Contemplating the Future of EMI Assessment: Using Contract Grading to Empower Student Intellectual Risk-Taking

This presentation will discuss how contract grading was used in a Sino-American university upper-level EMI literature course to de-emphasize grades and to encourage students to focus on achieving specific course learning outcomes of their choice. Contract grading supported the formation of an interpretive community in which students pursued such learning outcomes as taking interpretive risks, developing personal critical reading and thinking skills, and exploring scholarly perspectives on the literature without worrying about getting everything just right or reaching the correct answer. This presentation contributes to developing new pedagogies that empower Chinese students to worry less about their grades and to focus more on true learning, which requires taking risks, courting error or even failure, and not fearing penalty for such failure. Most educators experientially know that much is learned by making mistakes, but the academy too often penalizes such failure. This presentation argues that contract grading offers a new assessment pedagogy for the Sino-foreign university context that fosters deep learning by encouraging experimentation and failure, while (re)valuing the benefits of learning from such failure.