Beyond Grades: Transitioning from Transactional Education

A Transition Tale

One of the most remarkable educational transformations I've ever seen concerns my brother's high school friend, X. X was a typical high school guy in many ways. He was more interested in cars and girls than in classes. As a result, he didn't put much effort into his classwork and his grades reflected this. When graduation loomed, he had an "Oh crap" moment and realized he needed to start thinking about his future. He went to a guidance counselor who told him to go to trade school to learn air conditioning repair and if he couldn't cut that, he could always hang drywall. Fortunately, X rejected this advice. Instead, he started taking education seriously and enrolled in the local community college. Here's the point of the story. When X took classes he thought were important to his long-term goals, he didn't pay attention to grades. He paid attention to what he learned. Sometimes he retook courses in which he earned an A because he thought he hadn't learned key material well enough. X had a learning mindset, not a transactional mindset. The rest of the story is that X now has a Ph.D. in chemistry from a major university, is a tenured professor and partner in a successful research firm. The root of X's success is his learning mindset. Imagine retaking a class in which you earned an A, remarkable but effective.

The Transaction Trap in Higher Education

The AI disruption offers an opportunity to rethink education to move away from education as a transaction to education as learning. Higher ed has become way too transactional. It's all about the grades ... learning seems to be secondary. Yes, maybe I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Grade grubbing, complaints over exam difficulty, and the like are nothing new, but they seem to have reached epidemic proportions. Frankly, we (higher ed professionals) have done this to ourselves.

Consider the grading scheme for my undergrad course (a survey course at the junior level). My class has quizzes, online assignments, labs, two projects and two exams, all of which are assigned grades. Three of these are focused on effort primarily--if you do the work you get a good grade. The projects and exams are mastery based. Now, I think this is a pretty good scheme, but it struck me that it's also very transactional. You do X and you get Y.

My guess is that I'm not alone here. Most of my colleagues have courses that are arranged along the same lines. Administration even talks about the syllabus as a "contract," which could not BE more transactional. There's even a concept in contract law called consideration that basically says there's no contract unless both sides get something. Even thinking of classes as having "sides" seems a bit crazy. Shouldn't we all be in this together?

AI: Exposing the Cracks in the System

What does this have to do with AI? It comes down to disruption. Disruption is an overused word in the tech world. It pains me to use it, but I think it's apt. Although I'm not sure if AI will "disrupt" higher ed as an industry (which is another loaded term), AI IS disrupting assignments and grading. Social media, conference, and campus hallway discussions bemoaning students' use of AI are rampant. Professors are going back to blue book in-class exams. Some are requiring handwritten papers, which seem insane to me. I can barely read my own handwriting. I've had thoughts of going back to old school grading schemes based on two or three in-class exams. Currently, there's no reliable way to automatically detect AI written work. As I've written about before, there are indicators of AI writing, but the automated detectors are unreliable. (The word I usually use is "crap.") Clever students can easily mask their inappropriate AI use. Diligent students are terrified to use AI at all for fear of being falsely accused. It's not a good situation.

The Root of the Problem

I know I'm repeating myself a bit, but it's time to rethink grading. I'm not the only one saying this. There's an entire "ungrading" movement, although I'm not entirely sure what that means. As I pondered this more deeply, it occurred to me that the root cause of this problem isn't AI, it's the transactional view of education. AI just brought this to the surface and forced our collective hand. Things like detailed grading schemes and the meme of the syllabus as a contract have slowly, but inexorably led us to transactional education. Students are graded on what they do as much as what they've learned. Even demonstrations of learning are often guided by rubrics that smack of transactional mindset, even though that wasn't their original intent. So, it's no wonder that students (and faculty and administrators) have a transactional mindset.

I don't mean to be overly harsh in my criticism here, especially since I've been as much a part of the shift to transactionism as most. There are institutional factors that played a huge role, including ever-increasing class sizes and a focus on assessment from accreditors. I'm really not trying to point fingers, I'm trying to point out the problem.

Moving Forward: Solutions and Steps

The question becomes, "What do we do about it?" That's a huge question, one that takes more than a single article (or a single person) to answer. But, let's start by agreeing that there's a problem. In a broad sense, I see two aspects to moving from a transactional mindset to a learning mindset. First, we (faculty and administrators) need to move ourselves away from the transactional mindset. When updating syllabi and courses for next year, view your courses with a critical eye. Are you sending transactional signals inadvertently? Are your learning objectives just box checking or are they really the focus of your entire course? Are your learning activities really LEARNING activities or are they opportunities to earn points?

Then, turn attention to your students' collective mindset. Start the term by emphasizing why what they will learn matters. I'm guilty of passing by learning objectives ("You can read the learning objectives in the syllabus.") in favor of spending the first class talking about the graded elements of the course.

Now it's unreasonable to expect to shift the entrenched transactional mindset overnight, but we can use the introduction of AI as a catalyst to rethink our own mindset and the signals it sends to students.

---

Well, that’s all for this time. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave them below, or email me - craig@AIGoesToCollege.com. I’d love to hear from you. Be sure to check out the AI Goes to College podcast, which I co-host with Dr. Robert E. Crossler. It’s available at https://www.aigoestocollege.com/follow. Thanks for reading!