2026 CMS Summer Meeting

Saint John, June 5 - 8, 2026

Excellence in Teaching Award

WESLEY BURR, Trent University What and Who are Grading and Assessment For? [PDF]: I, like most in the mathematical sciences community, was trained in a fairly traditional way. The courses I took during my degrees were largely conventional — assignments, quizzes or tests, and exams. This was the world I knew. When I became an instructor, and then a faculty member, and was given varying levels of control over pedagogy for my teaching, this was the framework I followed. But I rapidly became dissatisfied with this framework, and began questioning both the purpose and efficacy of the methods I had been exposed to in my own education. In this talk I will discuss the evolution of my thinking on grading and assessment across the last decade, and the development of an integrated framework of mastery-based grading and assessment which I have established for a full sequence of courses at Trent University, along with some musings of how successful I believe it has been, and (hopefully) some inspiration for things you might consider trying in your own teaching.