Hello everyone,

I have watched this thread with some interest.  We use TBL on a full programme level for a large undergraduate pharmacy course at the University of Bradford in the UK, cohort size typically 150 students, typical age range 18-22 years.

There is no question about the value of non graded application exercises and I personally favour that approach, I almost always perceive the greatest learning is happening when there is not really one best answer at all, I'm sure some of you would agree.  However, I thought it may be useful to share our experiences, acknowledging that there may be some differences between students on different courses and in different countries, and also that whilst we all love TBL I think it is important to air some of the less comfortable issues I am sure we have all struggled with.  

We have almost 100% attendance at iRAT/tRAT sessions.  We have had significantly worse attendance at application exercise sessions despite the fact that some are graded.  This led to an increase in the proportion of marks allocated to application exercises within a set unit of study.  Attendance improved.  Great!  However, this means that our grading processes need to be extremely robust and the administrative burden associated with this is significant.  Were no exercises graded, staff would be able to focus their time on creating more high quality materials rather than on marking. Our feedback mechanisms still require some improvement but to give good quality feedback to teams again takes time.  Significantly for us it also means that students pass on the materials to earlier years, meaning we cannot use that particular activity again for summative purposes, we tend to use our 'best' activities for the marked exercises and then by doing so we shoot ourselves in the foot as we cannot use again in the short term.  Our students are engaged, enrolled on a professional health course and we spend time at the start of each year talking about the ethos of TBL, the ethics etc and yet between groups we continue to have low level 'sharing' of materials (or cheating, you could call it).

So for the time being, despite the negatives associated with grading application exercises they will remain, if I'm honest I wish we were brave enough, and our students mature enough, to drop grading altogether.

We still however encourage faculty to continue to use exercises with no 'right answer'.

Example 1 (where this is one best answer) - max of 10 marks available

• 2 marks for correct answer
  
• 8 marks for rationale, including why discounted other options