For roughly the last decade, I’ve been employing a pedagogical technique in my classes that I refer to as “ERG” (“Experiment in the Redistribution of Grades”). If you’re not already familiar with it, I strongly encourage you to read my account of its conceptual beginning and my first implementation of it on this blog in my posts titled “An Experiment in the (Re)distribution of Grades” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). 

Seriously, read the history first.

“ERG” is no longer an apt acronym, really, because (a) I’ve been doing this for more than a decade now (so it’s not exactly an “experiment” anymore) and (b) whatever it is that “grades” were meant to signal or measure in Higher Education has dramatically changed in the last 10  years, first because of COVID and second because of AI. I’ll save my comments about how COVID and AI impacted higher education– both positively and negatively– for another day.  

This post is to give you an update on ERG, which I continue to employ in all of my courses each semester:

First, the things that haven’t changed:

(1) I haven’t changed anything about the basic structure and implementation of ERG. Students are still given exactly one class-period to determine their ERG plan (on the second class day of the semester), and I still employ whatever plan they adopt at the end of the semester;

(2) It remains the case (so far) that every single class has adopted an ERG plan. There have been a couple of “close calls,” but no class has NOT unanimously decided to adopt an ERG plan;

(3)  Almost every class has adopted the (as a part of their ERG plan) the provision that if there are points “left over” after their ERG plan is fully executed, the remaining points will be gifted to a class in the next semester. (NOTE: At least two classes “stipulated” their gift on the condition that the “receiving” class also determined that their extra points would be gifted to some other class, and that the receiving class could not be informed of this stipulation prior to making that decision.)

Now, the (few) things that have changed:

(1) I’ve run up against several attempts to “game” the Experiment in ways that I did not anticipate, and which required additional parameters. (BTW, Kudos to the kids who did this!)  For the most part, these have come from students of two sorts:

(a) Democratic-Socialist students who argue that the class should just take all of the points and distribute them equally. Bless their hearts, but unfortunately the way this works out in real math is that most students end up getting a little bit better (or a lot worse) than a “C” in the class. Not surprisingly, so-called “democratic-socialist” students in America are not cool with that once they do the actual math.

(b) Students who understand the math who argue that all “pointless points” greater than 1-pt above the minimum for a grade should be contributed to the “pool,” and then should be re-distributed in 30pt increments. FWIW, this is (actually) the plan that would benefit the most number of students in each class, but I decided that I needed to have some “limits” on the benefits, so I arbitrarily determined that no ERG plan could “increase” a student’s grade more than one step up (e.g., from an “A-” to an “A,”, or from a “C+” to a “B-,” or from an “F” to a “D.”) 

One of the most important benefits of this  exercise is that there is no plan that a class could adopt that would hurt a student’s grade.  I think it’s equally important that no plan that a class could adopt would help a student’s grade in some extraordinary way. 

(2) As we all know, some classes are more chatty than others, so for the chatty ones, I had to establish (at the beginning of the class) that if no ERG plan was adopted before the class period ended, the opportunity to do so was expired. Nothing like a deadline to motivate democratic deliberation!

(3) Each class had to determine (unanimously) at the beginning of their deliberations how they were going to decide things going forward (unanimously? by majority? by supermajority? by consensus?). I explained to each class that my job, once they begun their deliberations, was only to act as “Secretary” (recording their decisions) or to answer/clarify questions about the process.