Many authors on this site have discussed the challenge of working within established systems. Exploring alternatives to grading often means experimenting within one’s own classroom, while remaining compatible with the demands of the surrounding school or department. This might be accomplished, for example, by translating the outcomes of an alternative grading system into letter grades to comply with transcript requirements. It is rarer to encounter explorations of alternative grading at the level of a program, school, or institution. However, thinking systemically is crucial for creating change that lives beyond the efforts of single heroic instructors. 

In an earlier post, I explored how the infrastructures built up around traditional grading can inhibit our ability to grow beyond grades. More recently, I used examples of challenges in my own institutional journey to launch an undergraduate program that embraces competency-based learning without traditional grades. In this post, I share more about this new program—named LEAPS—and our approach to replacing traditional grading with competencies and portfolios. As LEAPS grows, I plan to report back from time to time on how the process is going, and what progress we are making towards growing beyond traditional grading systems and helping our university do the same. 

LEAPS and Bounds

In the coming 2024-25 academic year, the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor will launch a unique 4-year bachelor’s degree program called LEAPS, which stands for Learning, Equity, and Problem-Solving for the Public Good. LEAPS is built around place-based learning and deep partnerships with communities, organizations, and companies in Detroit. To facilitate these relationships, all first-year LEAPS students will live and learn together in northwest Detroit in renovated facilities on the campus of the former Marygrove College, in the heart of a heavily residential neighborhood. The goal is to develop LEAPS students into “learning leaders” with the skills and experience to work effectively with peers, communities, and organizations to create sustainable and meaningful change. As students enter their junior and senior years, they will select individualized concentrations leading towards future career goals. We will work with students to identify courses and engaged learning opportunities that prepare them for their chosen path. For instance, someone interested in the law might take courses in history and policy while working with a legal aid organization or interning with the public defender’s office. Someone interested in museum-based learning could take our institution’s Museum Studies minor while working in the Detroit Institute of Arts or the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The program’s premise is that all growth and improvement involves learning and experience. This means developing new mindsets, capabilities, and ways of interacting with the world around you. Furthermore, the persistent challenges of urban contexts like Detroit will never be fully addressed by narrow technical solutions; they require broad-based multidisciplinary thinking. I have the privilege of serving as the founding Chair of LEAPS. 

LEAPS was conceived as a program that breaks traditional boundaries in higher education. Boundaries between universities and communities, between learning and application, and between disciplines. Traditional grading systems, which put students into a competitive mindset overly focused on the outcome instead of the journey, represent another kind of constraint that needs to be broken. After hearing me describe the program, a colleague of mine joked that “LEAPS knows no bounds.” In LEAPS, we want students to take responsibility both for their own growth and for the growth of those around them. Our assessment approach must support students in developing a focus on the process of learning and improving, including recognizing that sometimes progress involves struggle and even failure to obtain one's initial goals. We want LEAPS students to aim high, be resilient in the face of challenges, and develop the skills to reflect, reorient, and try again.  

Early in our team’s work on the program, reimagining traditional grading systems meant doing away with traditional letter-based grading systems and GPAs, and replacing them with a competency-based approach. In addition to issues related to learning, we also believe that the traditional college transcript, comprising a list of course titles and grades, communicates almost zero information about what learners are actually prepared to do. In place of grades and GPAs, we planned to use program-wide learning goals across four areas: Ways of Knowing, Personal Good, Group Good, and Public Good. Courses will have their own more specific learning goals, but these would overlap with the program-wide goals. By the end of their four-year degree program, students would be able to demonstrate competency in our program-wide goals and have a carefully curated portfolio of evidence to back up their claims. Students would receive a competency-based learning record instead of the traditional transcript. We ended up not being able to do without grades and traditional transcripts, but more on this after I describe the learning goals in more detail. 

The LEAPS Learning Goals

LEAPS program-wide learning goals are built around a combination of broad liberal arts knowledge and what are variously described as “transferrable” or “twenty-first century” skills. No matter what you call them, they are the kinds of skills that employers, graduate schools, and others describe as highly desirable, and which are under-specified in most college programs. Many institutions would describe these goals as emergent properties of a college education, but never say exactly where they are encountered within the curriculum. LEAPS names these valuable knowledge and skills explicitly, guides students to focus on them within their learning experiences, and documents both progress towards and accomplishment of them.

Ways of Knowing represent a broad range of thought traditions, including: logical, empirical, statistical, computational, historical, critical cultural, narrative, creative, and artistic. This includes fluency with both quantitative and qualitative tools for understanding, interpreting, and expressing ideas and information. Our approach was inspired by the work of the late Charles Muscatine at Berkeley, who established an experimental college within the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1970s, described in his 2009 book Fixing College Education. We represent these ways of knowing in three broad areas that map onto more traditional academic disciplines: Social Science Thinking/Reasoning (which includes education, psychology, political science, sociology, and urban planning), Humanistic Thinking/Reasoning (which includes literature, history, philosophy, art, and design), and STEM Thinking/Reasoning (which includes data and information science, public health, and environmental science). For each of these areas, we expect general fluency among all LEAPS students, with advanced abilities in at least one area related to their chosen upper-division concentration or career goals. 

Personal Good is about understanding oneself as a learner and participant in society. You have to understand yourself before you can support others. Competencies in this area include Self-knowledge and Well-being, Intentionality and Reflection, and Resilience. These kinds of skills are often developed through co-curricular activities in college. At Michigan they are most commonly offered through our Student Life organization, which sees itself as responsible for elements of student development that are not typically part of formal academic or degree programs. In LEAPS, we are partnering with Student Life to integrate these offerings into our academic program. Through the program-wide learning goals we explicitly support students in recognizing and documenting their growth and accomplishments in this area on their competency-based learning record.

Group Good recognizes that real-world problems are never solved by individuals, they require teams working in concert, and often across lines of difference. To be successful in this area requires developing an appreciation for how others learn and work, for managing group processes, and being a contributor who brings value to group work. Goals in this area include a focus on Communication, Leadership, Teamwork, Collaboration, and Accountability. 

Public Good is a complicated but important area that is designed to help LEAPS students see everything else they do in context. Understanding what is “good” differs depending on one’s positionality and history. Doing work for the “public good” requires developing an appreciation for social structure and the forces that shape them, and developing appreciation for different cultures and traditions in order to negotiate among them. Goals in this area include Civic Purpose and Engagement, Intercultural and Group engagement, Ethics, Empathy, and Altruism. 

Competency, Satisfactory Academic Progress, and a Compromise

As documented in my last post, a major roadblock to implementing a program-wide approach to competency-based learning without grades was the way Michigan implements the tracking of satisfactory academic progress, a requirement for federal financial aid. Michigan tracks this by GPA over semesters, and any program that does not use grades makes progress impossible to track in this way, putting federal financial aid for the entire campus in jeopardy. That was one applecart we were unwilling to upset, especially as we tackle all the other needs of a new program. 

We determined that, at least for the start of the program, we could keep our program-wide competency goals while living with course-level grades. Fortunately, the University Registrar was more than willing to support us in this by providing all LEAPS students with two different transcripts: the traditional courses and grades document, and a competency-based learning record with an associated (and validated) portfolio. When a LEAPS student makes a formal transcript request, both will be generated. We decided to employ the new MTC Learning Record from the Mastery Transcript Consortium for LEAPS. One key reason for this is related to the creation of infrastructure. We like the fact that the MTC represents a growing community of schools and is becoming a recognizable part of the college admissions landscape. LEAPS will be the first undergraduate degree program to partner with MTC (full disclosure: I am an unpaid advisor to MTC). In the future, I like the thought of learners having a single record that might accompany them across their entire learning journey, including different schools and their life-wide learning beyond formal schooling. But that is a different post entirely!

Processes for Marking Competency 

A key design feature of LEAPS is that all students enroll in a 1-credit course called Forum during all semesters of their enrollment. Forum is a place for sense-making, reflection, and planning about all the other elements of their learning in courses and beyond. Forum is led by senior faculty (like me), and is multi-year, so that more experienced students can serve as mentors to newer students. Forum helps make a huge public university feel smaller and more supportive, providing the kinds of student-faculty and student-student relationships that can be elusive for many undergraduates. 

Forum is where the “bookkeeping” of competency-based assessment takes place. At least once each term, students will be asked to reflect on their progress towards the LEAPS Learning Goals, and make a case for their progress. Using rubrics that describe progress towards competency for each learning goal, students will identify and describe how their experiences and assignments represent their progress. Students will be charged with giving feedback and critique to each other (another important set of skills to learn) as they hone their evidence. Over time, what we mean by “competency” and what counts as evidence, and perhaps even the learning goals themselves will be part of an evolving, community-driven conversation. Final documentation of competency status is made by the Forum instructors, who make it official using the MTC Learning Record. 

We plan to have annual public celebrations of student progress and learning, which might take the form of a poster fair. Community partners who played a key role in our students’ learning experiences will be invited to participate in these events.

A Bit of the Old, a Lot of the New

As noted, LEAPS learners will still receive letter grades. However, that doesn’t mean that innovative approaches to grading won’t be present across their courses. Some LEAPS instructors may employ a form of mastery-based learning that translates to a final grade. Others may employ contract-grading or other systems. Some courses, like Forum and our Engaged Learning credits, will be graded satisfactory/no credit. And students will take many elective courses outside of LEAPS in the broader university that will, for the most part, be graded in the traditional manner. Since LEAPS is a program about learning, we hope to start a conversation about grading and assessment with our students. Over time, perhaps they will lead the way in our efforts to do away with the traditional transcript and traditional grading altogether. 

We want LEAPS to serve as a lighthouse for other programs, both at Michigan and elsewhere. Lighthouses serve two main purposes. They illuminate a path to guide sailors toward their destination in unfamiliar seas. They also warn sailors away from unseen dangers. I’m sure that as LEAPS launches and grows, we will have both successes and struggles. I plan to report on both in the future as we work to grow our program and our university beyond grades.

Barry Fishman is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Learning Sciences in the Marsal Family School of Education and the School of Information at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research includes a focus on successful games as models for engaging learning environments, the creation of transformative and sustainable educational innovations using technology, and the design and implementation of new systems for supporting, recording, and reporting learning. He is the inaugural Chair of the LEAPS program.