Investigating Student Perceptions of Equitable Grading Practices

Grading is one of the key components of modern pedagogy. Grades are primarily meant to be a method of communication, which is initiated by the owners of the pedagogy (instructors, school, etc.) and are received by various parties such as students: as feedback on their learning outcomes, parents, potential employers, other institutions, etc. However, traditional grading practices in wide use across institutions globally suffer from many problems and can prove to be a hindrance to students achieving their learning outcomes. Many of these practices do not have a backing in education and social research and suffer from various problems such as inherent bias, rewarding of behavior over skill or knowledge, increasing student anxiety, etc. In contrast, EGPs have been backed in research, follow a more open assessment method and have been shown to induce increased learning. Thus, to mitigate some of these problems, we employ Equitable Grading Practices (EGPs) in an introductory CS-1 course at Virginia Tech for the Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 semesters. In this thesis, we introduce these practices and evaluate student perceptions of them thereafter to answer research questions so that we may be able to refine these practices. We gather student experiences primarily through two instruments: a survey and one-on-one interviews. We describe these in detail and evaluate them through the use of statistics as well grounded theory analysis to be able to extract student perceptions of these grading practices.