We’re coming up to the end of the Spring semester and the end of the 2025-2026 academic year (technically the Summer 2026 semester is included, but I’m not teaching this summer, so this is the end of the teaching year for me). I normally try to take some time to reflect on the year. It’s a good time for me to revisit the way I try to build a classroom culture, or what I can do to focus on students’ humanity, or some aspect of my syllabus that is still bugging me.

And so I’m thinking about homework policies again.

Photo by Luka Savcic on Unsplash

What Do I Want from a Homework Policy?

I want a bunch of things to be true in how homework is treated in my classes.

1. I want homework to be used as low-stakes, or no-stakes, practice. I want the homework to be flexible enough that students aren’t stressed or pressured to be completing these constantly. If life events happen, and a student needs to take a small break from focusing on my class, I want that to be reasonable. So I’m not looking for hard deadlines, and I’m not looking to have a super specific idea of what “completing the homework” means for each assignment.
2. Students should have some incentive or motivation to do this low or no-stakes practice. I recognize that sometimes some external motivation is necessary. Without it, some students might not feel like they can (or should) dedicate the time required to practicing thinking about mathematics outside of class time. College was the place where I had to learn about how to best foster my own learning, and I expect that my students are going through a similar kind or process. I want to support the development of good learning and studying habits.
3. Anything that I expect students to do should directly contribute to their learning. This is a hard one. I do not want students to waste their time in my class and outside of my class performing some ritual in order to meet some requirement that exists independent of their actual learning. I don’t really believe that my math classes are places where I need to teach students about how the “real world” works or develop skills that will make them “workforce ready.” I want them to learn the mathematics that we’re talking about in class. Any homework that students do for my class should only support them learning the mathematics we’re expecting to learn.
4. I don’t use points or percentages or things like that in my grading. I use different alternative grading methods in different classes (standards-based grading, a portfolio based grading system, etc.) but don’t use things like 7/10 or 83% in any of them. So I don’t want homework to be graded this way, either.

What Have I Tried That Hasn’t Worked?

I’ll keep this short. I’ve tried some stuff, and I’ve been unhappy with most of it.

Randomized and Auto-Graded Homework. I’ve used the online homework suites from publishers twice. Once when I was early on in my career, and once much later. The first time, I was really annoyed at spending my time being tech support for students instead of helping them learn mathematics. Sure, these online homework suites have gotten better over the years, but I still don’t love the focus on computation. I wrote up some more thoughts on these homework platforms here: My Meeting with a Publisher Rep.

The second time was more recent: I used MyOpenMath’s problem sets that are linked with the OpenIntro Stats book. I left these as completely ungraded and optional. Unsurprisingly, these practice assignments were somewhat helpful for the students who did them, but many students remarked to me that with their busy schedule, these optional assignments were the first things to go when they were trying to figure out how to spend their limited free time.

Weekly Homework Problem Submissions. This has been my most used version of homework. It’s a classic: students complete some assigned problems every week, and turn them in to me to get graded. I’ve graded these in a bunch of different ways: grading each problem individually, randomly selecting a few problems to grade, giving feedback on everything and then assigning some score that aligns with the general quality of work, and grading these on just general completion.

Honestly, my main issue with this policy originally was just the amount of grading involved. I often have ~120 students each semester, and grading these every week was pretty time-consuming. I still don’t like the high-stakes nature of these assignments (or the student perception that these are high-stakes assignments) for intro college students. I also haven’t been able to encourage students to use these for learning, instead of chasing the points that were doled out on them.

Completely Optional Homework. I spent several semesters just being pretty dejected about not being able to find a homework policy that fit into what I wanted, and so I made homework completely optional. I tried to carefully select or craft good questions for students to practice on or think about, but did not have students submit anything. We would talk about them in class and office hours, but otherwise students would engage in them only if they wanted to.

And this wasn’t helpful! These practice problems provided far too little support for students’ learning, since many students stopped doing them or never engaged in them at all.

What Am I Doing Now?

For this academic year, I’ve been using a weekly “Practice Problem Reflection” submission. Every week, students have the chance to submit a small assignment where they respond to four questions/prompts. Here are the questions:

1. Which standards or topics are you working on? What practice problems are you working through?
2. What are you proud of? What did you know or understand that was helpful to you as you worked on these topics?
3. Which problems were difficult? Why do you think that is? Show some of your thoughts and/or work for at least one problem that you found difficult.
4. Is there anything else you’d like to comment on, ask about, or think about with me from these problems or our class sessions? Let me know!

There are 14 of these weekly submissions (in a 16 week semester, students don’t submit them on the first or last week) and I grade them based on whether or not students are engaging with them. They have to submit at least 7 of them.

This has, overall, worked fine! Students are completing these, answering the questions honestly, and are seemingly pretty happy to have the freedom to submit work on whatever they’re doing to support their learning outside of class. Not all students engage in this in the exact way that I wanted them to, but it’s been the homework policy that has fit most closely with the rest of my course design.

I still have some problems with this. One of them is still the load on my time. While I don’t have every student submitting these every week (and I’m teaching fewer classes now as well), I still find it hard to give feedback on these quickly. I notice this especially with questions 3 and 4, where students are often asking me for questions that are best answered promptly. Getting behind on grading these really diminishes the value of the feedback that I’m giving to students.

And, of course, there are still students who struggle with finding the motivation to engage in this. Not every submission is a deep introspection on what a student is learning that week.

But some of them are! And most submissions are, at a minimum, great evidence that students are engaging in the course material outside of class and in a way that will support their learning. So overall, I think this idea is a winner in my class setup. The main thing I want to do is to tinker with the prompts I give.

Maybe I’ll add some prompt to the 3rd question that asks students to think about their plan to address the questions or difficulties they’re facing. What resources are they going to take advantage of? How do they plan to address these issues? I worry that this could be read with a large amount of pressure: I don’t want students to worry that if they identify some difficulty that they’re having that they then must have some perfect plan for overcoming it. I just want them to think about how they might overcome those difficulties without having to wait a few days for me to open the submissions on the LMS and respond.

Maybe I’ll crowd-source some changes from my students this semester. What kinds of prompts do they think would have been most helpful for them? What are the kinds of things they want to think about while they’re working on my courses outside of the actual class time? Either way, I’m hopeful that I can iterate on this homework policy to make some improvements while also matching the ideals I stated earlier:

1. Low (or no) stakes.
2. Sufficient motivation for engagement.
3. Support for learning outside of class.
4. Fit the grading principles in my courses.