Standards-based grading, at scale

Grades that communicate what a student actually knows.

MeridianMarks is an automated standards-based grading platform. Students meet each learning outcome by showing competency twice: 1) on homework, and 2) on an exam. You see exactly where everyone stands, in real time.

Request early access → See how it works
First classroom trial: intro statistics, Fall 2026
Why Standards-Based Grading

Better grading. Hard to scale.

An averaged percentage hides almost everything worth knowing. A 78% could be a student who understands most of the course material, but still needs work on a few ideas. It could also represent a student who partially understands all of it. Same grade, completely different students.

Standards-based grading addresses that by grading against specific learning outcomes, so a grade communicates what someone has and hasn't learned. The issue is that tracking progress per outcome, generating tailored reassessments, and fielding retry requests by hand isn't realistic past a small seminar.

MeridianMarks runs that machinery for you, so the system is actually workable in a real course.

01 Dual-evidence mastery

A standard is met when it's proven twice.

Showing competency on homework indicates a student is making progress. An exam confirms they know it. An outcome is met only when both agree.

HW Homework: revocable if understanding drops EX Exam: locked once earned
Learning outcome
One-sample inference
Not yet started
HOMEWORK
In progress
✓
EXAM
Confirmed
✓
Two sources agree → meets standard
02 Assessments built for each student

One class. A different assignment for everyone.

Every student's homework and exams are generated from where they actually are, reinforcing outcomes still in progress and advancing the ones already met. Questions come from your own bank, additional questions written to match your style, so it still sounds like your course.

Adapts to each student's progress Drawn from your question bank
Intro to Statistics · One class · Individualized Assignments
Student A further along
Sampling distributions advance
Regression new
Probability rules maintain
Student B earlier on
Measures of center practice
Data visualization practice
Data types maintain
03 The whole class, at a glance

See every student, every outcome, live.

A real-time grid shows exactly who meets each standard, who's in progress, and who hasn't started yet, with reassessment requests handled in the same place. The view that makes standards-based grading manageable at the scale of a real course.

Updates as students work Override any cell by hand
✓ Meets standard HW Homework met EX Exam met … In progress — Not started
Student CSLO 1CSLO 2aCSLO 2bCSLO 3a CSLO 3cCSLO 4aCSLO 4d

How it fits together in your course

Step 1

Open an outcome

Tailored homework is generated for every enrolled student automatically.

Step 2

Students work and request practice

They build homework evidence through open assignments and additional requested practice.

Step 3

Test new, then retry

Each exam covers new outcomes first. Anything a student doesn't meet can be retried on request, and an earlier miss never counts against the grade.

Step 4

The grade reflects learning

The live grid and each grade show what a student genuinely understands.

Where this comes from

Built by an instructor, grounded in research.

MeridianMarks is being developed by a university mathematics instructor and education researcher (PhD), and is grounded in the standards-based grading literature.

Fall 2026
First classroom trial in an introductory statistics course, the platform's first real cohort.
Feb 2027
Research presentation at the Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (RUME) conference in Washington, D.C., on the design and early findings of this project.
By design
Structured reassessment: a missed exam or a slipped homework outcome is simply a checkpoint, not a verdict. Students can re-attempt any outcome they haven't met yet, when they're ready.
The evidence

How do I know standards-based grading works?

Many years of grading research point the same direction. Traditional letter and percentage grades blend achievement with behavior, effort, and attendance into one number that is hard to read (Cain et al., 2022; Link & Guskey, 2022).

Standards-based grading reports what a student has and has not learned, and it tracks more closely with independent measures of achievement (Link & Guskey, 2022). In college courses across physics, mathematics, statistics, and education, instructors who made the switch report the same pattern: students find their grades clearer, fairer, and more reflective of what they actually know (Beatty, 2013; Buckmiller et al., 2017; Selbach-Allen et al., 2020; Scarlett, 2018; Knight & Cooper, 2019).

Important to note: no grading system by itself raises test scores or improves student learning (Link & Guskey, 2022). What standards-based grading changes is the accuracy of the signal students receive, which is the foundation everything else builds on.

Done well, reassessment is what makes a grade trustworthy, not a free do-over. MeridianMarks follows the research by gating retries behind homework readiness (Beatty, 2013), and because each student's exam covers only the outcomes they have not yet met, staying on top of the work means shorter exams. The incentive runs toward meeting outcomes the first time rather than leaning on the retry.

Sources

  1. Beatty, I. D. (2013). Standards-based grading in introductory university physics. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 13(2), 1-22.
  2. Buckmiller, T., Peters, R., & Kruse, J. (2017). Questioning Points and Percentages: Standards-Based Grading (SBG) in Higher Education. College Teaching, 65(4), 151-157.
  3. Cain, J., Medina, M., Romanelli, F., & Persky, A. (2022). Deficiencies of Traditional Grading Systems and Recommendations for the Future. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 86(7), Article 8850.
  4. Knight, M., & Cooper, R. (2019). Taking on a New Grading System: The Interconnected Effects of Standards-Based Grading on Teaching, Learning, Assessment, and Student Behavior. NASSP Bulletin, 103(1), 65-92.
  5. Link, L. J., & Guskey, T. R. (2022). Is standards-based grading effective? Theory Into Practice, 61(4), 406-417.
  6. Scarlett, M. H. (2018). "Why did I get a C?": Communicating Student Performance Using Standards-Based Grading. InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, 13, 59-75.
  7. Selbach-Allen, M. E., Greenwald, S. J., Ksir, A. E., & Thomley, J. E. (2020). Raising the Bar with Standards-Based Grading. PRIMUS, 30(8-10), 1110-1126.

Questions instructors ask

Canvas and most learning systems can be bent into standards-based grading, but they were built around points and percentages, so outcome tracking sits on top as an add-on you set up and manage by hand. MeridianMarks treats the outcome as the native unit.
The first trial is an introductory statistics course, and the model is designed to extend to other STEM subjects. Early access is how we decide which courses come next, so if you teach one, tell us.
New outcomes use the same items for the whole class. Only reassessment outcomes, where students retry something they haven't met yet, are personalized, drawn to comparable difficulty and avoiding questions a student has already seen.
Reassessment is gated. A student can't request an exam retry until they've shown readiness on the homework for that outcome. And since each exam covers only a student's unmet outcomes, staying current means shorter exams, so the incentive is to meet outcomes the first time rather than lean on the retry.
No! You provide a question bank, and the platform generates additional items from it, matched to your style and tagged to your outcomes. Exam items pass through your review before students see them, so you stay in control of what's actually asked.
By hand, yes, which is why it rarely scales past a small seminar. MeridianMarks automates the heavy lifting. It generates homework per outcome, assembles a personalized exam for each student, auto-grades objective questions, and keeps all the outcome and grade bookkeeping. You review the generated questions before students see them, and you grade free response questions.
You still give a letter grade. Outcomes map to a transparent A through F scale, and students see an "on track for" projection all semester. MeridianMarks runs the standards-based core of your course rather than replacing your institution's LMS, so you keep that system for what it already does well.

Want to try it in your course?

We're onboarding a small number of instructors for early access. Tell us a little about what you teach, and we'll be in touch as the trial expands.

Your details will only be used to follow up about early access. They will not be used or sold for anything else, and you may ask to have them removed at anytime.
✓

Thanks, you're on the list.

We'll reach out as early access opens up. Talk soon.