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My Crash Course in Ungrading (check the resources)

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My Crash Course in Ungrading (check the resources)

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By Dominique Vargas

What had I gotten myself into? In Fall 2021, I stepped in to teach a class that was already brilliantly designed by a faculty member who I admire and count among my mentors. In one of our planning meetings, the faculty member encouraged me to make the course my own, but emphasized their commitment to ungrading. I agreed enthusiastically, but after our Zoom call ended, I started to panic.

To be clear, I embraced in principle. I can't count the times that I've vehemently argued against standardized testing and punitive grading policies. I've encouraged grade-focused students to think instead about growth while privately lamenting the time they had spent worrying and not learning. Now all of these principles were going to be put to the test. (Had I not been terrified, I would have laughed at the irony of this fear of failure.)

My pedagogical education was greatly influenced by bell hooks, Peter Elbow, and other expressivists, so I was a quick convert to ungrading strategies even before I had the language to describe them. Ungrading is really an umbrella term that covers a range of practices that de-emphasize or reduce the focus on grades as a system of marks, ratings, and rankings. In place of grades, instructors provide students with frequent formative feedback combined with student-instructor dialogue, student self-evaluation, and peer feedback. In this course, ungrading also meant that students would never receive a letter or number grade on any class-related work. The syllabus included a robust description of ungrading as well as a contract, which outlined baseline requirements that would guarantee students at least a B in the class. At the end of the semester, students would-in consultation with me-assign themselves a grade for their work based on this contract.

If you're still reading, I'll just mention again: I was terrified.

I did not know then, however, that this would be one of the most important and formative experiences of my teaching career. Of course, ungrading was not a utopian experience. It was often difficult, but it changed the way I think about teaching and learning. In an effort to align with the way I talk to students about growth, I've outlined some areas for reflection:
What was successful
Metacognition : In the past, when I talked to students about an assessment, they often focused on perceived deficits that prevented them from achieving an A. In this course, students focused more on learning, setting goals to improve understanding, application, and analysis. Ungrading relies on regular reflection as well as self- and peer-assessments to help students to think critically about their performance and growth. In this way, students became more aware of the way that they were thinking and learning.

Engagement : I've always struggled with the best ways to assess students who do not often speak in class. Ungrading freed me from the tyranny of participation grades and gave students more opportunities to authentically engage with the material. This course fostered sustained engagement both in and outside of the classroom through frequent, low stakes assessments, journals, group work, and consistent feedback. These engagement strategies also built intrinsic motivation without the external pressures of grades.
Where I struggled
Time management : At the beginning of the semester, I told my students that they would get more qualitative feedback than they would if I were using traditional grading strategies. I said this mainly to communicate my commitment to their growth, but I don't think I was quite prepared for what this meant in practice. I promised and provided written comments on nearly every assignment and verbal feedback in fifteen minute, bi-weekly out-of-class meetings with students. Midsemester and end of semester assessments took the most time, because these responded to student self-assessments while also providing summative feedback. Though I managed to complete all of these assessments in a timely manner, in the future I would rely more on organizational tools like google sheets to keep track of my previous feedback and student goals so that I could spend less time preparing summary comments.

Transparency : Without the tools of traditional grading, I felt like I struggled to communicate expectations for assignments. I focused on clarifying purpose, task, and criteria when assigning learning activities, but I think students still could have benefitted from more structure and examples. In the future, I would implement more traditional assessment strategies such as qualitative that focus on criteria and structured draft submissions.
How I've changed
Critical self-reflection forms the foundation of my teaching practice. Ungrading provided more opportunities for me to engage with students and colleagues so that I could reflect on and adjust my teaching practices in the moment rather than after the semester concluded. It is important to note that I was in a privileged position: so much of the course design was already in place, and I had incredible departmental support, two fantastic TAs, and an on-call colleague to accompany me through the semester.

Overall, this experience helped me to get better at the things I care about: providing meaningful feedback and building a more inclusive community . Ungrading also further exposed the often implicit and inequitable framing of grades as currency. This approach required me to think more authentically about the distribution of power in the classroom. I got to know my students better than I had ever done before. I listened to and engaged with their ideas without pretext. I trusted them. I was humbled. I was grateful. It was what I always hoped my teaching could be.

Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning - Susan Blum, ed.

"The Case Against Grades" - Alfie Kohn

"Ungrading: A Bibliography" - Jesse Stommel

"When Grading Less is More" - Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed Ungrading Resources - Penn State University Open CoLab

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My Crash Course in Ungrading - Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love student learning | Notre Dame Learning

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By Dominique Vargas What had I gotten myself into? In Fall 2021, I stepped in to teach a class that was already brilliantly designed by a faculty member who I admire and count among my mentors.

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Assessing My First Semester of ‘Ungrading’ (opinion)

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Assessing My First Semester of ‘Ungrading’ (opinion)

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The original version of this article appeared in Grading for Growth.
In fall 2021, I took my first steps into the world of ungrading. Inspired by Susan D. Blum's book " Ungrading," I went fully gradeless in my upper-level Euclidean Geometry class. I gave only feedback on student work, with no grades on any assignment. The general plan was to have students describe how they met criteria for success that I laid out, include a portfolio of their work to support it, and decide for themselves what final course grade that led to.

Let's look back on my first semester of ungrading and see how things went.

Did My Students Learn?

Before I get into more details, I should say this: After teaching at least 12 sections of geometry over the years, this was the best semester of geometry I've ever taught. Students were energetic, interested, asked great questions, engaged in excellent collaboration. They willingly struggled, failed, reflected, tried again, and did an amazing job of supporting each other.

In that whole last paragraph, notice that I didn't say anything about grades. That's not what mattered.

These students were juniors and seniors, so they each had at least one normal semester of college before "the great pivot" in March 2020. They were eager to get back to normal (whatever that means) and I credit that desire with bringing much of the extra energy into our class. I just had to help them on their way.

So, what did I notice about learning? Students learned a lot, and they improved significantly during the semester. This is a class where I try to help students move from a rigid, "there's only one way to do it and there's always one correct answer" approach to math into a more nuanced view. They learn about the subtleties of mathematical argument by presenting to each other in class. They learn why high school geometry, a topic most of them intend to teach in the future, is the way it is and why its results are true. But they also discover that there isn't just one correct set of "rules": Mathematicians can choose the rules of geometry, follow them to their logical ends, and build entirely new worlds through these choices. This is a class full of big, challenging ideas.

In most semesters, students move in these directions, but many move only a little, and some I can never get to budge. They want to stick with their existing understanding of geometry and how it works, get that "one right answer" and (this is the part that really terrifies me, because many of them are pre-service teachers) teach their future students in the exact same way. This year, nearly everyone made huge strides in their growth and understanding. It was really amazing to see this happen.

And again-none of this had anything to do with grades. The grades got out of the way and let us learn.

But What About Grades?

Because this was an ungraded class, the focus was on feedback. Students got lots of questions and suggestions, both from classmates and from me, as they gave in-class presentations and discovered proofs in teams. On homework, I gave students detailed written feedback, phrased in terms of clear "homework objectives," but no grades. Students could resubmit one revised homework proof each week and get my feedback on the revision. Many students called out the homework-revision feedback loop as especially helpful in growing and solidifying their understanding.

Each student completed two "check-in reflections" in weeks five and 10 (of 15). In these structured written assignments, students reflected on their progress and made an estimate of their grade. (You can find more details of the class setup in my midterm reflection about this ungrading experiment, including the complete portfolio instructions and grade criteria.)

I offered optional 20-minute Zoom meetings to talk about their progress. Either the student or I could request a meeting.

I almost always agreed with students' self-reflections and their self-assigned grades. In the first round of meetings, there were two or three students who (in my opinion) significantly overestimated their progress, usually because they misunderstood some of the criteria for success in our class. I stepped them through some questions to help them understand why we disagreed, and afterward we were in much closer agreement. I also edited some of the final grade criteria to be clearer, simpler, and more inclusive, based on student feedback in these meetings.

More commonly, students were harder on themselves than I would have been, giving reasons like "I know I still struggle with this idea, even if my final work looks good" or "I've presented a few times, but not a lot." If there was something to work on, we made a clear plan for how to get there. But when I thought they were already making great progress, I tried to use their concerns to suggest directions to stretch and grow in the coming weeks.

Some students internalized the idea that they had to get things right on the first attempt or else they could never be good enough. A common refrain I heard was, "But I have to revise my homework before it's fully correct" to justify a lower grade. This is undoubtedly an artifact of traditional grading systems: They encourage a one-and-done approach that penalizes taking time to learn. I tried to convince everyone that taking advantage of feedback to improve is not just OK, it's how learning works, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

In all cases, having narrative criteria for final grades gave students clear directions for improvement. This was one of the big wins of the semester.

At the end of the semester, students completed one last written reflection, this time including a portfolio of work that supported their arguments. Students made good arguments for high grades, and they cited their growth and learning with solid evidence. Many students whose midterm grade check-ins had been in the "B/C" range reached an A at the end. A very small number of students made the choice to prioritize other things at the end of the semester, but they also owned that decision and proposed a lower grade in their final reflections.

In case you're curious, my final grade distribution was heavy with A's and A-'s, some B's, and a few C's. This was slightly higher than previous semesters, the biggest difference being that there were no D's, F's, nor withdrawals. The very few students who didn't get the grade they argued for all earned a higher grade instead (in every case, raising by a step, such as from B to B+). I think this is quite representative both of what students learned, and how they grew, during this semester. I can say with certainty that, based on 15 weeks of observing my students present, write, work, and grow, nobody should have earned a failing grade.

What Did Students Think?

In both the final portfolios and our anonymous end-of-semester surveys, students had very positive things to say about grades-but, well, they talked about exactly that: grades. They clearly saw a grading system where I didn't want one. They were happy with it, yes, but they still saw it as grades.

Only a few students called out what I hoped to be major benefits of ungrading. For example: "It made it easier to focus on learning vs. trying to get a good grade on each assignment." or "One aspect I have grown in is reflecting and learning from my mistakes. I often thought mistakes meant failure. However, in this class it was a learning point ... [this] allowed me to work on learning the content instead of 'earning the grade.'"

There were some very positive comments, such as "This is my favorite class," and quite a few expressions of surprise at how much they enjoyed it. There was also recognition at how much they had grown, especially in writing proofs. Then there's this, perhaps the most honest of all: "I don't hate it."

It's worth remembering that I work in a bit of a magical fairyland. By the time students reach my geometry class, they're third- or fourth-year pre-service teachers who have been through many, many other math and math education classes. They're familiar with alternative grading systems-in fact, they practically expect them.

Here's another student making an interesting observation: "Self grading is fine, and I see why it can be useful, but I feel like it was an added stressor to keep track of my grade in this class, in [another ungraded class], and then a workload of 15 credits. Now, if there is to be a self grading system, this [the method used in my geometry class] is the way to go."

Were the Grades Really Gone?

Well ... kind of.

In my midterm reflection on ungrading, I said that "it seems like the lack of grades is barely on anyone's radar." Students were more focused on geometry, and that's exactly what I wanted! This changed somewhat in the second half of the semester.

Each homework included specific objectives-ideas to practice using and working with, varying from week to week-and I tried to put feedback in terms of those ideas. One of the criteria that students used to decide on their final grades was to "consistently meet the homework objectives (possibly after revision)."

Many students came to see "meeting objectives" as a kind of grade. If I didn't clearly state something like "you've met all of the objectives on this homework," they would ask. Another criterion was to write "exemplary" proofs, and again, this provoked many questions: "Is this exemplary yet?"

Homework had much more focus on feedback than in past classes, but students still saw the objectives as a "checkbox" to meet. In other words, students saw a game, and they played it. Students are used to playing games-so much so that they saw a game even where I didn't want there to be one.

My refrain throughout the semester was, "I want you to focus on learning and growing, not on grades." Some students bought into that, but as the semester went on, I think the pull of the grades became too great in their minds. They knew there would be final grades, and they couldn't avoid thinking about them.

I noticed that grades were creeping into my class, but I didn't find a way to resolve it to my satisfaction. Later in the semester, I started including "magic words" in my feedback, as in "This is an exemplary solution!" So I basically was assigning marks, although with the twist that I didn't require any specific number of these marks for the final grade.

Interestingly, students said a lot about how helpful the homework feedback was and how much they learned through the revision feedback loop. So while grades may have crept in, there was still an increased emphasis on feedback, and students felt the benefit of it.

The final grade criteria also looked a lot like grades, in a Specifications sort of way: Here's a list of requirements; complete (most of) them to earn an A. For a B, complete fewer criteria or less thoroughly, and so on. Even though I didn't require specific numbers of anything, students also looked at this as a checklist, and I can't really disagree: That's what it was, intended or not. Despite the fact that grade descriptions made it clear that students didn't need to meet all of the criteria, most students tried to argue that they met all of them, even students who were arguing for a B or C as their final grade. Again, students saw a game, and so they played it.

Playing the Game

To tie things up, I want to introduce an analogy that I've been thinking about lately.

I have some hobbies besides being a mathematician and blogger, and one of the biggest is playing board games. There are a huge variety of board games out there, ranging from traditional and familiar (Monopoly, chess) to much more interesting modern designs ( Catan, Ticket to Ride, Wingspan). Some modern games are even cooperative, with all players winning or losing together.

I've come to realize that there are some key ways grading systems are like board games. Both have rules and each "player" gets a final score. Instructors create the rules, and students play using them, trying to "win." Many traditional grading systems have muddy rules that lead to miserable scenarios. Think about the classic Monopoly situation: Your brother manages to build a bunch of hotels, you keep landing on them, and pretty soon you're bankrupt and can never recover.

We often talk about how alternative systems like Standards-Based Grading and Specifications change the game. But-and this is my point in all of this-SBG and Specifications are still games. They have clearer rules, they're more fun, and they let players recover from early mistakes. But in the end, there's still a final score, and everyone knows it's coming. Students play the game with this knowledge in front of them.

I think it's fair to say that ungraders would like there to be no game (or grades) at all. But given that the vast majority of us live in institutions that mandate we play a game (final grades), ungraders instead try to disrupt the inner workings of the game as much as possible. Some ungraders make up the rules in collaboration with the players. Others ask the players to decide for themselves how well they played at the end of the game. Some try to remove all of the rules and let players run around in a sandbox world.

And this is definitely doable: There are games where I can get so immersed in the fun, that I don't particularly care what happens at the end. As an undergrad, I was lucky enough to take some classes that were also run this way: The class itself was exciting and interesting, and grades were mostly out of sight. Having experienced this helped me be confident that I could successfully use ungrading in my own classes. Then again, there are games (and classes) where every move is all about optimizing your final score.

I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing grades nor teaching by comparing them to games. One reason that I enjoy board games is because they involve learning and growth. Within the structure of a game, I can explore new strategies, try new things, solve puzzles, and grow in my understanding. I think that this is a fair goal for grades as well: To provide just enough structure to encourage learning and growth, without getting in the way of it.

In my ungraded Euclidean Geometry, my students could see that there was still a game. But they also understood that I wanted them to go beyond: To learn, to struggle, to fail, and to have the space to grow as they did so. I think that I managed to create a game that gave them room to do this, even if it was imperfect and got in the way sometimes. I, too, learned a lot about the game we were playing.
This isn't abstract math-for-the-sake-of-math, either. Geometry done on the surface of a sphere-like, say, the one we all live on-is both extremely practical and significantly different from Euclidean geometry.
I used Specifications Grading in previous semesters, so I already had a fairly high grade distribution. This is a common outcome when using humane approaches that focus on feedback and don't penalize the time it takes to revise and grow.

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Assessing My First Semester of 'Ungrading' - EdSurge News

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The original version of this article appeared in Grading for Growth. In fall 2021, I took my first steps into the world of ungrading. Inspired by Susan D. Blum's book " Ungrading," I went fully gradeless in my upper-level Euclidean Geometry class. I gave only feedback on student work, with no grades on any assignment.

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Rethinking How and Why We Grade Students… Again and Again and Again

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Rethinking How and Why We Grade Students… Again and Again and Again

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The University of Michigan

fishman@umich.edu
@barryfishman
This chapter is modified from the Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education, which employs a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The complete book is freely accessible at https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11900733

"American education is in trouble." That's how Howard Kirschenbaum, Sidney Simon, and Rodney Napier opened their classic book, Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education, five decades ago (Kirschenbaum et al., 1971). The authors named a litany of troubles relevant in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which are, sadly, still salient. Their core focus-grading- is probably not what most people, either then or now, might name as the most important issue facing society. But the success of our education system is crucial, and grading shapes learning and teaching in innumerable and significant ways. Perhaps that is why debates about grading and grading systems remain perennial subjects of debate in American education. And that is why a 50-year-old book deserves another reading today, and why it is so important to have Wad-Ja-Get? back in print, both in physical form and in a free online and digital version. The way Wad-Ja-Get? introduces the debate over grading makes it particularly accessible to a wide range of audiences. My hope is that this book will be widely shared among teachers, parents, and policymakers in order to spark new conversations about the purposes and practices of grades and grading.

Wad-Ja-Get? presents its arguments in the form of a conversation among students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community-members in the semi-fictional Mapleton High School. Although the story is set in a high school, the ideas are equally applicable to both K-12 and higher education. And though the story is set in the late 1960s, the topics and ideas feel current, not dated. When I first read Wad-Ja-Get? I was struck by how many of the arguments are the same ones I have with colleagues and students today. Readers will note that many of the themes, ideas, and solutions presented in the excellent Ungrading book (Blum, 2020) that inspired this collection are presaged in Wad-Ja-Get?, making it a conceptual "prequel" to today's discussions. Readers should also note that while the ideas and arguments in Wad-Ja-Get? remain relevant, at times the writing conspicuously reflects the time period in which it was written. Instead of updating the text to reflect today's ways of speaking about race, gender, and other topics, a mindful decision was made to leave the language in its original form. Doing so provides regular reminders of how much has changed in 50 years . . . and how much has not changed at all.

In this chapter, I explain how Wad-Ja-Get? came to be, and what happened after its publication, including how research on grades and grading has advanced in last fifty years leading up to Ungrading. Then I consider how the underlying infrastructure for grading and college admissions keeps things from changing in meaningful ways, along with a few examples of how changes to that infrastructure are making a positive impact. Finally, I consider how two crises-systemic racism and a pandemic-should influence our thinking about grades and grading.
The Story Behind Wad-Ja-Get?
Why was Wad-Ja-Get? written in the first place? Grading and assessment were not a central scholarly focus for any of the three co-authors. Though Wad-Ja-Get? is a notable contribution to the literature on grading, Sid Simon and Howie Kirschenbaum are better known for their work in educational psychology, values clarification, and counseling. Rod Napier is an expert on leadership development, change management, and strategic thinking. The three met at the College of Education at Temple University in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, where Simon and Napier were faculty members, and Kirschenbaum was Simon's graduate student. That's where the story of Wad-Ja-Get? begins . . . with Sid Simon being denied tenure at Temple.

The reason for the tenure denial was Sid's grading practices, and his refusal to change them at the administration's request. He never liked letter grades. Sid told me that, when he taught high school, it broke his heart "to squeeze these kids into one of the five letters of the alphabet." He much preferred narrative evaluations, where he could offer feedback using "all the letters of the alphabet." By the time Sid was teaching in college, he had adopted a blanket grading policy where everyone in the class got a B. Nobody would fail, and nobody would get an A. In Sid's way of thinking, this freed everyone to focus on their learning instead of their grades. At Temple, Kirschenbaum suggested that instead of giving everyone a B, Simon should give all As in order to get the attention of the larger institution and possibly spur a conversation about grading. This tactic worked; the administration noticed what Simon was doing and didn't like it.

In response to the tenure denial, a "Save Simon" movement arose on campus, with flyers, protests, and coverage in both city and campus newspapers and even in the Temple alumni magazine. Kirschenbaum was active in the movement, organizing rallies and gathering support for his advisor. In response, a faculty committee was formed to investigate the research on grading, chaired by . . . Rod Napier. The results of this committee's work indicated that the existing research did not provide strong arguments in support of traditional letter grading; a finding that continues to be true today. The combination of protest and scholarly review led to a reversal of the tenure decision and to the writing of Wad-Ja-Get?. Napier's committee report became the review of research in the appendix for the book.

Wad-Ja-Get? had solid early sales and attracted enough attention that the authors kept the momentum going by organizing a national conference on grading alternatives. In 1972, the Ohio Education Association (an affiliate of the National Education Association) hosted a conference on grading that attracted seven hundred attendees. In 1973 the three authors organized four conferences, in New York City, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco, attracting over two thousand people. The conferences were followed by the establishment of the National Center for Grading and Learning Alternatives, led by James Bellanca, who until his recent retirement served as the Executive Director of the Illinois Consortium for 21st Century Schools and has long been active in the skills-based or mastery learning movement, variants of which are leading alternatives to traditional grading (more on that later). In 1973 Bellanca and Kirschenbaum also conducted a survey of twenty-six hundred colleges to better understand the role that traditional grading plays in the admissions (more on that later as well; Bellanca & Kirschenbaum, 1973). In the same year, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development published Degrading the Grading Myths, a volume edited by Simon and Bellanca that featured essays and an overview of research on grading, intended for educators and educational leaders (Simon & Bellanca, 1976).
Scholarship on Grades and Grading since Wad-Ja-Get?
The research reviewed in Wad-Ja-Get? covers more than sixty years of scholarship on grades and grading. In 2016, as part of the 100th anniversary celebration of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Susan Brookhart and Thomas Guskey, both among the most accomplished scholars on grading and assessment, organized a group of colleagues for a comprehensive review article to address the question "What do grades mean?," covering both pre- Wad-Ja-Get? scholarship and the fifty years since (Brookhart et al., 2016, p. 804). What has changed in those fifty years? Not that much. The general finding that teacher-assigned grades are subjective and unreliable remains constant. More recently, however, researchers have increased an emphasis on non-cognitive skills including persistence, engagement, and positive school behaviors. Research also focuses on educational outcomes like successful graduation from high school or college, finding that grades can provide "a useful indicator of numerous factors that matter to students, teachers, parents, schools, and communities," and have been shown to predict academic persistence, completion, and ease of transition from high school to college (Brookhart et al., 2016, p. 833). Grades appear to correlate with cognitive knowledge as measured by standardized tests. In this sense, grades can serve as a measure of success in school, although there's a circular logic underlying these observations: Students who perform well on the dominant school-based performance indicator (grades) are observed to "do well" in school, both academically and behaviorally.

Brookhart, Guskey, and their colleagues conclude in their review that, though many, "may wish grades were unadulterated measures of what students have learned and are able to do, strong evidence indicates that they are not" (Brookhart et al., 2016, p. 835). In her 2000 AERA Presidential Address, assessment scholar and psychometrician Lorrie Shepard argued that the dominant paradigm guiding educational measurement in the twentieth century is the heart of the problem (Shepard, 2000). A culture that views intelligence as innate, a curriculum based on social efficiency and transmission of knowledge, and a deep-rooted belief in "scientific" measurement and sorting of students produce the desire to see inherent value in grades as instruments of rational control. Combined with deeply ingrained social inequities, this culture also results in systematic racial biases in grading, a topic not well covered in the Brookhart et al. review, but well documented elsewhere (e.g., Malouff & Thorsteinsson, 2016). Shepard argues for the development of a "learning culture" that prioritizes the idea that all students can learn with a focus on higher-order thinking. Such a culture would also demand new and more dynamic forms of assessment and ways to record and report student learning and progress.

The history of American education has been characterized as a struggle between psychologist Edward Thorndike and philosopher and psychologist John Dewey going back to the first decades of the 1900s. Thorndike was a proponent of scientific management, believing that the goal of education was to sort young people by their ability to improve the efficiency of the system. He believed deeply that "quality is more important than equality" (Rose, 2016). Dewey was a leading progressive voice, arguing for problem-based and experiential learning; a vision of education that was tailored for the individual, not for efficiency. As a leading educational historian has observed, a good summation of the last century of schooling would be: "Thorndike won. Dewey lost" (Lagemann, 2000). Many of the progressive education reforms introduced in recent decades-such as project-based learning and the current conversation on ungrading-are flashes of Deweyan sensibility, so the battle is not necessarily lost, though deep changes to the underlying educational structures that percentage-based grading feeds into would be needed to change the direction we have been and are headed.
Rethinking the Infrastructures that Structure and Support Grading Practices
Creating real change in education is hard, perhaps as hard as any societal challenge. In Degrading the Grading Myths, Simon and Bellanca muse, "There may be no more difficult reform task than introducing a non-grade report system into schools. Everyone wants it, but few initiate it!" (Simon & Bellanca, 1976, p. 70). In a 1995 critique of teaching and assessment in higher education, University of Rochester English Professor David Bleich notes, "Testing and grading are normalized to such a degree that only a small minority of students, teachers, and administrators can conceive of any alternative to this system. . . . [They] are manifestations of the ideology of schooling" (Bleich, 1995, p. 568).

One way to explain this normalization is that percentage-based grading and letter grades have become part of the underlying infrastructure that shapes education. While we generally think of plumbing or highways when we think of infrastructure, Susan Leigh Star-a sociologist who studied information systems-described infrastructure as the embedded and transparent standards and conventions that shape practice (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Things like grades become deep cultural practices embedded in schooling, and the structures of schooling-for instance the use of transcripts designed to record only final letter grades and the use of the grade point average (GPA) as a summation of all individual course grades-reinforce the importance of grades. To change this, we need to engage in what Star called infrastructuring work, creating new structures-such as new forms of transcript-and practices-such as the way colleges use information from secondary school for admissions-that create value for information about learning beyond the final letter grade and GPA.
College Admissions, Transcripts, and GPAs as Infrastructures
One such effort discussed in the Brookhart et al. (2016) review is the emergence-or reemergence-of mastery learning, which is a leading candidate considered by the Mapleton High School of Wad-Ja-Get? (no spoilers). In Wad-Ja-Get? the authors distinguish between a five-point system of mastery and a two-point system, which is akin to Pass / No Credit, sometimes referred to as standards-based grading. It is difficult to pin these terms down clearly in either literature or practice (see Guskey & Anderman, 2013 for some useful definitional work). The key, however, is that grading in these approaches is based on clear demonstrations of what students can do, and do not involve percentage-based grading or comparative grading such as curves. Much important work on mastery learning was done right before and during the time Wad-Ja-Get? was being written, first discussed by John Carroll in 1963 and further developed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968 and later work (Guskey, 2015). One key advantage of mastery learning is that it does not make time the main arbiter of learning, allowing for individual variation on the way to learning goals, with liberal use of formative assessments and feedback. Another advantage is that mastery assessment emphasizes what students know and can do, as opposed to merely ranking them against one another. Alfie Kohn, progressive education proponent (and author of the introduction to Ungrading), makes an elegant argument against using assessment to rank students, pointing out that comparative information by itself is not that useful. What would be more useful is a rating system, not a ranking system (Kohn, 2019). Current grading approaches seem to ration mastery, as though it isn't conceivable that all students can learn. Through detailed monitoring of what students know and can do, it is possible to produce a report of their learning with much more information than a single letter grade. Harvard education professor Todd Rose (2016) picks up on this in The End of Average, in which he calls out the culture of "averagarianism," arguing that ranking and sorting learners around a mean ignores important differences in learning, and in fact masks information about actual learning. Rose points out that two students could have the same GPA yet vary widely in their strengths and weaknesses. Mastery learning and grading approaches allow us to respect learners as individuals. A comprehensive meta-analysis of mastery learning programs found them to be highly effective across a range of learners, subject matter, and levels, and one of the most consistently effective educational interventions (Kulik et al., 1990). Given findings like these from the 1990s, why aren't mastery learning approaches more common today? A one-word answer: infrastructure.

From the 1990s through today, education policy in the US has emphasized a culture of testing that has dramatically narrowed what learners view as important. Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, put it well, writing that our students "were well-taught and learned well the lesson implicit in our society that what matters is not the process or the learning but the end result, the grade. A typical college freshman today has been through 10 years of No Child Left Behind educational philosophy where 'success' has been reduced to a score on a test" (Davidson, 2013). Davidson's book The New Education includes a broader critique of grading, describing it as part of the development of modern college education and a misguided search for "merit" based on reductive information like GPAs and test scores (Davidson, 2017).

In thinking about our current-day obsession with grades and GPAs, one can plausibly argue that college admissions shares blame equally with education policy. As one of the characters in Wad-Ja-Get? muses, "It's the colleges that have started the trend [towards percentage-based grading and GPAs] this time. . . . Harvard's and Yale's entrance requirements became the standard high school curriculum" (Kirschenbaum et al., 2021, p. 42). This common perception, that colleges required a GPA in applications, turned out not to be true. When Kirschenbaum and Bellanca surveyed college admissions offices about their policies in 1973, they were surprised to learn from the 1900 or so college admissions officers who responded that less than five percent of colleges required grades or class ranks in the application, and seventy-seven percent responded that other forms of transcripted information would receive "fair and equal review" (Bellanca & Kirschenbaum, 1973). This is still true today-colleges are willing to consider applicants with non-traditional academic records, though this is not widely advertised-but the perception and practice of grades and GPAs has only become stronger over the past decades. Pressure to get into selective colleges has become so intense that students (and their parents) obsess over each element of the application, imagining that each question must be answered in a certain way to even have a chance of admission to a dream school. Given the uncertainty of the process, it makes sense that seemingly objective measures like grades would become a prominent focus. Colleges feel GPA pressure as well. College ranking systems (another powerful infrastructural component) overvalue admitted students' GPA and test scores because they are easily measured and compared across colleges, even if it is unclear exactly what is being measured (O'Neil, 2017). In this environment, it is not surprising that students respond with an intense focus on grades, with notable detrimental effects. In addition to de-emphasizing learning, there is evidence that the heightened focus on grades is harmful to student mental health (Crocker et al., 2003). And the emphasis on chasing grades does not diminish after college admission. When I talk with students in my own university about replacing their GPAs with richer or more detailed information about what they know or can do, their first instinct is to panic. Wouldn't that put them at a disadvantage to other students with "high" GPAs to put on their graduate school or employment applications? The problem isn't student resistance, resilience, or grit; the problem is that the whole system emphasizes ranking and grading over learning. We need to change the system to reignite a focus on learning. Which brings us back to infrastructure.

Infrastructure shapes culture. What if the infrastructure of college admissions were designed to use richer forms of information that more accurately depict students as individuals? What if we could give employers a way to identify students who were a good match with their organizational mission and needs, as opposed to a one-number ranking? One technology that has enlivened the conversation in this area is digital badges, which can be used to denote learning or accomplishment in more granular ways than traditional grades and can be used to guide individualized pathways towards specific learning goals. When multiple badges are assembled into portfolios, they allow learners to customize their self-presentation (Casilli & Hickey, 2016). The work in badges is related to work around mastery learning, which has seen a recent resurgence though organizations like CompetencyWorks (Sturgis & Casey, 2018).

In 2018, I co-hosted a meeting of college admissions personnel, experts in digital badges, and assessment experts to discuss the potential of badges as evidence in the college admissions process (Fishman et al., 2018). Admissions officers at this meeting viewed these representations of learning as potentially crucial for expanding the range of students who see themselves as good candidates for success in college and for their ability to identify those students. A leading effort to change the infrastructure of college admissions is the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC; http://mastery.org/). Independent school leader Scott Looney was frustrated with the limiting aspects of the traditional transcript, believing that its structure limited innovation, discouraged interdisciplinary and engaged learning, and was more useful for sifting and sorting students than anything else: a strong echo with the arguments discussed above. Even more frustrating, he felt unable to do anything about this without jeopardizing his students' access to top colleges. A college admissions officer friend suggested that, while it might not be a great idea for his school to do its own thing, if a consortium of schools banded together, it would make it easier for colleges to respond positively to an alternative transcript. And so the MTC was born, with the goal of developing a transcript that represented areas of mastery instead of course titles and grades. The areas could be customized by each school and yet remain relatively easy for admissions officers to make sense of, in order to understand an applicant in the context of other applicants from the same school or state and against the specific goals of the college in building a broadly diverse admissions cohort. Since the establishment of the MTC network in 2017, it has grown to more than 370 private and public schools. In 2019-20, the first students used a pilot version of the Mastery Transcript to successfully apply to college. MTC is building new infrastructure that makes mastery learning into an attractive option for high schools . . . again.

Another element of infrastructure that needs to change in order to upend the dominant system of letter grades and percentage-grading is gradebooks themselves. The most common form of technology in schools today is the learning management system (LMS). These platforms-such as Canvas, Blackboard, and Moodle -support functions like distributing class materials, collecting and grading student assignments, and supporting classroom communication. LMSs are both ubiquitous and nearly invisible in schools; they are infrastructure. And LMSs typically have a narrow view of what grades and grading look like. It's difficult to find an LMS gradebook that doesn't start with the assumption that 100% is "perfect," thus making the objective for students to maintain grades that-on average-are as close to 100% as possible. Gradebooks are hopelessly averagarian. In response, students game the system within or across their courses to maintain or maximize their average.
School Is a Game . . . but It Is a Terrible Game
At this point, it's fitting to emphasize that the subtitle of Wad-Ja-Get? is "The Grading Game in American Education." School is indeed a kind of game, but it's a terrible game, with broken engagement and reward structures. Students are motivated to get good grades, but not to learn. What if we tried to learn from well-designed games and applied those lessons to the design of school learning (Gee, 2003)? In a well-designed game, players willingly take on challenges, persist through difficulties, and are resilient in the face of multiple failures on the way to ultimate success. In general, if you succeed at everything you do on the first try, you probably aren't being properly challenged. Eric Klopfer of the MIT Education Arcade is fond of pointing out that people play well-designed games because they are hard, not despite their difficulty. Why isn't school like that? I can't recall the last time a student came to my office and asked, "Professor, what's the hardest thing I can do next?" That's simply not how the current grading game is played.

To make school into a better game, my colleagues and I at the University of Michigan are developing a pedagogical approach we call gameful learning, after well-designed games (Fishman et al., in press; Fishman & Holman, 2015). A key to this approach is changing the frame for grading. Instead of starting with 100%-which you will most likely lose-in a gameful course you start with zero, but you can end up wherever you want based on the choices you make and the effort you put in. In this way, gameful learning is aligned with ideas from mastery learning. Learners are given autonomy, in terms of being able to make choices with respect to assignments and pathways through a course. Their feelings of competence are supported, in part through being able to make choices about what to work on, and through a sense of productive failure. What this means is that if a learner earns, for example, 60% of the points available on an assignment, this isn't a failure at all (though it would certainly be viewed as a one in most standard grading systems), but instead represents progress. What did they learn? What hasn't been learned yet? How should we focus future work by this student to help ensure that all goals are met by the end of the course? Gameful courses also emphasize a sense of belonging, helping students to feel a part of something larger than themselves. In the study of academic motivation, self-determination theory has demonstrated that when learners' autonomy, belonging, and competence are supported, they feel more intrinsically motivated (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Roy & Zaman, 2017). When these three elements are thwarted-as they are in much of contemporary education-extrinsic motivation is required to get learners to engage. For today's learners, that extrinsic motivation comes from grades.

Note that gameful learning is not about playing literal games to support learning; it is about changing the rules of grading to make school itself into a better game. Unfortunately, this way of thinking about grading is also nearly impossible to support with traditional LMS gradebooks. Infrastructure strikes again! To make it easier for instructors to implement gameful learning in their classrooms, we created GradeCraft ( http://www.gradecraft.com/), which integrates with popular LMS platforms and is custom-built to support gameful assessment approaches. At present, more than seventeen thousand learners have experienced gameful courses at more than seventy-five academic institutions. At the University of Michigan, forty-eight different programs across a broad range of subjects have courses that have been redesigned to be gameful. GradeCraft is an example of the infrastructuring work needed to change the way instructors and students think about grades and grading.

Beyond gameful learning, I argue that the entire college experience can be reshaped to better engage students as learners and to develop into the kinds of resilient problem-solvers the world needs now and in the future. The program I imagine would be inherently multidisciplinary, focused on problems instead of fields of study. There would be clearly defined learning goals, with achievement measured as progress towards those goals instead of by grades. There would be no required courses, and students would be supported in learning from all the resources and opportunities presented by the university and the surrounding community. This program imagines a different supportive infrastructure that in turn reshapes how learners interact with the institution and vice versa, and an admissions process that does not use GPA or standardized test scores to rank and sort students. I am leading an effort to develop an undergraduate degree program that makes this vision a reality at the University of Michigan. It is critical for this kind of work to happen at colleges, to send the message to K-12 schools and families that we value what is learned and how it is learned more than the final grades. There is growing evidence that the same is true for employers and graduate schools (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). I note that much of our work in this area is supported by a capable campus Center for Academic Innovation, helping to spur new and transformative ideas in education and providing both a supportive community and the necessary infrastructures for bringing those ideas to life. I am happy to say that efforts to reimagine education through centers for academic and learning innovation are spreading across higher education more broadly (Kim & Maloney, 2020). The status quo around grading is in part a response to the perceived demands of college, so it is fitting that colleges should lead the way forward.
The Current Crises in America
At the outset of this introduction, I lamented that many of the troubles facing education and society fifty years ago are still present. One of the most significant of these is institutionalized racism and anti-Blackness, which has been constructed and continually reproduced in the United States for over four hundred years and is deeply embedded in the structure of US education. A new challenge is the emergence of COVID-19, the effects of which are amplified by racism. Both have deep implications for society in general, and for education in particular. Is it frivolous to advocate for changing grading practices against the backdrop of such challenges? I don't think so. Rapid changes made in response to the coronavirus revealed many of the underlying flaws in current grading practices, in particular its focus on ranking instead of on learning, care, or equity. Progressive advancements in the way we think about grades and grading offer crucial opportunities to enhance equity and the care we show for all students, especially those who don't fare well in the traditional game of school. This is an opportunity to increase our focus on learning over sorting.

Why might now be different in terms of reform? Despite a century of scholarship and advocacy about grades and grading, the use of percentage-based letter grades is more prevalent and entrenched than ever. As a frustrated Mapleton student states in Wad-Ja-Get?, "I'm tired of talking about grades. I've talked about grades as long as I've been in school and that seems like a long time. We've talked about grades in this class before. We've talked about the history of grading. . . . And here we are again, talking about grades. But that's all we do around here: Talk" (Kirschenbaum et al., 2021, pp. 58-59). In Where Good Ideas Come From, science writer Steven Johnson illustrates how innovations come not from sudden breakthroughs or lone thinkers, but rather evolve over time, gathering (and losing) momentum in conjunction with other developments (Johnson, 2011). And sometimes, in what Johnson calls "the adjacent possible," the right combination of elements exists in the right context to enable the innovation to be recognized for what it is and take hold. The current combination of technology (e.g., digital badges), advocacy (e.g., Mastery Transcript Consortium, the growth of academic innovation centers in higher education), and crisis as it relates to education might bring about an adjacent possible favorable to advancing approaches to grading that enhance learning and equity.

Many Americans view education as a means of advancing one's standing in society, but like many of our institutions, its structures are more aligned with preserving the status quo, and these structures have been reinforced by decades of law and politics that created segregated neighborhoods and schools, and actively undermined efforts at meaningful desegregation (Ryan, 2010). "Race gaps" in achievement have long plagued American education (Barton & Coley, 2010). Black and brown students trail their peers academically as a result of chronic and systematic underfunding of the schools they attend (Baker et al., 2016). Repeated evidence indicates that socioeconomic status is one of the most reliable indicators of academic performance, and racist policies related to housing, employment, and other key elements of wealth creation for generations of Americans ensured that Black people in particular have less than white people. Even when overall achievement rises, the gap remains (Hanushek et al., 2019). A focus on gaps can be problematic in and of itself, leading us to view students in racialized categories labelled as "underachieving." In our current system we too often apply a deficit lens to disparities, asking how group performance can be "fixed," rather than addressing the systemic structures and processes that caused the gaps in the first place (Gutiérrez, 2008).

The field has never been level, and systems of grading and ranking contribute to preserving institutional inequity, with abundant evidence that teachers' grading practices are subject to racial bias, irrespective of teachers' racial attitudes (Quinn, 2020). I have already cited Todd Rose's (2016) critique of using averages to rank students. Historian and founding director of Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research Ibram X. Kendi argues that that the statistical methods we use to "measure" learning were developed by scholars who were also proponents of eugenics, committed to "proving" that the Black race was inferior to others (Kendi, 2019). Institutional racism in education, supported by a grading and standardized testing system focused on ranking, was readily able to demonstrate that some students were "naturally" less able than others. Thorndike's scientific management approaches to education played a key role in reinforcing and amplifying the inequality that has been there from the start.

How could we break this cycle? One way would be to champion grading approaches that focus on progress instead of comparison, on rating instead of ranking. Approaches like mastery-based grading allow for more individualization and autonomy and are thus inherently more equitable than approaches based on average performance because they do not ration success. One might argue that there are more important things to focus on, such as school funding. I don't disagree, but I do reject the false choice. Education is a system, and when we work for improvement, we need to focus on its multiple interconnected elements simultaneously.

Wad-Ja-Get? is mostly silent on matters of race and economic inequality when discussing grades and grading systems. Though the conversation at Mapleton High does not directly address systemic racism, it is also clear that the students engaged in the discussion are headed to college and enjoy many privileges that are invisible to them, and the book pointedly describes Mapleton High as occupying a luxurious building in a town with a small percentage of Black residents. I have observed that K-12 schools and colleges with "alternative" grading systems are often enclaves of privilege. One of these privileges is the simple ability to question and challenge the dominant grading system. It is the nature of institutionalized inequality that the rules don't need to apply to those at the top. Disadvantaged students and schools feel like they must compete within the system in order to be seen as equal. But the competition begins from unequal starting points. This is why it is so crucial to understand and address those rules and the infrastructures that support them in a way that emphasizes equity to the greatest extent possible.

Compared to the slow, constant crisis of institutional racism, the COVID-19 crisis emerged seemingly overnight and swept across the US education system at lightning speed. In a matter of weeks, almost all schools moved to remote instruction. As Na'ilah Suad Nasir and Megan Bang, President and Vice President of the influential Spencer Foundation, wrote in March 2020, "More drastic change to education systems has occurred in the last week than it has in arguably the last 50 years. What possibilities does this open up for the future of learning, for the reorganization of our institutions, for the centrality of families and family life?" (Nasir & Bang, 2020). Teachers and students alike found themselves working to find ways to continue learning in unfamiliar-and sometimes infelicitous-contexts. The social inequalities related to race and class that already were prevalent in the country were exacerbated for learners by differences in access to technology, networks, and safe and stable places to learn remotely. After the move to remote instruction, it was striking to note that the first major changes were to grading systems.

With few exceptions, K-12 and higher education institutions across the US rapidly switched to some variant of Pass/Fail or Pass / No Credit grading (Reich et al., 2020). Arguments in favor of the move tended to emphasize fairness and care for learners, on the grounds that most instructors and students were not well-prepared for such a move, and the growing health crisis created a situation that would make it difficult to focus on learning, to say the least. The arguments against the change were the most revealing, however. Some argued that by moving to Pass/Fail, we were lowering our standards. Others argued that, without a letter grade to aim for, students would lose their motivation to work hard. I also heard that the move would be unfair to students who had been working hard for a high grade thus far in the term, or to students who were on an upward trajectory and needed these grades to raise their GPA.

To the first objection-that we are lowering standards by moving to a Pass/Fail system-I ask, what were our standards in the first place? Let's begin with the assumption that passing is the equivalent of a C or C- in the standard grading approach. If you aren't happy with students earning those grades, why do they exist at all? Shouldn't a passing grade mean that the student has at least learned the core goals of the course? To me, this objection is an argument for raising standards such that nobody can pass a course without mastering the core learning objectives. This objection reveals a lack of focus on learning in our current grading systems.

The second objection-that without high grades to aim for, students will become unmotivated and stop working-reveals the devil's bargain inherent in current grading systems, in which students are only working for grades, not for learning. Self-determination theory calls this the "overjustification effect," wherein receiving a reward (a grade) for something you used to enjoy doing (learning) causes your enjoyment to decrease, and your need for extrinsic rewards (more grades) to increase in order for you to continue to engage (Lepper et al., 1973). If this isn't a clear call to refocus assessment and grading on learning, I don't know what is. This objection implies a lack of focus on care and equity.

The third objection-that this move is unfair to "hard workers" who were shooting for an A, or to students who need a good grade to improve their GPAs-again shows a lack of focus on care in our grading systems. The first group isn't materially affected by the change to Pass/Fail. The second group can be supported with a note to their transcript, or in letters of recommendation. In any event, the real question here-if care is the focus-is what the best move is for most students?

The focus on the pros and cons of Pass/Fail, however, misses a larger opportunity. If we employed mastery grading approaches, the entire system would be better prepared for shocks like COVID-19 and would just be better in general. Mastery-based grading focuses on learning, not ranking. It respects the idea that learners might take different paths to the same outcomes, thus enhancing equity. It supports the use of rigorous standards, and the idea that it is possible for everyone to reach them. It offers the potential to communicate exactly what learners know and can do, in comparison to information-poor GPAs and transcripts. Finally, mastery learning is flexible and resilient in the face of unforeseen situations, allowing us to emphasize care for learners. Of course, without explicit attention to issues of systemic racism, moves towards mastery grading will be undercut by the ability of those with power to maintain their advantage by investing in resources only they can afford or access. Any effort to improve our grading practices needs to maintain a focus on the deeper challenges of racism and anti-Blackness. The crisis presented by the pandemic creates a space for everyone in education to ask, "What are grades for? " Hopefully the answers we respond with will emphasize learning, care, and equity.
Conclusion
I'm so grateful to Drs. Kirschenbaum, Simon, and Napier both for the gift of this book fifty years ago, and for their enthusiasm for reintroducing Wad-Ja-Get? to a new generation of learners, families, educators, and policymakers. Talking with them and hearing their stories was inspiring to me as an educator, as a scholar, and as a person. My hope is that new readers find Wad-Ja-Get? to be just as compelling as I found it, and that it fosters renewed and productive conversations about grading and assessment. Changing how we think about and practice grading is crucial to redesigning education systems to be more just, more equitable, and more focused on learning. It's been fifty years since Wad-Ja-Get? first argued for that. Now is the time.
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Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111-134. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111

Sturgis, C., & Casey, K. (2018). Quality principles for competency-based education. iNACOL and CompetencyWorks. https://aurora-institute.org/resource/quality-principles-for-competency-based-education/

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The University of Michigan fishman@umich.edu @barryfishman This chapter is modified from the Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education, which employs a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The complete book is freely accessible at https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11900733 "American education is in trouble."

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‘Ungrading’ doesn’t necessarily mean no grades. So what does it mean?

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‘Ungrading’ doesn’t necessarily mean no grades. So what does it mean?

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'Ungrading' doesn't necessarily mean no grades. So what does it mean?

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Count "ungrading" among those academic terms with potentially confusing names. While it is true that sometimes ungrading means faculty are doing away with letter grades altogether, more often instructors are doing something less literal.

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Robert Talbert is convinced that traditional grading practices are due for an overhaul. Talbert, a professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University, is co-writing a book, Grading for Growth, about alternative approaches that focus on providing feedback and allowing several attempts rather than awarding points. "For too long," Talbert and his co-author, David Clark, in their newsletter, "grades have gotten in the way of learning, and learners have focused on scoring points and playing school instead of on learning and growth."

This semester, Talbert has been experimenting with what's probably the most alternative practice of all: "ungrading," in which grades are de-emphasized as far as possible. But, as he wrote in a recent , he has some reservations about the approach. The big one: Could ungrading actually make equity gaps worse?

Talbert's question is provocative. Getting rid of grades is a bold step, one proponents see as student-centered. Making things worse for disadvantaged students would be a dire unintended consequence. The question of ungrading's effect is also difficult to answer: Research on equity gaps usually compares students' grades across different racial or socioeconomic groups; in ungrading, students generally determine their own grades. That kind of self-evaluation, Talbert thinks, requires a skill not all students have had a chance to develop.

Ungrading has been adopted by a small but growing group of professors, including some well-known ones. As the practice expands, Talbert's question is a reminder that context is critical in teaching - and that any teaching strategy, however well-intentioned or evidence-based, must be enacted with care.

Since the 2020 release of Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), the book's editor, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has given a steady stream of presentations about ungrading, most of them over Zoom. She's done more than a dozen already in 2022.

The book, which brings together perspectives from professors across disciplines and institution types, was written before the pandemic, but its release turned out to be timely. The challenges of the past two years have led more professors to question longstanding grading practices, and raised their awareness of alternatives.

That first pandemic semester forced a short-term reckoning with grades, with many professors convinced that giving them as usual was unfair. Classes had suddenly - and in many cases, clumsily - moved online. This was an emergency. Like most emergencies, it would have a disproportionate impact on the already disadvantaged. Should a student fail because she didn't have reliable internet access, or because a family member became ill?

But this problem isn't specific to the pandemic. "It's never been the case," Blum says, "that everybody had good, safe, healthy conditions." Any time students are rated and sorted, some of them have overcome significant obstacles to succeed, and others didn't have to.

Ungrading is meant to get out of the rating-and-sorting business, to instead provide more individual counsel on strengths and weaknesses. But that doesn't mean it can level the playing field.

"Grades and success in school and out of school correlate almost completely with prior advantage," Blum says. "In every way. That's true with grades, that's true without grades."

Students who have "excellent conventional academic preparation," Blum says, "and socioeconomic privilege and racial privilege and linguistic privilege, are very familiar with how schools work, because schools basically reflect the dominant culture." High-achieving students know how those structures work - the "hidden curriculum" is available to them.

In his blog post, Talbert wrote that alternative grading practices, like specifications grading - where professors don't give points for work but either mark it as satisfactory or give detailed feedback on how it could be improved on a second attempt - can help mitigate inequity. But he worried that taking grades away entirely would make a course more difficult for less-advantaged students to navigate. Grades could be "guideposts" that those students need as they figure out college, he said, and removing them might be like removing "all the signs in the airport in a foreign country. Sure, there's a possibility that a person would focus more on the signs than on the journey they're taking; but those signs can definitely be helpful, as well."

Studies lend credence to that hypothesis: having highly structured courses has been shown to be particularly important for less-advantaged students. Providing structure is one of the main strategies of inclusive teaching, and grades surely provide some structure.

But getting rid of grades doesn't mean abandoning structure or standards, says Lindsay Masland, interim director of faculty professional development at Appalachian State University, who has tweeted about her experience trying ungrading. If professors are curious about the practice, says Masland, also an associate professor of psychology, "they need to stop and ask themselves, what is it that grades provide in my class? What are the things that my students get from the numbers or the letters that are helpful?"

After that, she says, go through the list. "Is the grade the best, or only, way for you to accomplish that amazing thing for your students?"

If students come into class with uneven abilities to self-assess, Masland says, then make self-assessment a learning objective for the course, and teach students how to do it. Self-evaluation is a skill they'll need later. Better to address this disparity head-on than to try to work around it.

Joshua Eyler has been openly critical of the emphasis placed on traditional grades and worries about their impact on student mental health. Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, is working on a book about grades. He'd like to see more instructors experiment with alternative approaches. "When I think about, how do I help people get to the model that works best for them?, it's all about context," he says. "Who you are, what are you teaching, what institution are you teaching in, who are your students, how many students do you have."

There are many ways to come at alternative grading, Eyler says. Whichever way they go, he says, instructors will need to think carefully about how the pieces of their course come together.

It's also worth remembering that a professor can improve grading without getting rid of traditional grades, says Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University. Gurung encourages professors to consider the ideas laid out in the book Grading for Equity, by Joe Feldman. They can, for instance, give students an incomplete or postpone recording any grade until work is in, rather than giving a zero that pulls students down. They can move to a grading scale with fewer levels, which has less false precision.

Gurung, who is also a professor of psychology, has experimented with ungrading. Before taking the plunge, he says, professors should engage in some reflection. "There are a lot of problems with grades. Which one are you trying to solve? Are you trying to solve pressure? Are you trying to solve reliability? Are you trying to solve bias?"

The answer to that question, Gurung says, will help pinpoint the potential solution.

And professors don't have to throw grades away in one fell swoop, he adds: "Another one of my tips is, Start small." Professors might de-emphasize grades in smaller, more advanced courses, and on lower-stakes assignments.

Talbert is right, Gurung says, that some students will be more prepared to assess themselves than others will, and professors should be mindful of that. "People very good-naturedly and well-intentioned want to jump to a 'let's do away with grades,'" he says, "but you have to realize how much preparation it takes for yourself, and how much support you need to give the student."

Ungrading, after all, describes something professors aren't going to do. Perhaps when they stop grading, the other elements of their course design matter even more.

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The Unintended Consequences of 'Ungrading'

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Robert Talbert is convinced that traditional grading practices are due for an overhaul. Talbert, a professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University, is co-writing a book, Grading for Growth, about alternative approaches that focus on providing feedback and allowing several attempts rather than awarding points.

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Starr Sackstein is a visionary educator, prolific writer, and passionate advocate for transforming the world of education. With an unwavering commitment to student-centered learning and technology integration, she has emerged as a leading figure in the field of progressive education.

Starr's journey in education began in the traditional classroom, where she quickly realized the limitations of conventional teaching methods. Fueled by a desire to create more meaningful and impactful learning experiences, she embarked on a mission to revolutionize education. Her career path led her to explore innovative teaching practices, including project-based learning, competency-based assessment, and personalized instruction.

A trailblazer in the realm of assessment, Starr championed the shift from grades to a more holistic approach. She pioneered the use of student self-assessment and reflection, emphasizing the importance of metacognition in the learning process. Her groundbreaking book, "Hacking Assessment," resonated with educators worldwide, sparking conversations and reforms around how students are evaluated and empowered.

Starr's influence extends beyond the classroom through her writing and speaking engagements. As a prolific author, she has penned numerous articles for prominent education publications and authored several influential books, each challenging the status quo and providing practical strategies for educators to implement change. Her thought leadership has been instrumental in shaping the ongoing dialogue on educational reform.

In addition to her writing, Starr's dynamic presence as a speaker has inspired educators at conferences, workshops, and events across the globe. Her ability to connect with diverse audiences and her deep insights into pedagogy and technology have earned her a reputation as an engaging and thought-provoking speaker.

Starr's impact is evident in the transformations she has catalyzed in schools and classrooms. Through her consultancy work, she has collaborated with educational institutions to design innovative curricula, revamp assessment practices, and create dynamic learning environments that foster creativity and critical thinking.

As an advocate for integrating technology in education, Starr recognizes the power of digital tools to amplify learning experiences. She has explored the potential of social media, blogging, and digital portfolios to engage students and extend their learning beyond the classroom walls.

Starr Sackstein's legacy is one of courage, innovation, and unwavering dedication to advancing education. Her relentless pursuit of meaningful change has challenged educators to rethink their practices and prioritize the growth and well-being of each student. Through her writing, speaking, and transformative work, Starr continues to shape the future of education, inspiring a generation of educators to embrace progress and possibility.

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Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

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Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

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Ungrading seems to be growing in popularity: there are hundreds of Tweets with the #ungrading hashtag, dozens of articles about ungrading and other alternative assessment practices regularly published in major higher ed outlets such as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and even some Duke professors, such as Cecilia Marquez, have begun sharing their experiences with ungrading here at Duke. If you're interested in learning more about this growing practice, this blog post provides a basic introduction.

Ungrading is a practice which eliminates or greatly minimizes the use of assigned points or letter grades in a course, focusing instead on providing frequent and detailed feedback to students on their work, in relation to the course learning goals. Ungrading is a form of " grading for growth," in that the primary purpose of the assessment is to help students learn and improve their knowledge and skills, rather than to create a summative score that students use to compare themselves against an external credential.

Often, ungrading occurs in an educational environment in which a final letter grade does need to be assigned; in this case, typically the instructor (sometimes with input from or jointly with students) assigns a grade at the end of the course. In some courses the instructor will ask the students to self-assign a final, summative grade, using some specific guiding questions. The grade assigned may also be based on acceptable completion of work from a list of specifications, similar to contract or specifications grading.

The focus in a class which uses ungrading is student learning, growth and reflection in relation to the course learning objectives. A fundamental requirement in a course implementing ungrading is learning goals and objectives defined at both the course and unit/module level, with clear alignment between those objectives and the assignments used in the course, and with a well-thought-out understanding by the faculty and students of the expectations for what success on the assignments looks like.

A class using ungrading is typically designed to include multiple avenues for feedback and reflection, from the students themselves, as well as from peers, the instructor, and sometimes external experts or clients. There are often multiple opportunities to resubmit at least some of the assignments to allow students to learn from and improve in response to feedback.

My definition of ungrading is rather broad and is dependent on context. Mostly ungrading for me requires (at a minimum): 1. ways to give better feedback that encourages and supports mastery levels of learning and 2. methods that enable students to take charge of their own learning (i.e., increase their agency), such that they can continue to excel even after my class ends.
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, Ungrading: What is it and why should we use it?, 1/14/2020, accessed 6/17/2022.

Ungrading has benefits for student learning, but faculty should be aware of potential drawbacks as well. Given that GPA is still part of the admissions decision process for most grad/professional programs and the selection process for some first jobs, if part of the ungrading process in a course involves students grading or rating themselves, there is external pressure on students to have a high final course grade. Not all students are equally equipped to self-evaluate, so faculty should be aware of this and provide support or guidance as necessary. Dr. Sharon Lauricella, a Communications Professor at Ontario Tech University, uses ungrading and has students self-assign a final grade. She has found that students haven't typically over-rated themselves in her courses, but she still retains the option to adjust self-assigned final grades if she deems fit. Some of potential biases in self-rating may be mitigated by using well-described rubrics or explanations for how to self-rate, which may include asking students to present a body of evidence of their work in the course supporting their selected rating.

Rather than having students rate themselves for a final grade, many faculty use some version of specifications grading. Instructors create a set of standards or specifications for each assignment that clearly lay out what success looks like on that assignment. Then they review student work according to that standard, provide detailed feedback, and assign a rating (met the standard or didn't meet the standard). Typically students have multiple attempts to meet the standard if they fail to do so the first time. Specs grading still results in a final letter grade, but the grade is determined in a different way. Students earn a particular letter grade by successfully completing "bundles" of assignments which have been pre-determined to correspond to a particular grade:

The idea is that students who want a "C" in the course have to do a certain amount of work that meets the specs; those wanting a "B" have to do everything the "C" people do, but more of it and of higher quality and/or difficulty level. Similarly the "A" students do everything the "B" students do plus even greater quantity and quality.

Done right, specs grading allows students choice and agency in how and when they are assessed; students are graded on what they can eventually show that they know, and they get to learn from mistakes and build upon failures; their grades are based on actual concrete evidence of learning; and the grades themselves convey actual meaning because they can be traced back to concrete evidence tied to detailed specifications of quality. The instructor often saves time too, because instead of determining how to allocate points (which takes more time than you think), she just determines whether the work is good enough or not, and gives feedback instead.
Robert Talbert, Specifications grading: we may have a winner, 4/28/2017, accessed 9/9/2022

Other concerns about ungrading or similar alternatives in which providing significant feedback on student performance is key, is how time-consuming that is and how to scale that to larger courses. Some suggestions:

Use peer review based on guiding questions or rubrics for at least some of the assignments (this has an added benefit of building students' evaluation skills). This may work better for students who have some background in the subject.

If it makes sense for the assignment, provide an answer key or explanation and have students self-review or mark up where they may need more work. Students could then be asked to submit a reflection on their work after one or a group of related assignments; you could read these and provide a general response in class.

Use some group assignments to reduce the number of submitted works on which you need to give feedback.

In summary, you'll need to consider how a final summative grade will be determined for your course, and you'll need to determine how you'll set up your assignments to provide enough feedback to students and to allow revisions.

If you are considering using ungrading or related alternative assessment methods such as specs or contract-based grading, let us know - we'd love to learn more about your approach and what's working for you.

Additional readings:

Ungrading: An introduction and Ungrading: An FAQ, Jesse Stommel

Anything at Grading for Growth, a blog by David Clark and Robert Talbert, mathematics professors at Grand Valley State University focusing on research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond.

Tips for Teaching Professors, a blog by Breanna Bayraktar, a Community College ESL professor and educational developer

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What is Ungrading? - Duke Learning Innovation

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Ungrading seems to be growing in popularity: there are hundreds of Tweets with the #ungrading hashtag, dozens of articles about ungrading and other alternative assessment practices regularly published in major ...

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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I was both surprised and, I suppose, flattered to be named in a recent article that I am among the people who are "doing ungrading right."

I was also more than a little chagrined, because most of my writing on ungrading has been to document my myriad struggles in implementing an approach to student-level assessment that was consistent with my pedagogical goals. In Susan Blum's edited collection Ungrading: Why Rating Undermines Learning (And What to Do Instead), I explicitly describe how I identify with Wile E. Coyote's attempts to snare the Roadrunner, given the challenges of developing a system of alternative grading.

I am uncomfortable being identified as someone doing ungrading right because framing it as something that can be done correctly suggests it is a schema or program that can be applied regardless of context or conditions, and once fixed, you're good to go. This has not been my experience. The effectiveness of a particular approach to alternative assessment is highly dependent on context, a context that can be altered by an almost innumerable number of variables.

Ungrading is no one thing. It is not a specific approach or set of techniques so much as a mind-set, a recognition that the relationship between evaluation as it traditionally happens in school contexts and the imperatives of learning is complicated, and for many students, those things have been at odds for the bulk of their academic careers.

I would not say that I am doing anything right when it comes to ungrading except that I try to do my best.

My default assumption, one I hold until proven otherwise, is that everyone is doing their best to do right by their students. This does not mean that I agree with everything everyone else is doing-any regular reader knows that I have very strong opinions about teaching and learning-but one of those opinions is that instructor autonomy and the freedom to adapt their practices to their unique contexts is a necessity for success.

The irony of my experience is that being largely ignored because of my status as contingent faculty gave me great freedom to experiment. At the same time, my status as contingent faculty means I teach only occasionally now, so it's much tougher to continue those experiments. As with most issues around teaching and learning, the biggest barriers to change and improvement are structural and systemic.

When I give talks about teaching writing, and my framework of " the writer's practice," I often conclude with a discussion of grading and assessment and how I ultimately turned away from traditional letter/numerical grading on individual assignments because I recognized that how I was grading was at odds with my pedagogical values.

To the extent that interest in ungrading seems to be increasing, my observation is that it's primarily rooted in instructors questioning legacy practices and how (even if) they are related to what they want students to learn. This is healthy. What isn't healthy is replacing one system with another without dealing with the complexities.

My advice then is not necessarily to do what I do in terms of specific practices when it comes to grading, but instead to follow the process that allowed me to bring my instruction and my assessment in alignment with those underlying values.

That involves following a number of precepts that help me be aware of my values when it comes to assessing student work.

I give the following advice:

Assess only what you value. For years, much of my time was spent enforcing rules around writing that I didn't actually believe were all that meaningful when it came to learning how to write. Ultimately, this led me to ditching letter/numerical grades entirely on individual assignments, but that was a multisemester journey. Other instructors with different values teaching in different contexts will come to different conclusions.

Be transparent with students about what counts when it comes to assessment. This includes but is not limited to the criteria by which student writing is being judged. In addition to the specific criteria, students should know how those criteria are connected to the underlying values of the course. Students are often uncomfortable with removing grades on assignments during the semester. This transparency helps manage that discomfort.

Use assessment purposefully, not just because assessment is expected. For years, I thought that because I assigned something, I was obligated to grade it. This is not necessarily true if we think of assessment as an aid to learning, rather than something separate. I read student work because I want to be able to diagnose issues students might be experiencing with their writing practices. This means I may bring a different lens to each assignment, depending on what part (or parts) of the writer's practice are most important.

Ungrading was actually the last part of my pedagogical evolution, and it took multiple semesters to evolve into an approach (often in collaboration with students) that genuinely seemed to (mostly) work. There's no guarantee that this approach will continue to work in the future. We're looking at a moving target as conditions and contexts change. And it's not like every student finished the semester singing hosannas. Even something that mostly works will continue to not work for everyone.

As we evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches, it's important to recognize there is no evidence that traditional grading "works" (if student learning is paramount) other than it being part of the status quo. This is not to say traditional grading doesn't work, either, but rather, we should have an open and flexible process around how we evaluate student work and the kind of feedback they're provided.

To me, ungrading is really just an unpacking or unraveling of how we grade to make sure what I'm doing makes sense for what I want to achieve.

How those processes get repacked or reraveled will be unique to the specific conditions and context of the instructor, course and institution.

I spent most of my time pretty convinced that I was doing it all wrong, and I had plenty of evidence to support that belief!

But over time things begin to make more sense, connections appear, the extraneous bits I'd held on from the status quo dropped away.

I don't know that you will ever be certain that you're doing it "right," and maybe that's the point.

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The first time I graded a set of papers, I was a graduate teaching assistant in my M.F.A. program. While my title was teaching assistant, I taught my own classes and was solely responsible for the lesson planning, teaching, assessing and grading.

The first assignment my composition students tackled was a combination narrative-analysis about creativity in their lives. I felt so proud of that assignment, although I cringe now to write that summary. Despite a detailed prompt and rubric, it was unclear exactly what I wanted them to do. Yet they did their best. So many of them excelled at the narrative portion-I read stories about cheerleading and band and Thanksgiving traditions. But they fell short on the analysis of those moments, and, as a result, their grade suffered.

I hadn't yet begun collecting and returning papers electronically, so I watched as, one by one, my students looked at their graded work. Their faces fell. Some may have cried. At least one hit a desk in frustration.

I hadn't asked those students about their writing process or about what they learned from the assignment. Even without their reflections, grading their work proved more personal than I had expected. Years later, I still remember the natural voice, the lively writing that sprang from some of the pieces. Shouldn't a distinct and memorable style count for something? And how much? It felt impossible to quantify. I hope I acknowledged those important elements in my comments, even though I largely ignored them in the final grade.

Now, in my 10th year of teaching, I've learned another way to evaluate student work: ungrading. This practice removes traditional grades from a class, instead relying on regular feedback and student reflection. The goal is for students to think less about what they are earning and more about what they are learning.

In the last year, I studied this method more intensely, relying heavily on the work of Susan Blum, Jesse Stommel and others. During the spring 2022 semester, I dived in and, with the support of a teaching and learning design fellowship from my institution, implemented a system of ungrading in my creative writing survey class.

I designed this somewhat nontraditional grading policy in a pretty traditional way: students received feedback on their work but only earned a complete/incomplete for each assignment. They had opportunities for revision, reflection and self-assessment. During the final exam period, we met in individual conferences to determine their grade in the course, a conversation my students started after completing an in-depth reflection on their growth and learning over the previous weeks.

Throughout the semester, I surveyed my students, posing questions about their relationship to grades and their understanding of ungrading practices. With each survey I administered, I thought about my own responses to those questions and realized how closely intertwined I view my authority in my classroom and my grading practices. As each week of the semester passed, I saw how ungrading brought humanity-both my students' and my own-to the center of the course.

Why I Chose to Ungrade

I ultimately came to ungrading because of a very human experience: frustration. Early in the fall 2021 semester, I met with a student in one of my classes. When I asked if she had concerns about the upcoming semester, she responded, "How do you grade?" Such questioning irritates me, ignoring, as it does, all the materials-rubrics, assignment prompts, the syllabus-that clearly state the learning objectives and grading criteria. But this time, I felt not only disappointed but disheartened. I had hoped we'd talk about this student's writing goals and experiences. Or maybe she'd share ideas for her semester-long project. I knew nothing of the pressures, anxieties or past experiences fueling her focus on grades.

This spring, my creative writing students and I started each class with a daily check-in, a practice I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez's Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. I adapted the practice somewhat and began each class with a guided question, most often about the reading or topic of discussion that day (the zone where I feel most comfortable). Sometimes, however, I'd ask about my students' lives: What are you looking forward to about the upcoming break? What's one good thing that happened to you last week? As we circled the room, I'd answer, too.

During one of our final classes, I asked students to share a highlight of their semester. Some talked about their classes-mine and others. But most mentioned the joys of making new friends and getting more involved on campus. Each semester, I fall into a pattern: teaching consumes me, and I see the people in my classes as writing students first. In myriad ways, I'm reminded that in addition to academics, my students have jobs and families and relationships to tend to. It's humbling to realize that my writing class fills such a small sliver of their lives.

I found this same recognition of my students' humanity in their reflections. Before this past semester, I'd never thought to ask students outright about their learning. I 'd assumed they'd demonstrate all they'd gleaned from the course in the work they submitted. Now, in their cover letters accompanying each assignment, I read about their process, their triumphs, their struggles, their effort. In their in-depth midterm and final reflections, which I adapted from Susan Blum's materials, I saw how my students progressed through each of the course's learning objectives and their personal goals, which we set during the first weeks of class. I discovered what they learned from each writing assignment, what they enjoyed about the class, where they struggled.

While I know how exasperated I become when a student appears unengaged, I found myself softening each time someone acknowledged this on their own. I could relate to their honest admissions that, sometimes, other priorities took precedence. As I read about the work they put into the course, I empathized. After all, during a semester when I teach between 50 and 60 students, I, too, bump my own writing to the bottom of my to-do list. At the end of each semester, as my students complete the course evaluations, I exit the room and hope they at least acknowledge how hard I've worked.

Leaning Into Subjectivity

Despite the experience I now bring to my teaching, I embarked on my ungrading experiment feeling slightly unsteady. By removing grades, would I actually increase the stress of my grade-conscious students? Would they view the course as a free-for-all with a guaranteed A? Was I-an untenured, full-time lecturer-putting my job in jeopardy by trying something new? I felt fortunate to have the support of my institution-and not just collegial enthusiasm from co-workers, which I did receive, but a formal fellowship and course release that provided the time and resources to pursue this new practice.

Luckily, my students were onboard, too. At the start of the semester, I shared my relationship with grades-as a student and a teacher. Together, we read some of Stommel's discussions on ungrading. Even the more skeptical, uncertain students seemed curious about how it would go.

I practiced ungrading in only one of my classes this spring and couldn't help but compare the experience to my traditionally graded courses. In those classes, I evaluate assignments with a structured rubric, awarding a final percentage and corresponding letter grade each time. Those grades-89, 77, 97- seemed so arbitrary now, and I thought back to my first full-time teaching job, when I served on a committee tasked with crafting a universal rubric. As we outlined the criteria for each grade, we found ourselves stalled. "How do we describe a B?" we wondered.

"It's just, it's fine. It's a B," one committee member said, shrugging.

Forget quantifying the criteria. A group of writing instructors couldn't even articulate it.

At the 2021 Association of Writers & Writing Programs virtual conference and book fair, I watched a session about responding to creative writing. One of the panelists acknowledged her bias-she's drawn to writing that she finds compelling and to writing styles similar to her own. What a huge relief to hear this dirty little secret spoken aloud: sometimes, grading writing is subjective.

Ungrading allowed me to lean into this subjectivity. This was perhaps the most humanizing element of the practice. I became a reader of my students' work-not the reader. Free from fears that I would be accused of only appreciating work I agreed with or to which I could relate, and free from the pressure to appear an infallible authority, I could respond more honestly. In the margins, I posed questions and noted emotional responses: where I felt heartbroken, where I was confused or surprised, where I laughed.

Often in my professional life, I remember advice from my internship supervisor when I was a college junior working at a local news station. One of the interns' responsibilities included following up on promising tips. Because we interned in the investigative reporting unit, we often called people who found themselves in vulnerable situations: a hack veterinarian had hurt their pet; a scammer had stolen their savings; in some painful and humiliating way, they'd been duped.

"Remember, you're a person first," my supervisor advised from his corner desk each time one of us picked up the phone, our fingers poised to dial.

When I worked as a news reporter just out of college, this advice served me well. But I wasn't convinced it was great guidance once I entered the classroom. In my first teaching gig in graduate school, I was in my 20s, barely older than the students assigned to my class. My petite, 5'2" frame didn't carry a strong physical presence, and I'd been warned-along with the other women in my cohort-that our gender would require that we work harder to establish authority.

With those factors in mind, I vowed that my students would see me as a teacher first, and my approach to the job reflected this. I implemented my own dress code-no jeans. My syllabi included uncompromising policies about attendance, late work and class participation. I left copious comments on student essays, responding to the writer's ideas yet also defending the ultimate grade I'd award. In my efforts to earn respect from my students, my "teacher-first" methods morphed into a "teacher-only" mentality.

I'd assumed so many of those stringent early policies made a strong statement about my authority in the classroom. "Take writing seriously. Take this class seriously," they implored.

But in a different way, they also emphasized the person behind the policies. "I'm trying to be a good teacher," they confided. "Please give me a chance. Please take me seriously."

In her preface to her 2020 collection, Ungrading, Blum writes about how the COVID-19 pandemic caused faculty members and institutions to review their grading practices. "The deeper question, sometimes raised and often skirted," she writes, "is of what grades mean at all."

Even before I began ungrading, the pandemic had brought much more humanity to my teaching. My students and I saw with new clarity how environment and stress levels impact learning and work habits. We also saw into each other's homes. They watched my dog periodically pop into a frame on Zoom. They know which mugs I use when I drink my morning coffee. After our return to campus, on days when my to-do list seemed overwhelming, I'd dress casually for work, and so now they have also seen me in jeans, my hair pulled into a ponytail. It only seemed natural to extend some of this humanity into my courses.

And I did: when I participated in our daily check-ins; when I offered a sample of my own writing for a mock workshop (a practice I'd read about in several creative writing texts but was always too afraid to try); when, just before my students completed the end-of-semester course evaluations, I shared my own assessment of how I'd done this semester.

If I could revisit that earlier set of essays, I would evaluate them differently. I can't repair any damage I did to that first class-whether to their GPAs, or worse, to their relationship with writing and their sense of themselves as writers. But that was a formative moment for me as a teacher, and I wonder if my current focus on grades is meant to make up for that mistake of years ago. It's only now that I feel confident enough to acknowledge it was a mistake. Stripping off the polished veneer I attempted to present at work was a relief-as was reading my students' work and composing an end note without the expectations and pressures of a rubric.

Valuing the Process

In the spirit of ungrading, I'd give myself a B for this experiment. I had planned and researched ungrading practices well; I checked in with my students often. Above all, I learned a lot.

I assumed the final average would be similar to that of other writing classes I teach, but it was slightly lower. Many of my students used this time without the pressure of grades to take risks and focus on their writing. It surprised me to learn just how often my students check their grades on Canvas, our online course management system, monitoring the fluctuations in their final average each time a new assignment posts. It's valuable for me-and my students-to realize the extent to which grades motivate.

But as I move forward, I need to revise the semester reflections and provide better guidance as students ponder and discuss their learning. When I met with each student for 15 minutes during finals, I'd already read their last reflections, and I listened while they suggested a grade and defended that suggestion. It struck me how heavily they weighed effort and engagement over any final product, and I discovered, with some surprise, that I, too, value their process and their contributions to the daily work of class just as much as-or maybe more than-any polished composition. I struggled, sometimes, to trust their own assessment of their learning, to not use ungrading as a means to worm my way into the grading process, to make sure every grade landed where I thought it should.

I found enough value in the practice that I will revise and try again-and probably revise and try again after that. There seems something deeply human in this process that's imperfect, messy, a work in progress. Yet valuable all the same.

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A faculty member reflects on why she switched to ungrading (opinion)

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The first time I graded a set of papers, I was a graduate teaching assistant in my M.F.A. program. While my title was teaching assistant, I taught my own classes and was solely responsible for the lesson planning, teaching, assessing and grading. The first assignment my composition students tackled was a combination narrative-analysis about creativity in their lives.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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When it comes to grading, less is more. So say a number of scholars who have shared their recent experiments with "ungrading" in blog posts and on other social media, sparking renewed discussions about the practice.

"My core hypothesis was that student learning would actually be improved by eliminating instructor grading from the course," Marcus Schultz-Bergin, assistant lecturer of philosophy at Cleveland State University, wrote of going gradeless this semester in a personal blog post that has since been shared on the popular philosophy site Daily Nous.

"My hope" for students, Schultz-Bergin continued, "is that the reflection they engaged in, and the discussions we had, will lead to a significant commitment in the second half of the course to really achieve what they set out for themselves so that when they tell me they earned an A they can really mean it."

Thus far, he added, the experiment in his undergraduate philosophy of law course "has had its ups and downs. There are definitely some things I will change going forward, but I do think the gradeless approach can work well in a course like this."

Experts in ungrading say it's still relatively rare in higher education, due in part to inertia with respect to pedagogical innovation, the culture of assessment and professors' anxieties about going gradeless. How will students respond? What will colleagues say? What will administrators think?

Still, ungrading is more common than one might think. And there are sound pedagogical reasons to do it, given the litany of research finding that grades play to extrinsic (not intrinsic) motivation, decrease enjoyment of learning and increase fears of failure. More than that, grades aren't necessarily a good measure of student learning. And, based on additional research, we know they're subject to rampant inflation.

"There are a surprising number of faculty questioning grades in productive ways, and experimenting with alternative modes of assessment," said Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington, and an early evangelist of ungrading. "If, as teachers, we just ask students why, when and how they learn, what we can get back is way more valuable than any standardized assessment mechanism can reveal."

Ungrading "creates space for that kind of honest reflection and dialogue," he said.

As Schultz-Bergin's post indicates, going gradeless doesn't mean that students won't end up with a final grade. Most institutions require that students receive formal marks, after all. But the process typically means that students semiregularly reflect independently, with their peers and with their professors on their learning and performance in a given a course. Those reflections -- which experts say are important to metacognition -- all help students to eventually grade themselves.

Professors who have gone gradeless say that students sometimes give themselves higher grades than they deserve. But they report that it's uncommon, and that they talk with the student about it when it does happen.

Maha Bali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, shared her experience with ungrading for the fourth time on her blog last month. An ongoing challenge is making sure that her grades aren't inflated. While most students are "honest" and give themselves grades commensurate with their effort, she said, "there are always a few who give themselves A and don't deserve it and we need to negotiate."

Elaborating on that process in an email interview, Bali said that midsemester grades are "easy to negotiate via email with specific suggestions for improvement." By the end of the semester, she said, it's harder, as one final reflection is due only a few days before grades are filed.

Even so, Bali said, "I only ever had one student argue back and forth with me demanding a numerical breakdown of their grade."

In general, Bali talks to students about grades being a combination of three things: a single standard -- which she describes as unfair because students arrive with different readiness levels, interests and strengths -- and against a curve or class norm and by growth or effort.

Bali wrote that she started talking about her ungrading approach with students early on in the semester. Unlike Schultz-Bergin, who is doing away with all numeric and letter grades all semester long, Bali gives students numeric and verbal feedback on small assignments. The numbers are "very insignificant in the large scheme of things," she wrote in her post, "but I don't want to ignore them completely, so students don't get a huge cultural shock."

Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame who hasn't given grades in several years and doesn't plan to again, is currently editing a book on ungrading. Stommel has contributed, as has Cathy Davidson, Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, whose reflection on her own ungrading experiment at Duke University, her former institution, caught much attention in 2009. ("I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade," Davidson said at the time.)

It was easier for Blum to solicit chapters from those in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences, technology, engineering and math, as the former broad fields more obviously lend themselves to ungrading (in Schultz-Bergin's case, for example, a philosopher is doing what is arguably a philosophical exercise). But Blum's book includes contributions from those in STEM and she believes that ungrading lends itself to any environment.

"It certainly fits well with writing, where revision is one of the primary techniques people use and all of the feedback tends to be formative, not summative -- writing and rhetoric people have done a lot of work on this," she said. "And I know there are people who are working in, let's say, a science course with a common syllabus [across sections], and that would be an obstacle."

But, in general, Blum said, in any context or discipline, the process is "so much more information than a simple grade could ever be."
Reflections Across Classrooms
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, a chemistry instructor at Central New Mexico Community College, has written about her current ungrading effort in her organic chemistry class. Like many other professors who forgo grading students, Sorensen-Unruh offered students a sense of how they should assess themselves and their learning in her syllabus. Most ungrading processes are highly structured. And in Sorensen-Unruh's case, she wanted to make sure that her classes would be counted as prerequisites for students continuing their studies.

So far, she said last week, things are going well. Students are sometimes "thrown off" by being told to lead their own assessment processes, she said, since they're not used to it. But they "seem to realize that the agency I'm trying to encourage them to use regarding their grades is an opportunity to think about their assessment differently."

As for teaching chemistry in particular, Sorensen-Unruh said she was "required to be a bit more creative when integrating this strategy." Her classroom already centers on active learning, she said, so making time to address individual student concerns in class isn't an issue. But her class is small -- 28 students. Doing this in class of 300 would be impossible without help, she said.

In STEM, she added, "I think ungrading requires a willingness to treat our classrooms as an experimental space where things might not go completely according to plan." So mentoring, especially for newer professors, would be ideal.

Sara Goldrick-Rab, professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, has previously gone gradeless in a graduate seminar. But she said that she's currently ungrading with undergraduates because her research demonstrates that "a culture of caring matters" to student success, "and it's time to apply my research to my teaching."

In her current general education course on caring about college, Goldrick-Rab has 70 students and three teaching assistants. The TAs had to learn the process and the class was "frankly shocked I wasn't grading. It took them awhile to trust it."

Then, she said, students "started to come to me, and write to me in self-reflections, things like 'I am so glad I can finally focus on learning rather than wondering if I'm hitting some specific mark. This is what I had hoped college would be.' Others have said it's 'the first time I felt like a professor really cared about her class.'"

Students still get anxiety surrounding tests, which are scored but not graded, Goldrick-Rab said. "Some can't quite let go of the idea that there will eventually be a final grade. And there will be -- I have to give one -- but it will be based on their review of their performance across the term, and unless we see something terribly off about their assessment we will use their recommendation."

Another key concern among professors about ungrading is attendance, though many professors report it doesn't make much of a difference, either way. Goldrick-Rab said that attendance remains a challenge, but that attendance lags as the term goes on "in every undergrad class every year."

The key difference now, she said, is that "I know more about why they aren't there. I get info from the reflections about their serious struggles to juggle the time required for heavy course loads, their work schedules, and their honest struggles to remain focused and committed when they are still sorting out why they are in college."

Goldrick-Rab, who attributed her teaching shift to Stommel, has no plans to return to grading. "This has been the best semester I've had since I started teaching in 2004," she said. "I feel more connected to and motivated by my students, and am convinced I am finally becoming an effective teacher."

Ungrading isn't for everyone, however. Ken Bauer, associate professor of computing science at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, recently tweeted that he was returning to something like traditional grading.

In a blog post Bauer wrote in response to questions about that tweet, he said he believes that he "perhaps went 'too far' in giving the freedom and putting my role as 99.9 percent 'the guide and mentor.'" Bauer said he gave his students some direct guidance and a list of topics to research" with the "intent to give them the freedom to explore."

But during the first partial grading period, "I simply asked students on the exam to write about a selection of topics in the course so far and to give themselves a numeric grade on a scale of 1-100 (our official grading system)." And they "freaked out. Well, most of them."

Bauer worked with his students after that to create a loose rubric, which he said seemed to relieve their stress. The results were great.

"But then came pushback," he said. "Some students expressed that 'Hey, you can just do pretty much "nothing" and pass the course,' or, 'We students can't be trusted, we need to be monitored and graded.'" Subsequent discussions with students ended in Bauer adopting what he described as a more traditional class structure with ongoing deadlines.

Bauer said he's still flexible with students who want to resubmit work and that it's all part of his learning process. But he's still searching for what feels "right," he said.

Schultz-Bergin said last week that he's received a good amount of feedback about his post -- most of it "positive but with a healthy and reasonable dose of skepticism." And "lots of good questions about execution."

Students have responded positively, too, he said, "but of course some more than others." A few have had issues with the "lack of assignment structure, but most have used it as an opportunity to practice important skills a lot without fear of poor grades."

Schultz-Bergin made three main changes to his course for his experiment. He offered students what he called a "buffet" of learning opportunities which they could complete at their discretion, but required only three reflection essays on their learning, progress and goals. Students also meet with him for two learning conferences, to discuss their portfolio of work and, ultimately, report their grade for the course.

"For me, this is really just a further evolution of various ways I've been working to improve the teaching and learning experience," he said. "Before, I've used alternative grade systems that aim to be responsive to similar concerns that the gradeless classroom responds to. In all these cases it helps me better help students learn and help them reflect on their own learning."

Blum said that ungrading has been part of the K-12 conversation for some time, in part because these educators tend to talk more with each other about their teaching. By contrast, college and university professors are doing ungrading -- and in similar ways -- but all tend to think they're on their own, she said.

If ungraders need better networks and professional development opportunities, Stommel also said that for ungrading and other novel assessment practices to "flourish, we need to push hard on the culture of assessment -- the reduction of students and their work to data points -- that has taken root across so much of education."

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Professors' reflections on their experiences with 'ungrading' spark renewed interest in the student-centered assessment practice

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When it comes to grading, less is more. So say a number of scholars who have shared their recent experiments with "ungrading" in blog posts and on other social media, sparking renewed discussions about the practice.

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Grading for Growth is "my other blog" - a Substack publication co-written with my GVSU colleague David Clark about all things related to alternative grading practices based on feedback loops and conversations rather than point accumulation and statistics. It's an extension of what I post here about grading (and sometimes I'll cross-post).

Once a week, David or I will be publishing research summaries and analysis, implementation ideas, interviews, and more on topics like specifications grading, standards-based grading, contract grading, and ungrading. If it has to do with grading students to help them grow as learners, we're on it.

So what are you waiting for? Click to subscribe, and posts will be delivered right to your inbox. Thanks for joining us!

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Grading for Growth is "my other blog" - a Substack publication co-written with my GVSU [http://www.gvsu.edu] colleague David Clark about all things related to alternative grading practices based on feedback loops and conversations rather than point accumulation and statistics. It's an extension of what I post here [https:

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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A professor shares the benefits and drawbacks of ungrading (opinion)

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Robert Talbert shares the results of his experiment over the past semester with this approach to assessing and reporting on student learning.

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In her latest book Linda Nilson puts forward an innovative but practical and tested approach to grading that can demonstrably raise academic standards, motivate students, tie their achievement of learning outcomes to their course grades, save faculty time and stress, and provide the reliable gauge of student learning that the public and employers are looking for.

She argues that the grading system most commonly in use now is unwieldy, imprecise and unnecessarily complex, involving too many rating levels for too many individual assignments and tests, and based on a hairsplitting point structure that obscures the underlying criteria and encourages students to challenge their grades.

This new specifications grading paradigm restructures assessments to streamline the grading process and greatly reduce grading time, empower students to choose the level of attainment they want to achieve, reduce antagonism between the evaluator and the evaluated, and increase student receptivity to meaningful feedback, thus facilitating the learning process - all while upholding rigor. In addition, specs grading increases students' motivation to do well by making expectations clear, lowering their stress and giving them agency in determining their course goals.

Among the unique characteristics of the schema, all of which simplify faculty decision making, are the elimination of partial credit, the reliance on a one-level grading rubric and the "bundling" of assignments and tests around learning outcomes. Successfully completing more challenging bundles (or modules) earns a student a higher course grade. Specs grading works equally well in small and large class settings and encourages "authentic assessment." Used consistently over time, it can restore credibility to grades by demonstrating and making transparent to all stakeholders the learning outcomes that students achieve.

This book features many examples of courses that faculty have adapted to spec grading and lays out the surprisingly simple transition process. It is intended for all members of higher education who teach, whatever the discipline and regardless of rank, as well as those who oversee, train, and advise those who teach.

Specification grading promotes the following values and outcomes. It:

1. Upholds High Academic Standards
2. Reflects Student Attainment of Skills and Knowledge
3. Motivates Students to Learn and to Excel
4. Fosters Higher-Order Cognitive Development and Creativity
5. Discourages Cheating
6. Reduces Student Stress
7. Makes Students Feel Responsible for Their Grades
8. Minimizes Conflict Between Faculty and Students
9. Saves Faculty Time and Is Simple to Administer
10. Makes Expectations Clear and Simplifies Feedback for Improvement
11. Assesses Authentically
12. Achieves High Inter-Rater Agreement

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grading and marking (students);united states.

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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grading and marking (students) - united states

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grading and marking (students);united states.

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education / teaching methods & materials / general

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education/teaching methods & materials - general

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Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time

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Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time [Nilson, Linda B., Stanny, Claudia J.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time

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For the last decade and a half, I've engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning "in real life" and learning in college. In my most recent book, "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College, I identified a number of ways that formal education has led to a lack of learning. Colleges promote credentials, obedience and the sorting of haves and have-nots, but not necessarily learning.

People kept asking me what I would do to improve things. And I said that if I could make one change, I would get rid of grades.

I'd been making some efforts in that direction, but still I fretted over how to make my pedagogy align with my theoretical understanding of how people learn. "Fretted" may be too light a term; I wondered if I could actually keep teaching if I didn't believe in the enterprise.

Last summer, as I prepared my classes, deeply immersed in the thinking that had led to the book, I decided I would go all the way and get rid of grades. Or at least, get rid of them as much as I could -- all the way to the end of the semester.

I had read many accounts of individual faculty members and whole colleges that were grade-free, but in mid-August, I discovered Starr Sackstein's book Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, which gave me some cover in case students or administrators challenged this.

My reasons for wanting to get rid of grades were numerous: I felt as if students are fixated on grades above all else. Most faculty conversations with students include some discussions of grades: What do you want? What do I have to do to get an A? How can I improve my grade? What are the criteria for grades? And the professor takes on the role of a judge.

It felt like there was no space for adventure, zest, risk -- or even for genuine learning. Everything focused on pleasing the professor.

And in my research on learning and education, I had learned a lot about grades, such as:

Grading requires uniformity. It assumes uniform input, uniform process and uniform output. I stopped believing that was a useful way to approach student learning. Students don't start out the same. They don't have the same life experiences -- or even academic experiences -- during our semester together. They don't go to the same places afterward. They have different goals.

Grades don't provide adequate information. If the purpose of grades is to convey a student's accomplishment, adequacy, excellence, compliance, effort and/or gain in learning, then they fail. Is a student who enters already knowing a lot and continues to demonstrate knowledge at a high level, but then misses an assignment because of a roommate's attempted suicide and ends up with a B-plus, the same as someone who begins knowing nothing, works really hard, follows all the rules, does quite well and ends up with a B-plus? What information is conveyed? What about someone who loves biology and excels in those classes, but who loathes history, bombs in history classes and ends up with a 3.0 GPA? Compared to someone who muddles through every class and a similar GPA, yet with no passion, excellence or highs or lows? What do we learn from the GPA? What does a course grade mean?

Grades don't truly motivate students. Experts distinguish different types of motivation: 1) intrinsic, or doing things for their own sake and 2) extrinsic, or doing things for external benefits not inherently part of the activities themselves. I would also add fear and avoidance as big motivators, or doing something to avoid negative consequences.

Grades are the quintessential form of extrinsic motivation: they reward for accomplishment. But they are also threats: if you don't comply in every way, no matter how you feel about anything, you will be dethroned. Yet the fact is, most people are motivated by interest or need, not by arbitrary mandates.

Extrinsic motivation leads to the minimax principle. If the only thing you care about is something beyond the activity itself -- an extrinsic reward such as the grade -- it is sensible to do as little as possible to procure the highest possible reward (grade), which Arie Kruglanski, Chana Stein and Aviah Riter dubbed in 1977 the "minimax strategy" in instrumental behavior. Cheating, shortcuts, cramming ... all those make sense if the only goal is points or winning.

Students treat college as a game. Games are fun, but if the goal is amassing points and winning at any price, then game is the wrong model for college -- at least if learning, not just winning, is the goal. Of course, games can also be absorbing and done for their own sake -- playing Words With Friends or Grand Theft Auto -- so those types of games are fine. Maybe the problem is when it is seen only as a survival course.

Students see the rules as arbitrary and inconsistent. Different professors have different scoring -- participation, homework, teamwork or no teams, tests, showing your work, partial credit -- all of which appear to be plucked out of thin air and make no sense, as I found in my research on plagiarism. Citation? Sharing? Page length? Number of quotes? Consult notes or closed book? Students just have to figure out in each case what the professor wants. It all seems arbitrary, and therefore unconnected with anything meaningful or real.

Students are taught to focus on schooling rather than learning. Is the goal of school, including college, primarily achievement, success, accomplishment? Is the focus on learning the actual skills people will need or want outside college? Whoever asks them, "What are you learning?" instead of "How are you doing?" Or " What'd you get? "

In fact, people are consumed with curiosity and joy when they learn new things. Sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's needed (as for a workplace that changes), but learning happens all around us all the time -- TED talks, podcasts, Nova, adult ed, learning from WikiHow, lectures at libraries, church study groups, knitting circles, work challenges.

Grades encourage a fear of risk taking. Grades seem so consequential that students believe they can't take a chance on anything unproven. In most college classes, a mistake is punished by a lower grade, which is then averaged into the other grades, even if the student completely gets it forever after that initial try. Yet mistakes are information and contribute to learning. In tasks like riding a bicycle or submitting an article for publication, feedback about shortcomings is information. This helps with improving.
Solutions
I have tried to address these problems with solutions. Some of the tactics I have used in my own classes include the following:

Decenter grading. We don't talk about the point breakdown because I don't have one in my classes anymore. We talk about what the goals are for everything we do: for reading, writing, discussion, research and projects.

Emphasize the entire portfolio. A semester is a nice, long, luxurious time for a lot of activities, reflection, conversation, writing and wondering. At the end, we can assess the entire experience, rather than students worrying about how an early misstep is going to mean lack of success.

Have students develop an individual plan. I developed this myself on the model of an individualized education program (usually used in special education). I have since discovered two similar models: Universal Design for Learning and Individual Development Plan. The idea is to have students figure out how a class fits with their own lives, course of study and interests. Even if it is required, I want them to articulate some value for themselves. I try to meet with every student early in the semester and again midway through to talk about how prepared they are, what they are eager to learn or do, and what causes apprehension or even dread.

Encourage self-evaluation. If the genuine goal of college is to prepare students for life, then it's vital that they develop their own standards. So rather than ask students to submit work with the hope that I'll think it's excellent, I encourage them to develop honest standards and self-scrutiny. Every assignment is accompanied by students' written self-assessment of their work. What were they trying to get out of the assignment? What did they learn? What was successful? What was less successful? Why? What might they do differently? What would they like help with? That should serve them better in life than hoping that mediocrity will be seen as fabulous. Sometimes things aren't perfect -- and that's OK. But it is useful for them to understand and even articulate the reasons. (I didn't give myself enough time. I started too late. I didn't understand this. I couldn't really get into this subject.) Throughout our lives beyond college, we won't excel at and plunge enthusiastically into every single thing we do all day.

Conduct portfolio conferences. I begin the semester with a discussion with each student about their own individual plan. I try to meet with everyone at the middle of the semester and the end of it in a portfolio conference. I give them a document to complete prior to our meeting and instruct them to look back through all their work. The goal is to show them their learning, by comparing their early and later understanding, and to help them feel pride at their body of work. It also forces them to review the material, which research shows fosters retention. Students suggest their grade, which I can accept or not. No, not every student suggests an A.

Outcomes
I enjoyed my relationship with my students; I loved the atmosphere of the classroom; I believe that the encouragement of learning and even risk taking in the service of growth have been successful.

Students reflected that it allowed them to relax and focus on learning, perhaps for the first time. One student wrote in a reflection on one of my classes that used ungrading, "I honestly enjoyed writing for me, instead of necessarily for a professor or an outside source. I felt I had more freedom to express what I wanted to say, and I feel like I wasn't focused too much on making claims that could get me points."

I am confident that at least some of the students were sincere in generating their own adventure in learning.
Comments to Skeptics
I know this seems idealistic and, for many classes and many professors, impossible. Here are my thoughts on that:

Going gradeless can be done in a class of any size and of any type, though students may find it alarming and unfamiliar. Some faculty use something called "contract grading," which still uses a traditional scale but puts some of the control in students' hands.

You can provide opportunities for students to make choices, which allows them to find at least a tiny bit of intrinsic motivation even in the most conventional of courses.

Some assignments -- maybe small ones -- can still be risk-free and contribute to intrinsic motivation, by being utterly fascinating, completely useful or fun.

You can always offer low-stakes exercises that are perceived as enjoyable and not trivial, in any course.

And even if your supervisors are skeptical, as long as the process serves the central goal of contributing to student learning, they shouldn't object.

Here is one piece of evidence from a student who really trusted the process and responded honestly to the question "What assignment(s) pushed you to learn the most?" "While it ended up being one of my weaker pieces, I felt that my [project] was my most personally informative piece. I read so many different sources on the [topic] and really took a deep dive to explore the reasons why the [people do what] they do."

Isn't that a beautiful, honest analysis of learning? I wanted students to believe that this education is for them, not for me.

I can never go back!

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The significant learning benefits of getting rid of grades (essay)

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For the last decade and a half, I've engaged in anthropological research on higher education, identifying several challenges and mismatches between what we know about learning "in real life" and learning in college. In my most recent book, "I Love Learning; I Hate School": An Anthropology of College , I identified a number of ways that formal education has led to a lack of learning.

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Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better

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Instead of Education is Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion call to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds. In this breakthrough work Holt lays out the foundation for un-schooling as the vital path to self-directed learning an...

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Ungrading: Alternatives to Traditional Grading

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Ungrading: Alternatives to Traditional Grading

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Ungrading: Alternatives to Traditional Grading

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Ungrading: A Review, A Retrospective, A Messy Path Ahead

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Ungrading: A Review, A Retrospective, A Messy Path Ahead

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Not giving grades doesn't feel like a radical pedagogy for me. I've been not giving grades for 17 years. The first time I taught as instructor of record in Spring 2001, I didn't give grades. I've taught ~100 sections of courses at a half-dozen institutions in a half-dozen disciplines. I've taught traditional students, non-traditional students, for-credit, non-credit, online, in classrooms, as a tenure-track professor, as an adjunct, at SLACs, a Community College, and R1s. I was once a "Road Warrior" adjunct teaching up to nine classes per term at four institutions. I had ~300 students per semester. I didn't put grades on student work. I have only put grades on student work when I was co-teaching with someone who did. I have not always felt I could be fully transparent about my approach to grading at the institutions where I've worked.

My ideas about grades and assessment have evolved over the years, as I've become a better, more confident teacher. But I am even more certain of what I instinctively knew when I taught that first class in 2001: grades are the biggest and most insidious obstacle to education. And they're a thorn in the side of Critical Pedagogy. John Holt writes in Instead of Education, "[Competitive schooling, grades, credentials] seem to me the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions." Agency, dialogue, self-actualization, and social justice are not possible in a hierarchical system that pits teachers against students and encourages competition by ranking students against one another. Grades (and institutional rankings) are currency for a capitalist system that reduces teaching and learning to a mere transaction. Grading is a massive co-ordinated effort to take humans out of the educational process.

I have previously condensed my own pedagogy into these four words: "Start by trusting students."

Start by trusting students. #4wordpedagogy
- Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) April 30, 2016

My approach to assessment arises from this. While I've experimented with many alternatives to traditional assessment, I have primarily relied on self-assessment. I turn in final grades at the end of the term, but those grades usually match the grades students have given themselves. (I do tell students 'I reserve the right to change grades,' but this is rare and I mostly have to raise them, because students are often their own harshest critics.)

The saddest and most ironic practice in schools is how hard we try to measure how students are doing and how rarely we ever ask them.
- Amy Fast, Ed.D (@fastcranny) March 29, 2016

Amy Fast writes, "the saddest and most ironic practice in schools is how hard we try to measure how students are doing and how rarely we ever ask them." We have created increasingly elaborate methods of assessment, all while failing to recognize that the students themselves are the best (and always resident) experts in their own learning. Certainly, metacognition, and the ability to self-assess, must be developed, but I see it as one of the most important skills we can teach in any educational environment.

The statement about assessment included in my syllabi:

This course will focus on qualitative not quantitative assessment, something we'll discuss during the class, both with reference to your own work and the works we're studying. While you will get a final grade at the end of the term, I will not be grading individual assignments, but rather asking questions and making comments that engage your work rather than simply evaluate it. You will also be reflecting carefully on your own work and the work of your peers. The intention here is to help you focus on working in a more organic way, as opposed to working as you think you're expected to. If this process causes more anxiety than it alleviates, see me at any point to confer about your progress in the course to date. If you are worried about your grade, your best strategy should be to join the discussions, do the reading, and complete the assignments. You should consider this course a "busy-work-free zone." If an assignment does not feel productive, we can find ways to modify, remix, or repurpose the instructions.

It's important to note that a gradeless class does not mean grades don't influence the work that happens there. Grades have been naturalized in EDU to the point that new teachers don't feel they can safely explore alternative approaches to assessment. In my experience, new teachers are rarely told they have to grade, but grading is internalized as an imperative nonetheless. And grades have been naturalized to the point that student expectations and anxiety can still swirl around them even when they're taken off the table.

Google Trends shows increased search volume around the term "grades" over the last 14 years. It also shows an increasingly furious pattern of search-behavior centered each year around the months of May and December, like a heartbeat beginning to race. And this has been my anecdotal experience as well, as I've watched the increasing anxiety around grades become more and more palpable.

I am also finding myself drowned in buzzwords, a few of which I'll address briefly here.

Learning Outcomes: More and more, we are required to map our assignments, assessments, and curricula to learning outcomes. But I find it strange that teachers and institutions would pre-determine outcomes before students even arrive upon the scene. I have argued, instead, for emergent outcomes, ones that are co-created by teachers and students and revised on the fly. Setting trajectories rather than mapping in advance the possible shapes for learning.

Grade Inflation: The problem, I'd say, is grades not inflation. And when institutions try to "control" grade inflation, the results are disturbing, and perhaps also unsurprising. Require teachers to give more B and C grades and they give more B and C grades disproportionately to black students. In education, I think we should be creating opportunities, not limiting possibilities for success. The best feedback I've ever gotten from a student, and something I've since tried to reflect more explicitly in my pedagogy: "Jesse's class was one of the hardest I've taken in my life; It was an easy 'A'" Having high expectations and giving mostly good grades are not incompatible.

Grade-grubbing: If this phrase is still in your vocabulary, do a quick google search for the words "grub" and "grubber," and I suspect you'll stop attributing these words to students. As educators, we have helped build (or are complicit in) a system that creates a great deal of pressure around grades. We shouldn't blame (or worse, degrade) students for the failures of that system.

Objectivity: In brief, I do not think objectivity is a virtue if dialogue is what we're after in education. Human interaction is incredibly complex. Authentic feedback (and evaluation) means honoring subjectivity and requires that we show up as our full selves, both teachers and learners, to the work of education. Grades can't be "normed" if we recognize the complexity of learners and learning contexts. Bias can't be accounted for unless we acknowledge it.

Rubrics: Most rubrics I've seen are overly mechanistic and attempt to create objectivity and efficiency in evaluation by crashing upon the rocks of bureaucracy. Learning and human interaction is sufficiently high resolution that a 3x3 grid, or a 5x5 grid, will always be weirdly patronizing. And when they're given in advance to students, rubrics are likely to close down possibility by encouraging students to work toward an overly prescribed notion of "excellence."

Participation Grades: Most grading scales offer way too many demarcations to communicate clearly and way too few demarcations to reflect reality. Try grading on a traditional scale the last conversation you had with your significant other or the progress your toddler's made toward talking: [78/100] [59%] [A-/B+] [✔️/✔️+] [middle first] [18/20]. All feel arbitrary, even absurd, and none communicate much of value. And how can teachers be on even footing with students if teachers grade student participation. Laura Gibbs writes in "(Un)Grading: It Can Be Done in College," "Because I put myself outside of the grading loop, I can focus all my efforts on feedback and encouragement - on teaching, not grading." Which leads me to wonder whether "graded participation" is actually an oxymoron. We can't participate authentically, can't dialogue, without first disrupting the power dynamics of grading.

Grades as Motivators: Alfie Kohn writes in "The Trouble with Rubrics," "Research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself." Grades do motivate, but they don't motivate the kinds of peak experiences that can happen in a learning environment. Something like "have an epiphany, communicate an original thought, sit uncomfortably with your not knowing, or build something that's never been built before" can't be motivated by a grade.

Grading on a Curve: In brief, it pits students against each other, discourages collaboration, and privileges the students who our educational system has already privileged. Cathy N. Davidson writes, "There is an extreme mismatch between what we value and how we count."

Mastery: I've long argued education should be about encouraging and rewarding not knowing more than knowing. When I give presentatiatons on grading and assessment, I often get some variation of the question: "How would you want your doctor to have been assessed?" My cheeky first answer is that I want the system to assure my doctor has read all the books of Jane Austen, because critical thinking is what will help them save my life when they encounter a situation they've never encountered before. I go on to say that I would want a mixture of things assessed and a mixture of kinds of assessment, because the work of being a doctor (or engineer, sociologist, teacher, etc.) is sufficiently complex that any one system of measurement or indicator of supposed mastery will necessarily fail.

There are lots of alternatives to traditional assessment and ways to approach ungrading, which I'll explore further in a future post. In some ways, I am withholding the mechanics of ungrading deliberately here, because I agree with Alfie Kohn who writes, "When the how's of assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why's back into the shadows." Grades are not something we should have ever allowed to be naturalized. Assessment should be, by its nature, an open question.

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Not giving grades doesn't feel like a radical pedagogy for me. I've been not giving grades for 17 years. The first time I taught as instructor of record in Spring 2001, I didn't give grades. I've taught ~100 sections of courses at a half-dozen institutions in a half-dozen disciplines.

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Grades are Dehumanizing; Ungrading is No Simple Solution

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Grades are Dehumanizing; Ungrading is No Simple Solution

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In June, I will be leading a virtual workshop on ungrading through the Big Questions Institute. You can register now for free and paid versions. And, for more on ungrading, I've collected much of my open-access writing on the subject in this Twitter thread.
There is copious evidence that grades are not a good measure of learning, that they inhibit intrinsic motivation, and that they create a competitive environment between students and hostile relationships between students and teachers. We can't entirely remove grades quite yet, because they are hard-coded into so many of our educational systems, but teachers can (and should) raise our collective eyebrows at grades. And we should do this work together with students.

I haven't put a grade on a single piece of student work in over 20 years. For the first ten years that I taught, I'd just say, "I don't grade," but that wasn't exactly true. While the students I work with self-evaluate, analyzing their own learning in dialogue with me, I still turn in grades at the end of a term - once bubbling in circles on a Scantron sheet, now filling out a series of increasingly (and needlessly) complicated online forms. From the start, that final moment of crude measurement felt out of sync with the rest of my teaching. It still does.

Why has so much of our educational system privileged that final moment of measurement, which reduces students to mere rows in a spreadsheet?

I'm a bit unsettled by the word "ungrading," even as I've helped frame the term, because it feels like a Zeitgeist, a fleeting moment in time in which the thinking about grades is shifting, away from crude quantification and toward an equally simplified notion that grades can just as easily disappear into the ether from which they came. However, grades have a history, and I'd argue they're a "technology."

There is nothing ideologically neutral about grades, and there is nothing ideologically neutral about the idea that we can neat and tidily do away with grades. We can't simply take away grades without re-examining all of our pedagogical approaches, and this work looks different for each teacher, in each context, and with each group of students.

Most students were born into a system of crude quantification. I don't say "born into" flippantly. I have a 4-year-old, and I've watched her growth quantified in discrete ways since the day she was born. She's adopted, Black, and has two gay dads, so her "development" has always been a subject of peculiar discussion. She's had some wonderful doctors, who see and engage her as the full (and rowdy) human that she is, but she is also regularly reduced to a data point, plotted upon a chart pre-determined before she came into the world. This has little to do with the full and lovely human being my daughter actually is in the world.

In a Time magazine article, "All Teachers Should Be Trained to Overcome Their Hidden Biases," Soraya Chemaly collects and reflects upon data about how girls (and girls of color, in particular) encounter their education. In that piece, she cites a study showing black girls are twelve times more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended. While Black children make up less than 20% of preschoolers, they make up more than half of out-of-school suspensions. This is the world "ungrading" lives within, and it's not a world where easy answers, or universalized best practices, are useful - or possible. A student in the class we're "ungrading" might be the very same student who was suspended from preschool because she was a girl of color. Every bit of who are students have been, and the material circumstances they face, influences how they do (and can) engage. This is why I've written with Sara Goldrick-Rab that we need to "teach the students we have, not the students we wish we had."

Most of our assessment mechanisms in higher education don't assess what our institutions say they value most. Glancing at even just a few college and university mission statements, I see none of the following:

We pit students and teachers against one another

We rank students in fiercely competitive ways.

We measure output with little concern for the learning process.

We demean student work by crudely quantifying it.

We start from a place of deep suspicion of students.

We assess in ways that reinforce bias against marginalized students.

And, yet, these are what far too many of our systems and technologies appear to valorize.

I've written previously about the ways our technologies have attempted to "manage" the complexity of grades (and assessment). So much of edtech - learning management systems, remote proctoring, plagiarism detection software - does little more than surveil students, reducing them to codified bits, readable by an algorithm, or able to be parsed at a glance in a column of 75 other students. So few of these digital tools seem to deeply understand the work of teaching, which is necessarily about humans working together with other humans. Spreadsheets do little to help this work; they're a distraction at best, an abuse at worst.

When our work moves online, as it has done for so many of our institutions over the last year, inequities and biases are exacerbated. We dehumanize students when we put them into spreadsheet rows or behind several clicks inside of a learning management system. The relationship between students and teachers suffers when our systems and policies reinforce hierarchies and encode biases.

Grades are anathema to the presumption of the humanity of students, support for their basic needs, and engaging them as full participants in their own education. Invigilated exams won't ensure integrity. Plagiarism detection tech won't unseat online paper mills. Incessant surveillance won't help us listen better for the voices of students asking for help. All of our efforts would be better served by three simple words, "I trust you."

This piece first appeared in Times Higher Education.

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Grades are Dehumanizing; Ungrading is No Simple Solution

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In June, I will be leading a virtual workshop on ungrading through the Big Questions Institute. You can register now for free and paid versions. And, for more on ungrading, I've collected much of my open-access writing on the subject in this Twitter thread.

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I don’t grade student work, and I haven’t for 20 years. This practice continues to feel like an act of personal, professional, and political resistance.

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5 Lessons for Teachers from the Ungrading Movement

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5 Lessons for Teachers from the Ungrading Movement

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Needless to say, it required some convincing.

Fortunately, I had researched, planned and prepared enough that he was willing to give me a shot. So, for the next year, I taught my freshman English classes without grading a single assignment.

Fast forward to June, and it was the most insightful and transformative -but also challenging - year of my career.

I know why you're scared to give up grades in the classroom

When teachers hear about the idea of not grading students, there are several common, valid objections.

"My district requires us to give grades on the report card."

For the sake of transparency, I had to do this, too. I couldn't get around putting grades on my students' transcripts.

However, as I'll explain, these grades were only for each quarter and the end of the year. Additionally, the students decided what grade they deserved.

If you're thinking that you should stop reading right now because you could never give up grades, then you're actually the person I want to talk to: I'll give strategies a little later on about what you can still take away from my experience, even if you absolutely can't or don't want to give up grading.

"How will the students know how they're doing?"

Without grades, you'll find ways to show and tell students directly how they're doing instead of obscuring that information with a number or letter.

Compare this: "you supported your argument with relevant, well-explained evidence.

To this: "B+"

And for those who say, "why not both?" I'd respond, which of those two pieces of information are students going to focus on? The grade? Or the feedback? We both know the answer.

In fact, an often-cited study showed that when students receive both grades and feedback, "grades were shown to decrease the effect of detailed feedback."

Additionally, in a no-grades classroom, students develop the skills of autonomy and reflection as they learn to evaluate their own progress compared to expectations and exemplar work.

"Won't the parents give me a hard time?"

Like you, I've read the parent emails and lived to tell the tale! In other words, I understand this is a valid concern.

However, when I shared my policies and reasoning behind my no-grades classroom during back to school night, parents were supportive, and some were even excited for the new approach.

Additionally, I developed correspondences with several parents throughout the year specifically because they saw qualitative feedback about their child's progress, and reached out to discuss it more.

While you may have other concerns, those are the three common ones I've encountered. With those out of the way, let's take a look at how my no-grades classroom worked. Then, I'll share the five lessons every teacher can learn, whether or not you ever want to teach without grades.

Teaching without grades: how does it actually work?

Here's the high-level overview of the system:

The class relied on feedback and reflection, instead of grades, to evaluate progress

Clearly defined learning goals and exemplar work were essential for students and the teacher to stay on track

Without grades, students had more freedom in how they showed growth using topics or media of their choice

Each quarter, students built a small portfolio and made their case for their final grade in a conference with the teacher

As I mentioned, students received grades for each marking period and at the end of the year. However, no essay, homework, reading questions, quiz, etc. received a number or letter on it.

Instead, we used feedback and reflection to measure progress and evaluate students' work. This process can work in any class with clearly defined content and skills goals.

Each quarter, students had to know which skills and content they were expected to learn and what it would look like if they were succeeding (this often involved the use of exemplar work). Preparing for this led me to get comfortable with my state's standards for English language arts. At the beginning of each quarter, we reviewed this information and students recorded the expectations in the form of "I can..." statements .

From there, we did multiple assignments and practice activities related to the reading, writing, speaking and language expectations for the quarter. Additionally, we set independent reading goals after calculating students' reading speeds , with a method from teacher/author Penny Kittle.
The great part about this process was that after this information was laid out, the students and I had lots of freedom for how to achieve these goals.
If students wanted to demonstrate growth in informational writing by composing a guide to a favorite hobby instead of following the essay prompts I had suggested, they could do it. Additionally, If students wanted to redo an assignment, they could do it.

Throughout a typical week, students would show me finished or in-progress writing pieces, reading responses, annotations, recordings of themselves speaking, etc. I recorded feedback about their work in the gradebook. The students used this feedback to revise their work and parents used this to see how their child was progressing.

End of quarter portfolios and conferences

The best part came at the end of each quarter, where we followed this process:

About two weeks before the end of each marking period, the class reviewed the expectations for the quarter and the related assignments.

Then, students finalized and gathered their best work to show how they had met those expectations and organized them into a simple digital portfolio on Google Drive.

Next, students completed a written reflection that explained the extent to which they met the expectations of the quarter.

Lastly, each student had a short conference with me, where they presented what they believed their grade for the marking period should be and why.

Students also created a larger, cumulative portfolio, sometimes called an "exit portfolio," at the end of the year.

In about 90% of cases, the students' choice of grade remained. Interestingly, some students were too self-critical and made their grade clearly too low. The rarest case was the student who lacked self-awareness and overtly gave themselves an A after completing little work or making little progress. That didn't happen as often as you might think.

No, it wasn't perfect: the challenges of going gradeless

Don't get me wrong, there were hurdles throughout this process. Some were resolved on their own or after a little effort, and others lasted all year. These were the major challenges:

I had to rely on intrinsic motivation much more. This is part of the reason why student choice in reading and writing was an essential aspect of the class. Without the intermediate grade to motivate students, choice became a motivator.

Allowing students to re-do work caused confusion with parents and guidance counselors. Although I wanted students to re-do their work throughout the year, as to truly make the focus on improvement, this created some extra work or confusion on the part of parents and counselors.

Some students put off completion of their work until the end of the marking period. They then recognized that this was not a good routine for them to follow. Because they missed out on the chance for me, and their peers to provide them with feedback and help them progress.

Not for you? You can still learn from teaching without grades

These are the five lessons that I gained from this year that any teacher can apply to their teaching, whether or not they ever decide to use a system of teaching without formal grades.

1) Teach students to reflect in a way that leads to growth.

As I mentioned, at the end of each marking period, students had to reflect on expectations and argue how they did or did not meet them. This was a specific, focused type of reflection that all classes can introduce at some point.

Often, teachers ask students to broadly reflect on how they did on a specific project, assignment, or time period without tying that reflection back to expectations, standards or exemplar work.

When the reflection process becomes more clear and focused, reflections become a way of students giving themselves actionable feedback, which is a truly powerful lever for learning.

Additionally, when you understand what it takes for students to reflect in a critical way on their own work, it will sharpen your ability to give students meaningful feedback.

2) Help students see what they're supposed to be learning.

Whether you're teaching with grades or not, the value of planning and articulating what students should be able to do and know is priceless. This then becomes the foundation of encouraging deeper reflection and more focused feedback.

This process can even happen within a more choice-based or student-driven classroom, such as one based around project-based learning or problem-based learning . In that situation, students can still be expected to articulate the questions they are pursuing or the problems they are solving. Prioritization is a real-world skill applicable to any classroom.

3) Use systems, not more effort, to make teaching sustainable.

If I had simply relied on collecting students physical papers, giving them feedback, then having them do a second draft, etc., this year would have been unsustainable. Instead, I used a few daily or weekly systems basis to make the feedback process easier.
Feedback system: Learn more about the single-point rubric at the Cult of Pedagogy. Jennifer Gonzalez's "single-point rubric." Feedback system: the Daily Record
There were three great benefits of using this as the one rubric for assessing student work:

Time: By using one rubric over and over, it saved me time in creating the rubric and explaining it to students.

Reflection: The double benefit here is that the rubric also serves as a place for the students to reflect on their work.

Creativity: Because the "exceeds expectations" section of the rubric is blank, it opened up possibilities for creative ways students could exceed expectations on their work.

Feedback system: Powerful Digital Tools
Another feedback system I used was the Daily Record. This was a roster students filled out to share their plans for the day. I eventually modified this process so that it also included a specific goal that students were trying to meet during that class period.
Legendary English Teacher Jim Burke first gave me the idea of using the iPhone Voice Memo app to give students feedback with this Tweet almost 9 years ago.
This allowed me to focus on the students who might need more urgent help on that day. It also acted as an accountability measure. The act of writing down their goal for the day and seeing me check in on them at the end of class a few times urged some students to stay more focused.

Last was the use of digital tools to give more robust, actionable feedback in a faster and more enjoyable way. At first, I used the Voice Memo app on my iPhone to record audio feedback to students, even if I was on hall duty and away from the computer.

I used tools like Kaizena and Formative to give feedback on student writing and reading assignments, which saved me time, but also made the process more enjoyable. Now, a tool like Spaces allows teachers to have students gather their work in a digital portfolio and give real-time feedback on the work by commenting and messaging in the app .

4) Clearly state (even just for yourself) your teaching philosophy.

This process taught me about the value of having convictions about my teaching.

It is easy to float through the days, semesters and years of teaching, simply relying on momentum. But for this no-grades experiment, I had to be keenly aware of what I was doing and why I was doing it.

First, this was because I didn't have the crutches like a "gotcha" quiz or other ways to penalize students with bad grades. Additionally, I had to articulate my plans to colleagues, administrators, or parents I worked with that year. This required me to go to academic literature and reach out to other teachers who had taught in a similar way.

This brings me to my last point...

5) Find a community of educators to support your growth.

When teachers try something new, it can feel isolating. At times, new approaches are met with mixed messages by others in education.

Fortunately, during my no-grades journey, I discovered the Teachers Throwing Out Grades Group . This was an incredible resource for me throughout the year. There were also specific educators, including Starr Sackstein , Joy Kirr , and Mark Barnes , amongst others, who shared their knowledge, experiences, and time to help me get through the process.

Regardless of where you are in your teaching career, you can find an online community of educators where you can ask questions, get resources, or find help.

Gradually, education is breaking away from the rigid vision of grades, bells, and other inflexible relics of the past.

I encourage teachers to examine the way you assess your students and consider how you can explore ways to put feedback ahead of grades, delay grades, or use a digital portfolio system like Spaces to emphasize learning over grades.

If you're in a place where that's not possible, then I hope that you can embrace the five lessons I've shared as ways to make learning more of a focus in your instruction, and importantly, to make teaching more sustainable and even fun.

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5 Lessons for Teachers from the Ungrading Movement - Spaces

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Needless to say, it required some convincing. Fortunately, I had researched, planned and prepared enough that he was willing to give me a shot. So, for the next year, I taught my freshman English classes without grading a single assignment. Fast forward to June, and it was the most insightful and transformative -but also challenging - year of my career.