Your comments that student are human beings touches me. I agree with you, and really want to communicate with students as a human being. But my class used to have 100 students, it was challenging to do that. It was also challenging to grade 100 assignments and tests. Finally, we are using the scantron sheet for the tests, and the assignments are pass/fail system. I am wondering if there would be a better way to grade more like a human being.

Hahaha your cartoon is so funny! And you are right. I am too much stressed as well , and my brain suddenly gets stiff if I take a test. So, I always got the lower score than my capacity in a standardized exam, and got the better results in writing reports and thesis without time constraints. I know I hate exam, but not sure how we can be fair in selecting students specifically for university entrance exam without the standardized tests.

Recently in Korea, a college student raised an issue about unfairness in her class. She found that a student got a good grade without working, so she wrote about this student on her university bulletin board. Her writing was shared in the newspapers and the online portals, and finally people found that the student had a connection with the president and she entered her college illegally by abusing her political background.

She was trying to graduate without attending the classes, but the grading system finally caught her. This scandal revealed the president’s secret friend (mother of the student), and continued to the impeachment of the president. This might be an extreme case, but I believe that we still need a fair grading system to filter out people who just want to buy their degree without studying , like the student in the story, even though they are a minority.

Thanks for your thoughts, your illustrations are so cute! I agree that we cannot have only one solution, and we should support students’ imagination rather than just an assessment. I also agree with Shiqiang that “assessment, like tests and exams, provides a relative fair way to select a small number of people due to limitation of resources.” For me, Baccalaureate exam in Europe seems like a good intersection point between imagination and an unavoidable assessment.

Thanks for your comments! I think the idea of Jonathan or Sneha below is great, I would structure my class with those methods: peer assessments even for the individual works and presentations.
My first thought was just to use pass/fail grading system for the group works similar to Faith’s comments, but your methods sound really interesting as well: having individual meetings with each group, or progress reports or presentations… I would like to borrow them, too ?