TIPS for Students! A Fair and Equitable Way to Require, Motivate and Reward Creativity and Student-initiated Activities

Within education, there is a long-standing tension between the use of standardized grading versus student-centered, experience-based education. In this experience report, we introduce TIPS (The Incentive Points System), a supplementary framework designed to enhance traditional grading by rewarding student creativity and self-directed learning with ''Incentive Points.'' TIPS aims to integrate the benefits of standardized assessment and student-centered education. In TIPS, a mandatory percentage of a course grade is earned through self -initiated, directed, assessed activities, thereby encouraging students to engage deeply with the material, while fostering their intrinsic motivation, personal growth, and meta-cognitive skills. We assert that TIPS can improve fairness and equity in grading by accommodating diverse student backgrounds and abilities. TIPS is versatile, allowing for easy integration into various grading schemes. We describe implementation and student feedback on TIPS over a ten-year period, survey results, and a comparison of two class offerings with and without required Incentive Points. Collectively, these results support our claims.