Grades can magnify inequities that exist in American schools, making it harder for some students to succeed.

What is Asset-Based Feedback? Feedback in the context of education is information provided following a learning activity that helps students and instructors: 1) identify current gaps in a student's journey from novice to expertise in a given domain and 2) clarify the steps toward filling ...

In this post I share how I discovered a peer-reviewed article on postplagiarism that includes fake references, including attributed work that I never wrote. I summarize legitimate contributions to …

This morning, our six-year old first grader - a kid who has no experience with or conceptual understanding of school grades - showed us a "neat trick." On a piece of paper next to some of his writing (we'd been playing Boggle last night), he drew a lower case "f" next to a minus sign (-) and told us that "f minus is a bad grade." Oh, OK, we said. However, he slyly continued, "Look at this!" And then he drew a curved-ish line down, turning his lower case "f" into an upper case "A." With a finishing flourish, he also struck through the minus, turning that symbol into a plus (+). "It's an A plus," he exclaimed. "What does that mean?" we asked. He didn't know. And we have no idea where he picked up this knowledge of grading, perhaps from a chapter book because his first-grade teacher does not assign grades to the many projects he creates in class. He has never received a grade from an educator in his life, yet he's approximating the act of assigning a grade to himself and believes it's best to avoid an F- and aspire toward an A+. The logics of conventional schooling and success are so pervasive, are odd at face value, and are frankly incomprehensible to children unless they are first trained into a culture of what "counts" as rewarded achievement.

A statistical case against points-based grading

Or lack thereof

As the academic year begins, concerns arise for equity-deserving students who may struggle without adequate support. Promoting academic integrity involves fostering an inclusive environment where a…

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. We’re back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries! The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are… Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the Univer…

Please see below for the links to the slides and handout (with references and script) for my talk at The Grading Conference 2025 on June 11, 2025. Title: Tolerance for Error: A theory of how (some)…

The evolving landscape of academic integrity calls for a shift from traditional plagiarism detection toward a post-plagiarism approach that treats students as partners. This framework emphasizes co…

The history scholar explains why it matters that there’s been a spike in students graduating with Latin honors.

In this special collaborative episode with the L&S Exchange Podcast, we explore how college changes what we trust and what higher ed can do to become more trustworthy. With special guest philosopher Tony Laden, author of Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of Higher Education and What We Can Do About Them (2024). Aftershow featuring the L&S Instructional Design Collaborative and UW–Madison philosophy professor Harry Brighouse. Notes: "20 Things Teachers Do" by Tim Brighouse Produced by Carrie Welsh and Jennifer McCord. Thanks to Avrie Marsolek, James Dempsey, and Tony Laden. And a special thanks to the L&S Exchange for collaborating with us on this episode. We are grateful to Merit library at UW–Madison for the use of their recording space.

I am thankful to historian Seth Bruggeman for writing this piece at Inside Higher Ed. It put into words much of what I was feeling last semester in one of

Students with alphabetically lower-ranked names often receive lower grades than their peers, according to a recent study from the University of Michigan.

We asked professors, students, and high-school counselors.

And generative AI is the thing that broke it, Zach Justus and Nik Janos write.

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

Ethics and Educational Technology. Reflection, Interrogation, Design with Stephanie Moore. #MyFest23 #equityUnboundLink to webpage link to this conference: h...

If you insist on using tools to detect AI-generated text in student work at least do so in an open and transparent way.

We're one week away from Turnitin's AI text detection tool going live on April 4th. It is being rolled out to all customers with no ability to opt out or even test the functionality first. Instructors will be exposed to this unproven functionality before we can even react.— Ian Linkletter (@Linkletter) March 27, 2023

As the school year gets underway this fall, many teachers are wondering how to address the mental health repercussions of the past two years. How can we show up for our students with care at the ce…

As a new academic year approaches, I urge institutions & educators to abandon online proctoring. It's racist, ableist tech that entrenches pedagogies of policing. Need evidence for abolishing online proctoring? Visit the Against Online Proctoring Library: https://t.co/p27UxMGJ5y— Charles Logan (@charleswlogan) August 14, 2022

An unsettling glimpse at the digitization of education.

Cheating is not a technological problem, but a social and pedagogical problem. Technology is often blamed for creating the conditions in which cheating proliferates and is then offered as the solution to the problem it created; both claims are false.

Advocates ask teachers to cede authority to students. But what if you are a faculty member of color or an adjunct without much acknowledged authority to share?