Cassandra Cook

What do we want our students to learn when they leave a course? Why have we chosen the learning outcomes we did? How is a student’s final grade connected to what we expect them to learn? This talk tells the story of student assessment in the Mathematics Department at the Lummi campus of Northwest Indian College. The department underwent a colossal transition and now assigns grades based on student proficiency of course learning outcomes. Northwest Indian College serves several tribes stretched over the Pacific Northwest and Idaho with a small number of math faculty at the Lummi campus. This work began four years ago and is ongoing. I intend to share the experience of making these changes, what I have learned, and what challenges we had along the way. The current state of our transition toward outcomes based grading is by no means complete or perfect. However, I am proud of the leap we have made and hope this tale can be useful to other departments looking to embark on a similar endeavor.