2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Traditional percentage-based grading in lecture-based courses often fails to provide meaningful insights into a student’s true understanding of the course material. Instead, it encourages students to focus on earning partial credit rather than mastering concepts and more importantly, retaining key information for future courses and professional applications. In this work, we assess the effectiveness of an alternative grading scheme in an advanced undergraduate mathematics course for Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) applications, aimed at improving student understanding of core concepts. These concepts are crucial for success in follow-on ECE courses, where instructors frequently report that students, despite having performed well on previous exams, demonstrate little to no retention of relevant concepts. In our implementation of this alternative grading model, often referred to as mastery-based or standards-based grading, students are given clear, granular learning objectives. Students’ understanding of these objectives is explicitly assessed multiple times throughout the semester. Rather than receiving partial credit, students earn full points for fully correct answers or zero points for incorrect answers. Students are then provided with constructive feedback that guides them toward improving their understanding of the learning objective, without revealing the correct answer. Students are then allowed to revise their work on the assessment to improve their score. To evaluate whether this shift to alternative grading improves student understanding and retention of course concepts, we compare traditional percentage-based grading outcomes with those from our alternative grading model, gather feedback from instructors of subsequent courses, and survey students about their experiences with the new grading approach.