The Good, the Bad and the Controversial: The Practicalities and Pitfalls of the Grading of Class Participation

ABSTRACT Three things in life are certain; death, taxes and the fact that management educators all have an opinion, usually a strong one, regarding the grading of class participation. There appears to be three different "camps" on the issue. The first consists of those who firmly believe in the merits of graded class participation and not only practice it, but swear by such practice. The second consists of those who absolutely abhor and not only see no value to it but argue passionately against it. The third consists of those who see it as a necessary evil and reluctantly engage in it due to departmental or college standards or mandates. However, even those who fall into the first category as staunch advocates of grading class participation will admit that the process involves challenges and even results in some ongoing uneasiness for them. This paper explores the issue of grading class participation relative to its alleged pros and cons and areas of uneasiness and presents some alternative strategies for and variations of graded class participation and identifies design issues and caveats that need to be considered when implementing graded participation. INTRODUCTION The concept of student involvement and participation in the learning process is rooted in the Socratic Method of inquiry, traceable back to the times of Plato and Socrates. It is utilized to facilitate the development of critical thinking skills, particularly related to conceptually complex or controversial issues. Indeed the Socratic Method has provided the foundation for classroom instruction in law and other disciplines as well as been widely applied in various modes of organizational training (Maxwell, 2007). Researchers have been attempting to determine the impact of class discussion and participation on learning and performance since as early as 1925. These early studies found no significant relationship between levels of participation and test scores but a significant relationship between levels of participation and the ability to recall material several months after its presentation (Bane, 1925). Numerous subsequent studies over the years have attempted to assess the impact of class participation on learning as well as determine factors that affect levels of participation, as will be discussed herein. Many of the more recent studies of class participation have focused on participation as a critical component of shifting learner-centered teaching paradigms. As instructional methodologies have evolved from the traditional lecture, which encompasses passive learning, to more active learning pedagogies in which students participate, more attention has been paid to the role of class participation on learning. Indeed, it has been argued that grading class participation is consistent with and reinforces the popular paradigm of teaching that focuses on active learning and student development (Manzer and Rassuli, 2005; Dallimore, Hertenstein and Piatt, 2006). Such ideas are premised on the assumption that academic performance can not and should not exclusively be measured simply by assessments of the quality of written work turned in. The reason for this is that not everything learned in class will appear on exams or form the basis for assignments (Mamola, 2005) and more so, class participation is "live" and, as a result, can't be faked or plagiarized. Indeed class participation requires that students be actively, rather than passively, involved and engaged in the learning process (Haigas and Stoner, 2007). Within the management disciplines class participation has become somewhat of a norm. Assessment of class participation is almost ubiquitous in management courses, especially the capstone strategy course. One survey found that 94.3% of respondents evaluated class participation in undergraduate management classes (O'Neill, Snyder and Townsend, 1986). Another reported that 93 percent of core curriculum courses included class participation as a component of course grades, even though the assessments were used in some cases as a "fudge factor," where a student's final borderline course grade was ultimately decided based on their participation (Bean and Peterson, 1998). …