Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Work-in-progress grade abatement profiles scores were posted exactly 24 hours ago:
These scores, which were explained in even greater detail elsewhere, will be deleted from the online gradebook tomorrow morning. They’ve served their purpose: You’ve seen what your hard work or lack of work will lead to, and you know what to do between now and October 22, when a permanent GAP score will be determined.
Deleting these scores does not delete evidence. Keeping them, however, would require constant updates to the profile, since you would constantly produce new evidence. You might make better choices. You might make worse ones. To constantly update the score would replace one vector for toxicity with another. Consider that idea — of vectors in grading — here:
Read that carefully. Then consider this: If we are constantly gathering data on you, your GAP score is not summative — it is, instead, about communicating progress to other stakeholders, holding you accountable for your choices, and offering a soft reboot of the evidence-gathering process. Those goals separate the formal GAP scores it from the Skinner-box shock of a WIP GAP score.
There are plenty of places on this website that delve into this stuff (here’s one on using spreadsheet data), but you really just need Alfie Kohn’s logic:
It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
That’s from “The Case Against Grades,” which you should read in full. Those WIP GAP scores will be removed to put us back on the triptych model of assessment, with a focus on profiles and evidence-gathering. The lesson of those scores, however, ought to stay with you.
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