Tip: Offer Students a "Clean Slate"
What to do with students who failed an early major assignment, or simply haven't turned in enough work to even earn a C?
Apologies for the weeks of silence - I defended my dissertation (successfully, luckily!) earlier this month and promptly came down with a fairly nasty case of COVID, after 2 years of keeping our household COVID-free. Happily on the mend & excited to share this Tip with you.
I recently read somewhere - and cannot remember where, so if it was you, my apologies! - someone asking about offering students a “clean slate” at some point in the semester. The idea was that in courses with a smaller number of higher-stakes assignments, an early misstep might do such damage to the student’s grade that they would be essentially unable to recover from it by the end of the semester. When this happens, I think students tend to stop attending and stop completing work, although very few actually drop the course. If, however, the faculty member offered to drop the first exam grade or required a student to complete 3 out of 4 major assignments, then the student who dropped the ball even on a major assignment would still be able to complete the course successfully.
Offering students a “clean slate” at some point in the semester is a bit more extreme, perhaps, but still in line with finding ways to make flexibility work for student success. I have shared before some ideas for building flexibility into the course design in ways that benefit students, including:
offering students multiple ways to show mastery through alternative assignments
offering many lower-stakes assignments so that any one assignment - failed or missed entirely - isn’t the end of the world
Neither of these quite solves the issue of a student who has failed a major assignment, or - what I think is more likely happening nowadays - simply doesn’t turn in enough work to even earn a C. Too, these strategies really work best when planned out before the semester begins.
I think there’s an interesting third way to consider: identify a set of (perhaps simplified) assignments that students must complete in order to earn a C, and no additional opportunities to re-do other assignments or earn anything but the C. I’m envisioning this as a late addition, specs grading approach, where you’re essentially telling the student: “You are on track to fail (and/or) have missed too many assignments to be able to pass. Here’s a set of assignments to complete that will minimally allow you to demonstrate mastery of the course objectives, and earn a passing grade.”
Of course, for this to be feasible, the burden on the faculty member must not be too great. It would be challenging to try this while offering extensive written feedback, for example, or needing to create all new “second chance” assignments while still grading the original assignments for the rest of the class. On the other hand, if you have a third or more of the class in danger of failing, this clean slate approach might be appealing to both you and the students.
Have you offered students a second-chance “clean slate” before? If so, how did it work?
