BY JONATHAN REES

I am old enough to have used a physical gradebook when I started teaching. It looked like it was filled with graph paper, but there was definitely an extra-large space on the left for the students’ names and room to do some calculating all the way on the other side. I abandoned that gradebook when I learned how to use the program that Microsoft now calls Excel. Okay, maybe “learned” is the wrong word there, but I did know enough to write a very simple function that would save me hours of time with a calculator at the end of every semester.

The big change for me came about ten years ago when our then provost convinced a lot of us that it would be a great gift to our students for them to be able to log into our Learning Management System (LMS) and see their progress in the course inside the gradebook they created there. Certainly, this was a better answer than telling students that they have all their assignment grades so they can do the math themselves, right? This was my first venture into the world of the LMS. A lot of people I know have never ventured any further because this one step has proven to be both needlessly difficult and awful.

Before I describe that awfulness, let me get two things out of the way. First, I am a devotee of what they now call in the teaching and learning community “ungrading.” That’s a subject for a whole different post (or perhaps a conference!). Nonetheless, the one problem with that excellent approach is that unless you have the freedom to go full anarchist, you still have to write something in the gradebook when the semester is over and have that go out to your registrar. Second, I really do think it’s a good idea that students know and can be reminded of what their grades are over the course of the semester. My problem is with the system that has been designed to convey that information to them.

Every LMS is a little different. So is every gradebook. Nevertheless, any gradebook that students can see limits your flexibility in how to display or calculate final grades both during and at the end of the semester. It also offers a false sense of precision for disciplines like mine (history) in which the most important kind of learning that students do isn’t really precise at all. Most importantly, it never seems to let me run the grading scheme that I want. This is hard to describe without getting to deep in the weeds, but, for example, our gradebook won’t recognize that I’m going to drop the lowest score out of five quizzes when it calculates the final grade until I manipulate the columns right before I turn in my grades. Until that point is reached, the final grade at the end of the column will always be inaccurate (on the low side) and more often than not that’s going to cause a lot more heartburn among students than necessary.

The really maddening thing about issues like this is that it is difficult to understand if my problem stems from the LMS provider or just from the way this LMS has been installed on our campus. How can you find out? At the risk of overusing the same analogy I made in my last post here, your LMS shouldn’t be like the weather either. Faculty need to understand the systems that they’re being asked to use, and have much more impact on how they’re set up than they do now. Part of this is shared governance, but it’s also related to our freedom to teach the way we each see fit.

Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University