In the 2020-21 school year, we were just starting to return to the classroom from COVID restrictions, but some of us saw this as an opportunity for something new. We’ve known for years, if not generations, that our assessment models in education simply don’t work. They are deeply inequitable, giving distinct advantages to students who don’t need to work or whose families have enough wealth to hire tutors. These assessments tend to favor those who have good memories but don’t necessarily have any understanding.

During COVID, I didn’t want to just dump all of my assignments, quizzes, and tests onto our online platform and cross my fingers that students wouldn’t cheat (or maybe cross my fingers that they would?). I had survived COVID by creating a system where I felt students would still learn something, despite not being in the classroom. I knew there was no replacement for being in the classroom, but, like most of us, I did the best I could.

Years earlier, I had played with gamification, overlaying video game psychology on to the classroom in an attempt to increase engagement. I had read The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon and it was something that, growing up as a gamer myself, I thought could really work. Firstly, it involved entering all of my assessments on day one with a grade of zero for every student. This would set up the gradebook like an experience points system in a video game, having students start at zero and accumulate points for everything they did. The goal was to show value in every piece of work and, no matter how the students did, everyone would see growth at every step.

Language was also seen as important, with tests being relabeled as “boss battles.” There would be individual, guild, and class achievements that would unlock different rewards. Our midterm exam would become a guild-based PvP session as described in Lee Sheldon’s book. 

One of the most important pieces would be a “quest log,” a rebranding of the math notebook, where students would talk about their goals; track their levels, skills, and engagement; and include corrections and reflections. There would also be a final reflection piece where students would pretend to be the teacher and write a letter to the principal convincing them why their grade is correct or not and provide evidence. Though early in my career, I had already recognized that grades were, perhaps, the biggest part of the issue.

There was also a huge collaborative aspect. After all, the best video games involve other players! There would be randomly-assigned guilds with roles rotated throughout the course. Students would work together to achieve rewards, incentivizing them to ensure everyone succeeded. Students would also create avatars that externalized their anxieties related to math so that they might feel mentally healthier than a typical math classroom.

Needless to say, I soon ran into opposition from some students and parents who were used to always seeing high grades. It didn’t matter that I shared why I thought this would lead to even greater success. Many of my struggling math students loved the approach. They saw themselves as being on the same playing field as everyone else. When everyone starts at zero and the grade is flipped so that it’s about what students can do and not what they can’t, almost everyone feels like they can succeed. However, the obsession with grades by the few undermined my early attempt and I went back to old ways, feeling defeated and disheartened.

Quarantine Physics

During COVID, I resurrected some aspects of my earlier gamification approach, but I had learned more since then. Enter Quarantine Physics!

Again, this system was based on the accumulation of points, but put far more control in the hands of students. Physics is all around us, so why not encourage students to carve out their own path through the course even if they were learning from home? This approach focused far more on providing students with the tools necessary to succeed and putting their learning and how they demonstrated understanding in their hands. In the midst of an impossible situation, it worked surprisingly well! In hindsight, I realized how powerful student agency really is.

During COVID, I had made the decision to move to skills-based grading based on reading Scott Brunner’s blog Physicstory. I worked with students to identify the key skills in the course (our science curricula has skills outcomes in addition to content outcomes), and we set to work developing rubrics to give students clear targets to hit.

We elected to go with a 5-point scale that was careful to label the level of understanding and not assign labels to the student. I took care to frame things using “I can…” statements and to focus on common issues that, with some attention, students could learn to overcome. There would also be individualized feedback on every assessment, but this rubric system would hit all the key points, give some quick feedback for the common issues, and act as a guideline when we needed to determine a grade.

There was another issue that I was careful to avoid and discussed with my students at length: quantifiers. One thing that I find makes traditional rubrics incredibly ineffective is the use of quantifiers like “rarely,” “some/sometimes,” “often/most often,” and “always.” As soon as we go to a 4- or 5-point scale, it becomes almost impossible to avoid. While most assessment experts and educational consultants espouse the idea of accuracy being of the utmost importance, it is impossible in a rubric like this. With even just a handful of teachers, you are nearly guaranteed to see almost every permutation possible of where they draw the line between “rarely” and “sometimes” or between “sometimes” and “often.” Most teachers would likely even say that “always” isn’t actually “always.” For this reason, a rubric built on quantifiers has no chance of improving accuracy of grades.

The Single-point Rubric

Our next iteration involved making things more ambiguous for this very reason. Prior to the development of the next version, I had read an article that changed how I thought about rubrics, Jennifer Gonzalez’s Meet the Single Point Rubric. I found this approach to be a solution to the issues I had with the multi-point rubrics. I wanted students to master the skills; why shouldn’t it be a question of “either they can or not yet”? I decided to give students the agency to determine if they had mastered the skill, providing evidence of their mastery during our portfolio conferences.

In this latest iteration, students had more agency, and the self-assessment process became more individualized. Skills were broken down into a series of “I can…” statements, as before, but now students would use their progress through these as an aid in determining where they landed along a “point-less” continuum.

However, I still hung on to the multi-point rubric because that seemed to be the assessment tool of choice among so many assessment experts and consultants. I was already making waves with what I was doing; did I really want to go against the grain even more with another change?

It took some time, but I finally decided, “Sure, why not?” My students and I agreed that the multi-point rubric was making things worse and not better. So, single-point rubric, here we come!

At this point, we finally have a single-point rubric that we been using for the last three years! The layout has been reorganized and the continuum simplified. I admit that I made it this way with an eye on efficiency, making it easier to for me to address key points. The most important feedback we can give each student is narrative, not numerical.

Many of the problems plaguing traditional grading weren’t resolved by the move to standards-based grading. It wasn’t until I embraced the single-point rubric that I realized how much the multi-point rubric was holding students back. Multi-point rubrics fail students because they learn to get the grade they want with minimum effort. They also discourage risk taking and hinder student agency.

There’s still work to be done and room for this model to evolve, but my students and I are all better off for having made this move. It’s taken most of my career so far to find an assessment model that puts students on equal footing, promotes agency, and doesn’t hinder engagement. Students are more eager to learn and can clearly see the focus on learning. My students are getting the feedback they need, and I feel more fulfilled as an educator. I’m teaching a course that I wish I had taken as a student, one that I hope my children will take in the future.

Christopher Sarkonak is a high school physics and mathematics teacher at Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. He is currently the Perimeter Institute’s Regional Coordinator for the province of Manitoba. Follow him on Twitter at @CSarkonak.