Incremental Grading in Practice: First Experiences in Higher Education

Abstract

Incremental Grading is a student-driven assessment approach where students have the responsibility to grade their own work based on pre-defined assessment criteria, usually rubrics. The desired outcomes of Incremental Grading are higher self-assessment skills, higher ownership of learning, lower degree of procrastination, and a more distributed workload for teachers. The approach has been described as a pattern language in previous work and has now been applied in two courses for academic teaching. In this experience report we evaluate the effectiveness of Incremental Grading in these courses, using a mixed-method approach. The results show that Incremental Grading has a positive impact on the self-assessment skills of students, can positively affect the quality of their work and consequently their final grades, and makes teacher's feedback more valuable.