If you’ve talked to any fellow engineering nerds or techies lately, you’ve probably heard the phrase “fail fast and fail often.” The idea is simple: value learning from your mistakes rather than going slow and striving for perfection. I teach this idea in my classes, especially my engineering classes, but also in more traditional science classes. I want kids to feel free to try and fail in order to grow.
As a teacher, when I hear the word “fail,” I think of the number 60 percent. For students, a failing grade is deeply associated with the stress of not reaching the required standard. Grading and failing have been frequent topics at my school over the past year. Like many other schools, we have debated the merits of grade inflation and the flexible grading policies that many have adopted for pandemic-era learning.
In my 10 years in school, I have never seen a debate where faculty (and students) were so divided on the right way to proceed. At times, these grading policy debates felt like rooting for baseball teams: the proficiency-based grading team vs. the old-fashioned grading team. “Liz is against retakes and will argue with you” is a sentiment I’ve heard in meetings.
Earlier this year, I navigated this struggle in my own classroom when my colleague Brendan and I began teaching a course called “Design at Human Scale.” Brendan, a math teacher, has played a big role in spearheading proficiency-based grading in our school’s math department. He assigns grades to students based on benchmark topics, and students are allowed to retake the test until they demonstrate mastery. He uses a four-point grading scale, which he has adjusted to reflect the 0-100 percent used throughout our school.
I, on the other hand, was much more traditional – I did periodic assessments, graded students based on percentage of correct answers, and then added up all the assessments to get a final grade – but I wasn’t sure how to integrate this grading philosophy.
I had learned enough about grading to have some doubts about my system, but I was still tied to “normal grading.” The idea of abandoning my policy seemed unthinkable to me. I felt that my grading system made sense, and that people who didn’t agree with it just didn’t understand.
That being said, I struggled with grading that felt subjective. This subjectivity was more prevalent in my engineering classes, which had more creative assignments than my physics classes.
My engineering course is all about iteration. Projects start small and simple and get more and more complex. Failed prototypes are good material to grow from. For my fidget spinner project, we start by making a paper fidget spinner with spaghetti bearings. The next version is made out of cardboard to test the size and shape before making it into the final laser cut product. But I was grading the project based on a final report that doesn’t reflect the value of iteration.
Faced with the challenge of subjectivity, I aimed for a higher, more satisfying grade, and suddenly engineering became an “easy A.” (Any college-level engineering student would be surprised at this, given how hard engineering has traditionally been.)
I was curious to see if my grading could reflect the “fail fast, fail often” mentality I teach, and the new design course offered an opportunity to start trying.
When planning the course, Brendan and I worked together to design a system that we would both be excited to try. We considered the objectives of the course and identified four main learning focuses: design, iteration, tools and software, and community.
For each project we worked on, we asked students to provide evidence about what they learned in each category. We reviewed the evidence and determined whether the student’s work demonstrated growth and was worthy of a pass. If the evidence was insufficient, students were given the opportunity to resubmit.
So we didn’t evaluate anything. Exclude The students reported their progress. I didn’t have to look at each clock they designed and give them a grade, like 90 or 88. Instead, they told me what they learned by building the clock. Brendan and I translated the evidence into a numerical grade using a table that correlated the number of pieces of evidence with the grade scale.
Our system still has room for improvement, but I like it enough to continue refining it and want to apply it elsewhere in the future. The subjective part has been successfully replaced with a more objective measure. Creative work should be evaluated based on how well students justify their design choices, not on whether I’m happy with it. It’s still not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. I had to be willing to “fail fast and fail often” myself.
Co-teaching this course taught me the way I want my students to learn: by trying new things, failing, and growing from those failures. Faced with the opinions of many experts on grading, I learned that being open-minded and curious, rather than arguing, leads to success. There are no perfect, easy, or obvious solutions to good grading.
Being more open to iterating on my own practice has brought me greater professional growth than debating the merits of retaking, revising, and mastering, and I am happy to see the learner in myself that I strive to help my students become.
