I'm doing #ungrading again.
Because I can't realistically keep a sense of the progress of each of 50+ students in my head, I give a number for each assignment:
0: Turned in nothing or a blank document.
1: Significantly incomplete.
2: Basically complete. For programming assignments, passes all unit tests.
3: Above and beyond -- perhaps tackled an optional challenge problem.
Several 0s and 1s indicate a problem to be addressed. 2 is by far the most common result. If a student wants to argue for an A, they should have a few 3s.
**The question: should I show these numbers to the students?**
Pro: It give them a sense of how they're doing, and therefore how much energy they need to allocate to this class.
Con: They will look at the number, think of it as a "grade", and pay no attention to written feedback.
Thoughts?
@peterdrake I think it would be useful for students to see the general guidelines you are using at the beginning of the semester. Ideally (and I go back and forth on this myself), students should be able to assign categories to themselves based on your feedback, so I don't know that it would be necessary to show them numbers for each assignment. However, depending on the course, there may need to be some explanation about the difference between a 1 and a 2. (e.g. writing a large amount of code that never compiled and is unlikely to ever compile does not count toward completeness)
