that Wormeli emphasizes—an honest report of a student’s learning at that moment in time.
So as the calendar flips to December and the end of the 2nd quarter draws near, resist the temptation to ask ChatGPT for extra credit ideas in the courses you teach. Instead, scour your grade book and search for deficient skills that are lowering students’ grades. Provide them with an opportunity to revise and resubmit their work. Give them the opportunity to show that when they know better, they do better, too.
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