I mean, I agree with you. But there aren't many of us out there.

Link to the newsletter, which is well reported. No shade on the writer intended. Lots of shade on Harvard intended. www.chronicle.com/newsletter/t...

--Still tracing ungrading/collaborative grading. When I was researching *Failing Our Future* I found a similar practice that dates to the 1960s, but I'm still following the bread crumbs there.

Having fun with this! 7/end

--Standards-based grading comes directly from the K-12 world. The innovation brought to the model by higher ed is that instructors in college create standards directly related to their own course and content, whereas K-12 standards derive from state standards and larger curricular goals. 6/x

Nilson removed the statement about contract grading from the recently published 2nd edition of the book. I'm not sure why, as it helps to clarify what can be a pretty challenging model for folks to wrap their heads around. 5/x

It's often assumed to be closely aligned with standards-based grading, but if we instead acknowledge its lineage in the contract-grading family, we can more clearly see specs grading as a system of mini-contracts. 4/x

Here are a couple of things I'm finding very interesting so far:

--According to Linda Nilson, specs grading "started under the name of contract grading" (1st ed. of *Specifications Grading*, p. 74). This might help us to to see specs grading in a different light. 3/x

(Yes, we know that putting together a genealogy is something you might expect two people trained in the Humanities to do. We make no apologies. 😂) 2/x

Also like every 10 years there is a *national* news story about grade inflation at Harvard and people make fun of the students and don't ask themselves about the impact on young folks in a deeply unhealthy, highly competitive environment where mental health services keep getting cut

People spend way time worrying about whether students are getting too many A's and not enough time considering the possibility that people who busted ass so hard that they got into a place like that might be the kind to be high achieving

Too many FACULTY think grading is about breaking people, too

You'd think that folks who think the answer to allegedly artificially high grades is artificially lowering grades would make the connection that grades are just artificial, yet here we are.

Thanks for the shout-out, Matthew!

Thank you for sharing this message! It's one the alternative grading research community is trying to spread widely and one I tried to emphasize in my recent book, *Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It*.

Anyway, I don't know who needs to hear this right now but faculty, grades are NOT there to take students down a peg, put them in their place, or determine a student's value

They should reflect student learning, if they must be given at all

If you're interested in looking at grading's history, uses, challenges, and perils, seek out the writings of @josheyler.bsky.social. His book "Failing Our Future" is good and he's got plenty of articles out there.

Here's one: www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-v...