Work in Progress: Grading through a Capability Lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The purpose of this WIP research paper is to briefly consider the basis of higher education's current grading system and to discuss an implemented grading structure based on a human development framework which was part of a cultural shift within the department. The letter-grade marking system is relatively new compared to the institution of higher education and brings with it a secondary effect of an "A" ranking conveying significant value and meaning to the interpreter. Students (and faculty) bring their own interpretation of what it means to be an 'A' student and connect this to their personal identity. The shift to letter-based grades coincided with influx of capital into American universities and an industry need for more research. Providing such letter-based sortings is often a required part of the instructional contract with most university structures. Grading systems at their best may provide helpful developmental feedback to learners and reward valued behaviors, but they are also punitive and contribute to shame and feelings of alienation or un-belonging. Grading itself is a strong voice of the faculty. While a curriculum guides the overall experience of students, grades themselves are the "coin of the realm" in terms of directly conveying students what faculty value. These weightings of various activities and what work is and is not graded tacitly tell students where faculty expect students to spend their time and effort. Who can be an engineer is then restricted to those who show aptitude in predefined outcomes and can successfully navigate the grading structures given to them. We ask if it is possible to grade across a curriculum in a way that increases opportunities for student agency and can convey to students the multi-faceted nature of being an engineer. While technical skills and knowledge are important, they are only one aspect of being an engineer. We introduce an attempted grading structure that includes six factors of engineering development used across each assignment within a first year engineering course. This change informed ongoing efforts to align grading approaches that place value on student agency in student development and informed an educational model based on the Capability Approach.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".