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Showing posts from February, 2015

Earn Points! Moving Towards a Competency Based Grading System

There's been a noticeable move here in Iowa towards Competency Based Education .  It's slowly gaining traction in the PK-12 system, and it may eventually affect the way we learn and teach in higher education.  What I like most about it is that it rewards competency more than seat time, the passive version of attendance.  I have sat through many classes in which I learned very little because I knew most of the content already.  As a teacher, I've had students that I recognized passed my course way before the class was complete, so I had to find ways to make the class more engaging without "over-preparing" them for the next course. For a class to effectively embrace competency based education, I believe the whole program, in which it is a part of, needs to adopt the approach, otherwise other teachers and students may find that the competency based approach may be unfair.  I'd be happy to expand on this later, but I'd like to present an interim solution