I abandoned grading my students and stopped taking attendance. Here’s what happened

J. W. Traphagan, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, abandoned traditional grading and attendance requirements, opting for a self-evaluation system that eliminated busywork and replaced grades with an assessment of participation and a score assigned by each student to reflect their performance. Here are his takeaways:

First, I often hear that students are apathetic about learning these days. This is inaccurate. Students are, in fact, excited about learning.

However, they’re indifferent to or even bothered by the educational system’s incessant emphasis on quantitative measures and assignments that seem to have little or no value. Most students want to learn, but don’t see the conventional educational approach as providing a particularly good framework for learning.

Second, many students have experienced enormous stress and anxiety. High school can be a pressure cooker focused on grades, test scores, GPAs and getting into the right college. As a result, learning seems like a side effect of education rather than the goal.

My students consistently note that when they don’t have to anticipate the expectations of their professor, they can focus on taking chances in their writing and thinking. And taking chances often leads to true learning and mastery of a topic.

Finally, this experiment has forced me to think about intellectual rigor in the classroom. Is a system designed to generate stress through piling on work and being “hard” — whatever that means — rigorous?

Or is rigor about creating an environment where students enjoy the learning process and, as a result, willingly engage in broadening their horizons and thinking about their lives?

I think it’s the latter.

Allowing Student Choice in Their Daily Schedule: a Technical How-To

This year, using Google Forms and two Add-Ons, I cobbled together a system that allows teachers to account for our 400 high school students during a relatively open 30-minute period of their day. When developing this system, I had two primary objectives:

  1. I wanted students to choose which class they go to for this 30-minutes.
  2. I didn't want to use passes or paper and pencil sign-ups.

I needed to know where students were at and whether or not they attended, but I didn't want students to have to go to one teacher's class for attendance just to leave (as is done in typical seminar-like structures I've seen elsewhere). I find this to be a waste of time and energy.

After some help from the internet and time to tinker, I came up with the following system:

1. Students Register for the Class They Want to Attend

We offer these 30-minute periods, called FIT (for Focused Instructional Time) every Tuesday and Thursday in the middle of the afternoon. Prior to the start of each FIT period, students navigate to this page on our website, click on the name of the teacher who's class they need to focus on, and complete a Google Form letting the teacher know they plan to attend.

For reasons that will become evident in the next step, each of the registration links on this page go to a separate Google Form specific to that teacher's class.

2. Registrations are Capped at Thirty Students Per Class

To prevent some classes from becoming overrun with students, I use the formLimiter add-on by New Visions Cloud Lab. While not perfect, this add-on looks at the spreadsheet where registrations are being recorded and turns off the form once registration levels hit a pre-determined level (in our case thirty students).

3. Students Receive an Automated Email Confirming Registration

Whenever a student successfully registers for a class, they see a message on the screen and receive an email confirming our expectation that they will attend. This email is sent using Google's own Form Notificaitons add-on. It becomes the fall-back receipt in the event of a registration getting lost.

4. Registrations are Captured in a Single Google Sheet

To ensure my entire staff can easily find any student during this 30-minute period, I have set the destination of each of the individual teacher's registration forms to the same Google Sheet. My entire staff needs to have edit rights to this spreadsheet, so I protected all of the cells they shouldn't edit to prevent errors from breaking everything.

5. Teachers Take Attendance Using Registrations

Every Tuesday and Thursday, during this 30-minute period, teachers open up the spreadsheet, navigate to their course tab, and take attendance using the list of students who have registered to be in their class during FIT. If a student who registered is absent, the teacher copies the registration information and pastes it into another tab labeled "Absent." My dean of students checks the absent tab for students who should be present while my instructional coach and a paraprofessional "sweep" the halls looking for students who may have forgotten to register.

6. Once Attendance is Taken, Teachers Delete the Registrations

Within the sheet is a tab containing formulas that count the registrations for each teacher. It is this tab that each registration form looks at to determine whether or not the class is at capacity (30) and the form needs to close. Deleting the day's registrations after attendance is taken resets the count tab value to zero for the course allowing another 30 students to register the next time around.

If a teacher forgets to delete their registrations after taking attendance, then only as many students as seats available will be able to register the next time around before the form automatically shuts itself off. For this reason, deleting student registrations after attendance is taken is a key behavior to ensuring this system works.