How some Chapman arts and humanities professors are turning away from traditional assessments

Graphic by Annie Gelfer, Staff Photographer

How much of a role should traditional exams play in Chapman University classes? The ongoing debate over the legitimacy and effectiveness of standardized admissions testing has spread to exam-based grading in the classroom, where some professors are employing other methods of evaluation in efforts to increase retention of knowledge, equity among students and even deter cheating.

While professors in social sciences and humanities seem to be at the forefront of the shift away from exam-based grading, many STEM professors still utilize exams for benchmarking and testing accuracy, especially in foundational classes.

Senior art history major Rylie Shimabukuro said that while it varies by professor, most of her classes consist of projects and essays. However, she sees the value in balancing these methods with traditional tests.

“I don’t know if I like (projects and essays) more since I have done them for so long, but I did have a lot of test anxiety in high school, so I do not stress out as much (now),” she said. “With my (class) that does exams, I learn a lot of content… but it is a lot of material to cover, which also takes a lot of time to study.”

Assistant Professor of English Samantha Dressel has similarly noted that exams caused anxiety for her students. As a result, she now utilizes nontraditional assessments called mind maps in her literature survey classes. In these classes, students draw diagrams showing relationships with ideas and concepts of texts to demonstrate critical thinking and to deter cheating with ChatGPT. 

“I would rather students be tested on what they actually remember about the materials, rather than on how well they respond to stress,” Dressel said. “I used to give long answer-based exams that students could type out, but once generative AI was an option, I wanted something pen-and-paper.”

Dressel said that students perform slightly better than traditional exams, but the grade distribution is roughly the same.

“They do tend to score a bit higher, which balances out my more strict essay grading,” she said. “I (also) think this higher score is because students don’t have a lot of logistical pressure around completing the exam, so they can just focus on showing what they know.”

Other creative or performance-based majors by their very nature tend to shy away from exam-based grading altogether.

“A traditional test would not benefit creative majors because our work is not based on memorization,” said senior graphic design major Jayden Ramirez, who described the portfolio showcases that students in the program must organize and participate in each year.

“We are graded not only on the overall success of the showcase, but also on the quality of the portfolios we present,” she said. “(Showcases) are far more beneficial for graphic designers, as they prepare us for real-world situations where we’ll need to present and articulate our ideas in professional settings.”

In addition to curriculum-based reasons for transitioning away from testing, rhetoric and composition Professor Ian Barnard has long used contract grading, also called labor-based grading or engagement-based grading, to promote equity.

At the beginning of each semester, students in Barnard’s classes are able to see the corresponding letter grade they will receive for fulfilling certain predetermined amounts of work. Feedback is given based on the quality of one’s work, but it does not directly affect the grade.

“Contract grading has a long history, but it's really been revitalized in the last 10 years, especially in my field of rhetoric and composition by people working on anti-racist pedagogy,” said Barnard, who recently published an academic journal article on the topic. “It makes the argument that traditional grading methods, where we focus on students' writing, are kind of really racist because they're privileging white English (writing standards).”

Barnard said that contract grading relieves anxiety for many students because they don’t need to appeal to professors’ biases or viewpoints in their work.

“The students who don't like it are usually those who were high achievers in high school,” said Barnard. “They think it's unfair that other students who they perceive as not doing as strong of work are also going to get a good grade in the class. But that to me is precisely the point of contract grading: to get rid of those hierarchies.”

Barnard added that some faculty have had reservations about possible grade inflation from utilizing contract grading.

“When Chapman evaluates faculty for promotion and pay raises and things, they look at the grades we give students, and they don't like it if our grades are too high,” they said, “So that's kind of a horrible thing, that basically faculty are encouraged to give lower grades.”

Nonetheless, Barnard said that their students’ grade distributions have not become inflated since they began exclusively using contract grading three years ago.

A complete transition away from exam-based grading, similar to what Barnard has employed, may be more difficult among STEM disciplines, according to Thomas Piechota, professor of engineering and previous interim dean of Fowler School of Engineering.

He said that some assessments may be necessary for data collection as the School of Engineering seeks to gain accreditation from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, yet he and other professors have tried to lower the stakes by adding benchmark quizzes and lowering the percentage of the grade that a midterm or final exam is worth.

In one of his courses this semester, the class revolves entirely around the production of an individual research paper, with no traditional assessments. Piechota added that project-based learning is highly applicable to the real world, whether inside or outside the classroom.

“Whether it's someone doing research with a professor or independent projects in the DCI Lab, there are opportunities for (students) to use skills that they've learned in different classes,” Piechota said. “Students want those opportunities and (employers) see the value in those too.”

With constantly changing trends and technologies within higher education, it seems that nontraditional forms of evaluation will continue to evolve.