Pass/fail grading: Reducing harm through compassionate assessment
Vikki Hill, Interim Director of Learning Enhancement and Academic Development at Queen Margaret University, Scotland.
There is increasing awareness of the need for relational and supportive practices for both staff and students to improve wellbeing and reduce inequity in higher education. Taking the definition of compassion as ‘the noticing of social or physical distress to others and the commitment to reduce or prevent that distress’ (Gilbert, 2017,p189), Vikki will introduce her research on pass/fail as a form of compassionate assessment that can reduce harm and anxiety. Pass/fail grading could be considered a more compassionate form of assessment as it has been shown to reduce stress and competition, promote collaboration, encourage focus on feedback and improve wellbeing (Current et al, 2024). As more higher education providers support the move to pass/fail grading and change their assessment policies and regulations, the need to consider complex processes of policy enactment increase (Hill, 2023).In this workshop, participants will explore the challenges and affordances of pass/fail grading in Higher Education and access a range of outputs and resources from the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project 2021-23 Belonging through Assessment: Pipelines of Compassion and the QAA Collaborative Enhancement project 2024-26 Compassionate Assessment in HE. Please bring questions and provocations to problem-solve collaboratively.
References
Currant, N., Bunting, L., Hill, V. and Salines, E. (2024) ‘Rethinking assessment? Research into the affective impact of higher education grading’, Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, 17(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.21100/compass.v17i1.1496.
Gilbert, T. (2017). When looking is allowed: What compassionate group work looks like in a UK university, in Gibbs. P. (ed.), The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education (pp. 189-202). Springer. Available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8.
Hill, V. (2023) Enacting compassion during the pandemic: Academic staff experiences of a No Detriment Policy on pass/fail assessment, in Carrigan, M., Moscovitz, H., Martini, M. and Robertson. S.L. (eds.) Building the Post-Pandemic University. Edward Elgar Publishing. (pp. 82-100). doi: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802204575.00022.
Biography
Vikki Hill is the Interim Director of Learning Enhancement and Academic Development at Queen Margaret University, Scotland. Vikki is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was a recipient of the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence in 2020. Vikki has over 20 years’ experience in arts education, academic enhancement and leadership and works with staff and students to develop compassionate pedagogies, practices and policies. Vikki’s has led projects to enhance this such as Belonging Through Compassion and the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project Belonging Through Assessment with Glasgow School of Art, Leeds Arts University and University of the Arts London. Vikki’s research focuses on assessment, compassion, academic development and posthumanism. Her research outputs span different media from journal articles, podcasts, websites, film, book chapters, listening events and installations. This diverse and creative range of approaches supports her commitment to dialogic, collaborative and affective knowledge exchange to enact social, racial and climate justice. www.linkedin.com/in/vikkihill1 https://www.vikkihill.com/
ahenetwork.org 