Shawn Cornally coins the term FeedThresh (short for “Feedback Threshold”) and gives it a definition that feels exactly right:

1. The student knows that first attempts are rarely perfect, and often require serious revising.
2. The student wants expert feedback on work that is established and based on research and the literature.
3. The student knows that his learning is not tied to class time or any other arbitrary unit of time or space.

Assessment is too complicated for any of us to do any more than say, “We’re trying to optimize for a certain set of values,” and then make those values explicit. Standards-based grading involves some compromise, but I don’t know of another assessment strategy that optimizes the values that Shawn’s made so explicit here.