Tip: Thinking About Ungrading

If we put our energies into showing students that what we ask them to do is valuable outside of the course, we wouldn’t have to put so much energy into point-ivizing everything.

Before getting into this week’s topic, I have to share a brief disclaimer - I have never implemented ungrading as a whole-course grading method. I’m intrigued; I find many aspects very persuasive, and I’ll share some of them here, but I haven’t ungraded a whole class. Since I almost always write about topics with which I have at least some - and often quite a bit of - personal experience, I thought a disclaimer would be important.

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Last week I asked readers to think about how they articulate a philosophy of grading, which sparked some interesting debate in various corners.

There are tons of excellent resources out there (list at the bottom) for learning more about what ungrading is and how to do it. I don’t wish to replicate any of these great sources; instead, I want to explore two fundamental reasons why you might want to change your grading philosophy.

Image by Manfred Steger from Pixabay

- Grades Inhibit Motivation-

I was particularly struck by the commenter who took the time to suggest that I read Alfie Kohn:

Read Alfie Kohn.

He resolved how to do this forty years ago.

No. Really.

There's no better way.

In a very small nutshell, Kohn advocates for the importance of intrinsic motivation in education and argues that grades and homework (among other practices) are detrimental to developing intrinsic motivation. (Kohn’s The Case Against Grades is a good starting point.) This leads to the first strong argument, in my opinion, for going gradeless: grades do not motivate students to learn; they motivate students to maximize their grade. (If they motivate students at all!)

Complaints about teachers assigning busywork on one hand and students only caring about points on the other have been a continuous theme across all the different schools where I have worked. The more strategies instructors devise to incentivize - which, let’s not forget, really means point-ivize - completing work, attending class, etc., the more work we are putting into convincing students to do things that they don’t already value. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that if we put our energies into showing students that what we ask them to do is valuable outside of the course, we wouldn’t have to put so much energy into point-ivizing everything.

Helping students see the meaning and relevance of their work is a theme that connects many of the important practices I’ve explored here, including reframing assignments to communicate expectations more clearly. Grading for Growth’s authors are exploring alternative grading in higher ed, and in a recent post they write:

if students can see the purpose of an assignment — its meaning and relevance in terms of the class — then they will indeed do the work.

I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced that this works for everyone - What about students who simply are not motivated by anything in the course? What do you do with a student who is taking your course to fulfill a requirement, and has no interest in the subject and no intention of taking any classes that build on it? - but maybe it doesn’t need to. After all, if grades motivated every student to apply themselves to learning, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

- Grades Inhibit Innovation -

In Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently), Schinske and Tanner review the history of grading, and conclude by suggesting that grading practices get in the way of teaching innovation:

The time and energy spent on grading has been often pinpointed as a key barrier to instructors becoming more innovative in their teaching. In some cases, the demands of grading require so much instructor attention, little time remains for reflection on the structure of a course or for aspirations of pedagogical improvement…One wonders how much more student learning might occur if instructors’ time spent grading was used in different ways.

In my experience, instructors do spend an awful lot of time on the process of grading - either creating things to be graded, creating ways to assign points, creating ways to justify the first two, and then dealing with the results - student complaints - if this process isn’t seen as fair. The more time we spend on assigning and negotiating grades, the less time we have for developing new activities, giving feedback, meeting with students, and other activities that might be more impactful on student learning.

Developing an Ungrading Philosophy

I posed these questions last week, and I have some tentative and sometimes half-formulated thoughts about how well ungrading might help me answer them.

• What does “failure” mean in your context? What about “passing”? Because students determine their own grades, it seems that “failing” and “passing” are even more fluid concepts than when instructor- or -institution-defined. It seems like folks who have successfully implemented ungrading do some sort of consensus-building within the class about what expectations students want to hold themselves to and what that means for how they will self-evaluate.

• What elements of performance (drafts? attendance/participation? peer evaluations?) should be included in an assignment grade? The final course grade? Again, students might be more in the driver’s seat here, with some level of guidance about what the class as a whole has decided “counts” in terms of their self-evaluation.

• What do your grades (letter grades, percentages, points, compete/incomplete) represent? Since they don’t exist, except in the final course grade report for institutional purposes, probably not much?

• What do you do about “borderline” students? From reading through various blogposts, it seems like there are fewer of these - students either make a good case for their A or B grade, or they admit that they haven’t done the work or learned enough to earn a passing grade.

• What other factors (such as institution/department policies) influence your philosophy of grading? This seems quite tricky, honestly. How do you handle comparisons to what other sections of the course you are teaching look like? Comparisons to the next course in the program sequence? What about student complaints? These are all challenging enough to negotiate when you’re doing more or less what everyone else is - I imagine they would be more problematic if you’re out on a limb doing your own thing.

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What would you need to convince you to go “gradeless”?

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I’m still reflecting on how ungrading might work for me and my students, so this newsletter is as full of questions as anything else. I would love to hear about your experiments with ungrading - please share in the comments.

For more reading…

• Excellent edited volume - Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

• Kohn’s The Case Against Grades and Jesse Stommel’s Why I Don’t Grade are two good entry points into the discussion about ungrading

• Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner’s 2014 history & lit review of ungrading

Some real-life examples

• Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh’s approach to upgrading in Organic Chemistry (blog post) and analysis here Ungrading: What is it and why should we use it?

• Ken Bauer’s explanation of introducing ungrading to students

• And more in political science, psychology, first-year writing, English and humanities

In the media

• Susan Blum - So, you want to take the grades out of teaching? A beginner’s guide to ungrading (November 2021) and The significant learning benefits of getting rid of grades (November 2017)

• Grades Can Hinder Learning. What Should Professors Use Instead? (July 2019)

• Professors' reflections on their experiences with 'ungrading' spark renewed interest in the student-centered assessment practice (April 2019)

• John Warner - If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Grading Contract Advice (January 2019),

• If you’d like to listen rather than read, here’s a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode interviewing Susan Blum about ungrading and Stommel’s 2022 keynote on ungrading and alternative assessment

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