--Originally published at TEC GDL 2016
Dear Reader – Welcome to this blog post where I try to review my experience throughout the Programming course at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Campus Guadalajara).
In the beginning I would like to start with a small exercise:
Close your eyes and think about all the experiences you had when it comes to teachers grading your performances – no matter if it was a presentation, an essay or an exam.
When you think about this, try to focus on the emotions you felt in these moments and maybe ask yourself:
Did I deserve this specific grade? Is a teacher capable to decide how each of their 30 (or more) students has learned throughout the past months and grade them by using multiple choice questions?
Our teacher Ken Bauer probably also faced these questions and in his development as a teacher there must have been a point where he said: Hold on! Isn’t it the task of my students to learn as much as they want to learn and set their limits and ambitions themselves? Shouldn’t they be able to learn in the pace they see fit best with their own time and learning capabilities?
This is how I see the use of the #AbolishGrading policy that our teacher introduced and which I haven’t seen anywhere so far. But after this course I have to ask: Why don’t we see this more often? This policy asks for the students to grade themselves based on a specific rubric, given out to all students before the partial exams. The students are entirely free in the pace they want to work in and the class itself was really interactive because each student had an individual online blog where they were able to cover the 22 so-called mastery topics that Ken identified as the most basic concepts
