DURHAM, N.C. — In one English class this fall, Duke students will grade themselves.

That’s the idea behind Cathy Davidson’s “This is Your Brain on the Internet” course, an exploration of thought in the rapidly changing age of digital technology.

“Do all the work, you get an A,” she writes on a blog explaining her course.

“Don’t need an A? Don’t have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.,You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there’s your grade.”

That practice, called contract grading, has been employed for decades.

Here’s the twist: in Davidson’s class, students will decide whether the assignments are completed satisfactorily.

Two students will lead each class, selecting readings and writing assignments and evaluating student work.

There will be no exams or research papers, unless a student wants to write one, according to Davidson’s blog.

Students will work together on a final multimedia project.

On her blog, Davidson explains why she’s eschewing traditional grading for this new method, known as “crowdsourcing,” in which a task usually done by one person is instead done by a group.

“After returning to teaching after several years as an administrator, I found grading to be the most outmoded, inconsequential, and irrelevant feature of teaching.Thus for (this class), all students will receive the grade of A if they do all the work and their peers certify that they have done so in a satisfactory fashion,” she writes.

“Everyone who chooses to do the work to the satisfaction of his or her collaborative peers in the course will receive an A, but no one is required to do all of the work or to earn an A.”

Davidson’s approach to this course is unusual, said Todd Zakrajsek executive director of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Center for Faculty Excellence.

Plenty of faculty members take issue with grading, and some surrender a portion of a class to student evaluation, Zakrajsek said.

But Davidson is essentially giving students total control of grading.

“If the real essence of a college education is to become a learned individual, grades really are inconsequential,” he said.

“But we’re also using an education to gauge who really is learning.”And it also brings the professor’s role into question.

Is Davidson’s job to simply give students information, or is she a manager, guiding students as they figure out things for themselves?

Zakrajsek doesn’t know Davidson, but read the course description on her blog and came away impressed with how thoroughly the course has been thought out.

But he does wonder whether students are qualified to decide whether class work is satisfactory.

“She’s not way out on the fringe,” Zakrajsek said.”She’s just adamant about the fact that she doesn’t like grades.

(But) I think students need real feedback to know how they’re doing in the class.Are students the best to make that determination?”

Zach Perret, a Duke senior studying biology and chemistry, said the new class format may lead students to collaborate more and compete less.

“It’s a competitive place,” Perret said. “Unfortunately, that culture leads to a little too much competition. It may make it a little more about learning.”

Lee D. Baker, dean of academic affairs for Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, said faculty members are encouraged to try new ways of teaching.

“Cathy Davidson is a seasoned instructor and an innovative scholar,” Baker said. “And research suggests that the more students are engaged in each aspect of the class, the more learning takes place.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, two trade publications read heavily in academia, have done stories on Davidson’s new course.

Davidson, who has tenure, was on vacation and difficult to reach. She did leave voice mail for The News & Observer saying in part that she is pleasantly surprised by the attention her blog post about her new course has received.

The comment section prompted some teachers to encourage her use of crowdsourcing.

Others saw value in professors grading.

In 2003, Alex Halavais used a similar approach for a communications course he taught at the State University of New York’s Buffalo campus.

He likes the idea of having students evaluate each other’s work and believes they learn more from each other than from a professor.

• Eric Ferreri