Why College Faculty Should Never Grade Participation
Participation is essential to learning, which is why you shouldn’t grade it
Lying in the shadows of AI existentialism, academic freedom and DEI is another equally consequential higher ed culture war: the battle over academic rigor.
Among more ambiguous principles like critical thinking and problem solving, vociferous defenders of academic rigor seem to include the following in their teaching philosophies:
Rigid assignment deadlines and formats
Rigorous grading—meant to resist institutional priorities like enrollment numbers and graduation rates in an effort to preserve merit-based academic achievement
A learning environment that prepares students for the complexities and demands of the "real world”
Equating work quantity with rigor; a call to bring back long readings, papers, and logistically complex projects
I often refute these beliefs with pedagogies that uphold rigor without being exclusionary. However, my philosophy aligns with at least one thing rigor defenders would likely support: eliminating participation grades.
What The Research Shows About How College Faculty Grade Participation
Though it is possible to measure participation, there’s a strong argument that doing so diminishes academic rigor in college courses. Ken Petress in the College Student Journal gave an operational definition for class participation in 2006, where he wrote that “class participation is composed of three evaluative dimensions: quantity, dependability, and quality.”
A literature review on class participation rubrics in higher ed reveals how faculty build participation rubrics based on these dimensions. As you could imagine, the way that faculty interpret mastery in these areas is varied. For example, some faculty defined quality participation as “concise, specific and as relevant as possible”, while others prioritized substance and thoughtfulness of students’ contributions. As an educator, I’ve heard substantive, thoughtful student responses in class that were neither concise nor totally on-topic.
Faculty who sit down to grade a student’s participation without a rubric are grading the low-hanging fruit. They ask themselves, “How often did this student raise their hand in class?” and, “Did they meet the minimum three-post requirement for each week’s discussion posts?” In this case, quantity equals quality.
Faculty who sit down to grade a student’s participation with a rubric are grading based on selective memory. In a 90-minute class, it’s nearly impossible for an instructor to genuinely assess each individual student’s progress toward specific learning goals while facilitating discussion and delivering content. Those who do so after the fact are grading what they remember—most do it solo, while some lean on a teaching assistant’s insights. We also have research on grading bias that shows that non-performance factors such as students’ names and conventional attractiveness impacts students’ final grades, biases that likely influence participation grading.
If you agree that faculty should be assessing substantive work and measurable skills instead of mere effort, and that quality participation is so unhelpfully subjective that it can’t be measured with efficacy, then you’d agree with me that we should focus on assessing the skills that students are practicing, not the mere fact that they practiced them.
I feel the same about reflection, active listening, heck, even attendance. These are all vital skills that make learning possible, and we should give students feedback on them because they’re so important. But we should save the letter grades for the more specific, subject-based learning goals we have.
How One Faculty Member Instituted a Class-Wide Participation Grade
I learned about one faculty member who made participation a class-wide grade. That’s right—each student in the class earned the same participation grade. In order to raise their class participation grade from a B to an A, they’d need to collaboratively decide how they would make improvements to their participation.
The class was an undergraduate-level Political Ethics class. The class challenged students to take the role of weekly news anchors, turning their classroom into a newsroom where they reported on the most pressing news of the day to the American public. Information literacy, storytelling, and critical thinking skills were all core learning goals, making the class less about politics and more about what it means to ethically report on and discuss real-world issues.
You might be wondering, “How can a group of 25 students productively work toward the same grade?” My memory from this 2024 conversation stops there, but if I had to fill in the gaps using my imagination, the faculty member likely gave feedback on the quality of participation she saw from the class. Then, the class might’ve discussed this feedback in small groups, generated their response to the feedback along with their own assessment of their participation, and negotiate a participation grade with the instructor that reflected their progress toward learning goals stated in the rubric.
Why Grading Participation Will Always Disservice Students
The above section describes an ideal way to grade class participation for those who insist on doing so. We’d never ask students to tabulate the number of times they each raised their hands, or to look at a Canvas dashboard to decipher the quantity of their discussions posts; when we ask students about their participation, we can encourage them to think about it through a holistic lens. This approach ensures that our memory and bias aren’t the largest determinants of students’ participation grades.
Even still, we don’t need to grade participation to create a culture of care, collaboration, and intellectual curiosity among students. We can set the foundation for what effective participation looks like in the first week or two of class. Once students begin practicing those principles, they’ll keep doing it because they’ll find that their learning is deeper and more enjoyable as a result. Students will do ungraded work if they know why they’re doing it and find it valuable.
The verdict: grade students on the skills they’re able to display, not their mere effort or presence. Effort and presence are important and should be rewarded, just not through a letter grade.
Faculty will struggle with this verdict because the only way we’ve been taught to reward students is through assigning letter grades. Learning how to give effective feedback, make our classes accessible to neurodivergent students, or creating strong alignment between class activities and assessments aren’t skills that we learn during new faculty orientation. These are all areas of teaching where we must seek professional development to encourage student participation.
Instead of grading things that we can’t measure in a system where grades are an upward academic and professional mobility lever, let’s focus on rigor by learning how to do the things that incentivize participation: give good feedback, make classroom engagement accessible, and better align class activities with assessments.
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