Adventures with Grading Contracts in Operations Classes: A Preliminary Investigation

Abstract

Statewide initiatives and the COVID-19 pandemic have caused us to re-examine how we deliver and evaluate students in our courses. In this paper, we discuss our experiences using grading contracts, which are commonly used in writing programs but virtually unknown in fields like operations research. We found strong undergraduate student support for the contract and no statistically significant differences in final course grades. We urge our fellow educators to consider alternatives to the traditional grading schemes that strongly favor in-class exams in evaluating students.