In the college classroom, grades are the primary avenue by which we quantify and communicate student achievement. In setting up grading systems for our courses, we make countless decisions: Should the project be worth 25 or 30 percent of the final grade? Will I drop the lowest quiz score? What penalty (if any) should I implement for late work ? These seemingly small decisions can have a surprisingly large impact on the grades that we assign and the type of learning and understanding that we privilege. Thinking carefully about the way we grade is critical for JEDI-informed teaching of statistics. In recent years, I have been drastically and continually rethinking my approach to grading. At JSM 2023, I gave a talk about these efforts as part of the session "Power in the Classroom: From Helping Students Play the Game to Helping Students Change the Game." I am sharing the slides from this talk here. 

In these slides, you will find: thoughts on the purpose of grades, the impact of grades, and why grading is an important consideration for JEDI-informed teaching; a brief discussion of the many problems with traditional grades (with suggested resources for further reading); three examples of changes I have implemented in introductory and advanced statistics courses at Macalester College; and reflections on what aspects of those changes worked... and what didn't. Additional resources and examples can be found at the "content resource" link.