Quick Take
- Narration: Michael Hacker reads the academic content cleanly and at an appropriate pace for a professional audience, though the material is structured for the classroom rather than the open road.
- Themes: Alternative grading systems, Standards-Based Grading, the feedback loop between assessment and learning
- Mood: Practical and reform-minded, with an academic rigor that keeps it grounded
- Verdict: A thorough introduction to alternative grading for educators ready to move beyond points-and-percentages, though the companion PDF is genuinely important for implementation.
I was partway through a long Friday afternoon when I put on Grading for Growth, half expecting the standard education-reform audiobook experience: compelling diagnosis followed by advice that sounds achievable until Monday morning arrives. What David Clark and Robert Talbert have actually produced is more serious than that, and more demanding of the listener. This is not a book for educators who are mildly curious about grading reform. It is a book for educators who are ready to do the specific work of redesigning a course from the grade up.
Clark and Talbert are mathematics professors, and their background shows in the precision of their argument. They are not interested in vague recommendations about feedback culture. They are interested in the mechanical question of how you actually set up a grading system that reflects what students know rather than when they knew it, and they have been running these systems in their own classrooms for over a decade. That decade of practice gives the book a specificity that is genuinely unusual in this genre.
The Case Against Points
The argument begins with a critique of traditional grading that will feel familiar to anyone who has thought seriously about the relationship between grades and learning. Traditional grading, as Clark and Talbert lay it out, penalizes students for being in the early stages of understanding something. A student who submits work that demonstrates genuine engagement with a difficult concept but gets it partially wrong receives a lower grade than a student who submits superficially correct work that does not demonstrate understanding. The feedback this sends is worse than useless: it tells students that the goal is correctness at the moment of submission rather than eventual mastery. Students who internalize that goal stop taking intellectual risks, stop attempting problems they are not already confident about, and stop engaging with their failures as learning opportunities.
Alternative grading, as the authors define and document it, is organized around a different set of answers to the questions that grading is supposed to answer. What do students know, and what can they do with that knowledge? Progress is marked rather than performance at a single moment. Students receive feedback that is actionable: specific enough that they can revise their work, detailed enough that revision becomes a genuine learning activity rather than a cosmetic correction. And they are allowed to revise without penalty, which is the part that makes many traditional instructors uncomfortable but which the evidence the authors present suggests is the central mechanism of the system’s effectiveness.
Three Systems in Practical Detail
The heart of the book is a detailed treatment of three alternative grading frameworks: Standards-Based Grading, Specifications Grading, and Ungrading. For each, Clark and Talbert provide both a theoretical account and first-hand accounts from faculty across disciplines and institution types who have implemented the system. This is where the book earns its credibility. The authors are not describing hypothetical classrooms; they are describing syllabi, mark schemes, and feedback processes that have been tested in large lecture courses, small seminars, community college settings, and research universities. The range of institutional context is deliberate and important. One of the consistent objections to grading reform is that it might work in a small elite seminar but is impractical at scale. The examples systematically challenge that objection.
The workbook chapter near the end, which walks instructors through the process of building a prototype alternatively graded course, is the section most reviewers point to when they describe the book as practically actionable. E. Jensen, one of the Audible reviewers, specifically described the process as reviewing research, describing several types of alternative grading with examples and case studies, and including a workbook with instructions for converting your own class grading. That sequence, diagnosis, taxonomy, examples, and then practical construction, is unusual in academic education books and it works.
The PDF That Matters
An important note for listeners: the audiobook comes with a companion PDF available in your Audible library, and unlike some academic titles where the PDF companion is supplementary, here it is genuinely load-bearing. The workbook chapter in particular involves frameworks, tables, and structured exercises that do not translate well to pure audio. Michael Hacker reads through these sections clearly, but you will want the PDF open alongside the listen if you are planning to actually build the course prototype the authors describe. This is not a knock against the audiobook production, which is clean and professional, but a fair warning about the nature of the content.
The narration itself, from Hacker, is appropriate for the material. He reads academic prose with clarity and consistent pacing, differentiates chapter headings and section breaks cleanly, and handles the occasional use of direct quotation from faculty contributors with a light variation in tone that signals the shift without performing it. For nine and a half hours of professional education content, that is about the right register.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
This book is specifically written for faculty and instructors considering or already using alternative assessment systems. Graduate students preparing for teaching careers and curriculum coordinators involved in assessment reform will also find it directly useful. Skip if you are a student looking for information about how alternative grading works from the receiving end, or if you are a K-12 educator looking for immediate classroom applications; the book’s examples are drawn almost entirely from higher education, and the authors note explicitly that the translation to K-12 contexts requires additional adaptation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the companion PDF add enough that you really need it, or can you follow the workbook chapter by audio alone?
For the conceptual chapters, the audio works well on its own. For the workbook chapter that walks you through designing an alternatively graded course, the PDF is genuinely important. The exercises involve structured templates and comparative tables that the narration describes but does not replace. If you plan to implement rather than just understand the system, download the PDF from your Audible library.
Does Grading for Growth address the specific challenges of large multi-section courses, or is it mainly for small seminars?
The authors are explicit that alternative grading can work in large courses, and they include examples from multi-section lecture courses specifically to address that objection. The case studies cover community colleges, research universities, and a range of class sizes, making the practical applicability broader than many grading-reform books.
How does the book handle the objection that students will game a system that allows unlimited revision?
This is addressed directly, and the answer is more nuanced than a simple reassurance. The authors argue that what looks like gaming in a traditional grading system, doing the minimum to get the grade, is actually a rational response to what traditional grading rewards. When the standard shifts to demonstrated mastery, the incentive structure shifts with it. They also note that the volume of revision work in practice tends to be self-limiting because students engage more seriously when revision is genuinely purposeful.
Is Grading for Growth useful for instructors in disciplines outside mathematics, given the authors’ backgrounds?
Yes. The authors drew on contributions from faculty across disciplines precisely to address this concern, and the examples include humanities courses, writing-intensive seminars, and science labs alongside mathematics. The core framework is discipline-agnostic, even though the authors’ own implementation experience comes from mathematics.
