Requiring Proficiency While Allowing For Failure

Several factors influence student success and retention in STEM courses and/or degree programs including prior mathematics experience, stereotype threat, overall stress and mental load, etc. When taken together, these factors can result in a distribution of pathways and associated rates required by students to achieve proficiency in the different content areas of their courses and degree programs, which, in turn, can affect both progression and retention in those programs. Our team has sought to better accommodate this diversity of student experience by developing a competency-based grading system for introductory physics. In this system, students who do not demonstrate proficiency with an element of course content on an initial assessment have sufficient subsequent opportunities to do so. This system also recognizes that coping with and learning from failure are essential to learning within STEM. Finally, this assessment structure provides timely and individualized information about which content a student is struggling to master, enabling targeted interventions to help that student. We show how the implementation of this grading system specifically improves student performance, particularly among groups that often pose a retention risk in science and engineering degree programs. We also discuss the benefits of this grading system for course and degree level assessment and propose future work to explore its use in a modified prerequisite system for other courses.