In current university education, although there are different teaching methods, most university courses use scores to measure student performance. This raises the question: for a professor who uses scores to measure student performance, where is the most appropriate position to set the total score of a course?
Why does this matter? Because it has been reported in many studies on online games and other types of score-based games, that earning more points can strongly motivate players. In addition to this, when earning the same percentage of points, for example, earning nine points out of one hundred points (9/100) is equivalent to earning nine hundred points out of one thousand points (900/1000). In this case, the increased value of the total score, even though the ratio is the same, may appear, in students' minds, to be farther from the top value. This phenomenon is called denominator neglect and is a common misunderstanding of numbers for humans.
Therefore, perhaps we can infer that in the points system, the size of the total score will affect the enthusiasm of the students, because if homework with a higher value is not completed, the loss of more points will cause the students to produce more work. Loss aversion might make students more active, which leads to an improvement in student performance.
In order to study this problem, Professor Jordan D. Troisi from Colby College and his colleagues set up a research study. The lab based study was using an experimental design to gather students' responses on a hypothetical course with one of the three potential total points, which were 100, 1,000, and 100,000. The laboratory-based research recruited 308 students, and all the subjects were instructed on their voluntary nature before the experiment. They were divided into the three groups mentioned before (the total scores were 100, 1,000 and 100,000). All subjects were asked to read the following text before starting:
“All assignments this semester have a point value assigned to them. You can see each assignment with its corresponding point value below. All the points that you earn for each assignment are added together to calculate your final grade. You can use the grade scale to determine your letter grade based on the number of points that you earned.”
On the designed course syllabus, all the assignments had the same score ratio, and an icon with the course evaluation method (for example, “an A+ will be 96+ out of 100, and will be 960+ out of 1,000”) is also shown to all participants. After reading these, they will be asked to fill out a questionnaire (they don’t have to actually go to these experimentally designed courses). In the survey, they will be asked their states of emotion after losing certain points, and how likely they would be to sign up for a class using a pass/fail grading scheme. Figure 1 (top of article) is the result of the experiment, and we can conclude that a larger score can indeed cause fear and increase negative emotions, eliciting a greater preference for signing up for a course that is pass/fail.
Due to the limitations of laboratory-based experiments, the professor initiated another investigation, a study of an actual class. The actual classroom based study was going to observe and analyze students’ performance in 12 real courses over 6 semesters that they were enrolled in. There were two courses per semester, and the perfect scores were 100 and 1000. Figure 2 (top of article) summarizes the final grades of these students, and Figure 3 is (top of article) the conclusion drawn after the exchange between the two professors who taught the class. The conclusion was that, even though the contribution to the final transcript was the same, students were more willing to complete them because they were unwilling to lose such a large number of points when faced with higher point values of homework. The higher the degree of completion of the homework, the higher the final grade; on a smaller scale, some small assignments, such as those that were 2% or 5% of the total grade, were considered unimportant, and students were more likely to choose not to do them, which brought down their overall performance.
Therefore, if a professor can freely set the total score of the courses they teach, then a relatively higher score may be able to better motivate the professor’s students. Of course, if the professor currently has a better grading method, such as the Specifications Grading method1 used by Professor Karl Bailey from Andrew University, then such a professor should advocate their grading method to all of their colleagues!
1 Unlike conventional letter grades based on fractions, the Specifications Grading method measures the performance of a student based on multiple angles (such as attendance, average grade on tests or project that matches the requirement). For each requirement reached, an achievement point will be given, which will increase the student’s letter grade by a letter (a C to C+). Students need to work for those requirements in order to achieve their ideal grade.
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