Nursing education has faced extraordinary challenges in recent years. With the COVID pandemic, for example, many undergraduate nursing programs pivoted to an online-only education model for courses that had primarily been delivered face-to-face and that relied heavily on the use of hands-on training for skill acquisition. Like other programs did in March of 2020, we transitioned both core curriculum and elective courses to online and hybrid modalities. Included in this transition was our internal BSN Honors Program (“Honors”), and while that transition presented an incredible challenge for both faculty and students, it also offered a unique opportunity to modify learning experiences and explore novel pedagogical approaches. Namely, we adopted a new grading approach called specifications grading.

Developed by Nilson and Stanny (2015), specifications grading simplifies grading while maintaining consistency and validity when evaluating student performance. Specifications grading builds upon Bloom et al.'s (1971) concept of “mastery of learning” and is a form of standards-based grading, similar to contract grading and use of rubrics (Graves, 2023; Iamarino, 2014). Specifications grading shares similarities with contract grading in that the expectations around earning a particular final grade are set at the beginning of the semester, (Graves, 2023; Stommel, 2024), and the student's final grade is determined by whether they met the pre-determined benchmark (Lindemann & Harbke, 2011). This approach addresses a major barrier in higher education, as Munro (2023) noted that limitations in traditional grading schemes may lead educators and employers to falsely believe that students have developed competencies they truly have not.

With specifications grading, individual assignments are linked to standards, learning objectives, or competencies, and each assignment is graded as to whether or not the student met predetermined criteria—or specifications (Nilson & Stanny, 2015). In practice, this means each assignment is graded as complete/incomplete or satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Assignments are then grouped into bundles such that each bundle reflects a higher level of content mastery. Since bundles align with traditional letter grades (e.g., A, B, C), a student's final grade is based on the bundle of assignments they complete. In practice, this may mean a student who earns an A has demonstrated higher-level mastery of a learning objective than a student who earns a B (e.g., they can evaluate information versus simply remember facts), or it could also mean they have mastered more learning objectives. Faculty may opt to build in opportunities to resubmit incomplete or unsatisfactory assignments by allotting students passes or tokens (i.e., students may use a token for a resubmission).

In the decade since its inception, faculty from a variety of disciplines have used specifications grading, including communications (Elkins, 2016), mathematics (Prasad, 2020; Williams, 2018), philosophy (Earl, 2022), political science (Blackstone & Oldmixon, 2019), public administration (Jones, 2022), STEM and engineering (Rupakheti et al., 2018; Tsoi et al., 2019), and theology (Blodgett, 2017). More closely related to nursing, the fields of biology (Katzman et al., 2021), general chemistry (Boesdorfer et al., 2018; Toledo & Dubas, 2017), health sciences (Ganesh & Smith, 2017), nutrition (Pope et al., 2020), and pharmacy (Dupree et al., 2024), and public health (Gay & Poproski, 2023) have had faculty who used specifications grading in the classroom. Generally, the literature of specifications grading details how specifications grading has been implemented and how students and faculty have perceived the new grading system.

Despite its promise for nursing education, especially given recent recommendations from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing for competency-based education (2021), we have found only two documented examples of specifications grading in the nursing field specifically (Dabney & VanDerWoude, 2023; Norton et al., 2021). Thus, our aim with this paper is to build on their work by reporting observations from our initial use of specifications grading in Honors from both the faculty and student perspectives.