You are likely reading this because your professor directed you here to help you understand their decision to incorporate the principles of the GOAL Framework into the course you’re taking with them.
Grades are a part of college life, but the systems used to calculate them don’t always reflect what you’re actually learning. Too often, learning assessment can feel like it measures compliance more than growth, and coursework can seem like a series of hoops to jump through rather than meaningful opportunities for relevant scholarship. The GOAL Framework — Growth-Oriented Assessment for Learning — takes a different approach.
Instead of focusing on points, averages, or one-shot exams, GOAL centers learning itself. It asks: what are you gaining from this work, including the process of assessing your learning, and how can you carry it forward?
How GOAL Helps Students
- Less Stress, More Clarity With opportunities to revise and try again, mistakes are acknowledged as an important and inevitable part of the learning process instead of the end of the story. That means less anxiety about “getting it right the first time” and more space to keep learning.
- Visible Effort Your engagement and labor matter — the drafts, the practice, the teamwork, the persistence. GOAL makes those efforts visible and valued, not invisible background work that vanishes into a black box from which a score or grade eventually emerges.
- Feedback That Matters Instead of being reduced to points in a grade book, your work comes back with feedback you can use right away. Iteration and reflection give you chances to actually grow from that feedback.
- Authentic Work GOAL encourages assignments that connect to your life, your communities, and your own voice. You’re invited to bring your full self — not just guess what the instructor wants.
- Fairness by Design Built-in flexibility means fewer hidden hurdles. Deadlines, formats, and participation can have options, so you don’t have to scramble for exceptions or unnecessary accommodations to show what you’ve learned.
Why It Matters
You deserve courses where assessment is about progress, not just performance — where feedback helps you improve, and where your work feels meaningful. GOAL isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about raising them in a way that is both humane and rigorous: giving you clearer goals, fairer pathways, and assessments that actually help you learn.
GOAL is for students who want to be seen, supported, and challenged to grow. It’s about making college learning not just a series of grades, but a journey of belonging, confidence, and growth.
Note for Faculty and Staff
Many students will read this page first, but we know you may be here too. The GOAL Framework is not a critique of individual teaching practices — it is a forward-looking approach to learning assessment that grows out of and builds upon decades of scholarship and experimentation.
Not every course or instructor can make every change at once, and that’s okay. Adoption is often gradual, with small pilots and adjustments building over time. The framework is meant to be supportive: a set of principles, examples, and tools that faculty can adapt at their own pace.
The aim is not to abandon rigor or to add workload, but to create assessment systems that are sustainable for faculty, equitable for students, and grounded in meaningful learning.