Closing loopholes and setting captives free

Central to all assessment, grading, and reporting is an idea of justice, that is, rendering to each person his or her due. Another definition of justice, from The American Heritage College Dictionary, is "conformity to truth, fact, or sound reason." With mastery learning, we are interested in the truth about a student's mastery of whatever learning objectives are associated with a certain course of study.

Traditional methods of assessment, grading, and reporting don't do a good job of discovering or describing a student's mastery of learning objectives. For instance, 58% on Chapter 7 Test tells us very little about what Billy is going to need help on once he fails the class this year. He might as well have not shown up to class for all the credit he will be given for his efforts. Next year, he will need to take the entire class again from scratch when he may actually only need to demonstrate mastery on 42% of the course's learning objectives. Of course, the arithmetic is never that cut and dry--in fact, very little in our traditional grading systems is.

Our traditional methods have two fatal flaws when it comes to promoting student success--ironically on opposite poles of the whole "loose/strict" continuum of common practice: (1) it is loose where it should be strict, and (2) it is strict where it should be loose. I will treat each of these problems separately in later posts. I will also show how, using mastery learning, we can remedy both of these flaws (both of which are offenses against the ideal of justice), effectively closing loopholes and setting captives free.