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Thoughts on “ungrading.” Fall 2020 was the first term in which I conducted all of my courses without grades. I saw visible, inspiring student successes and I’m not going back to standard grading, but it’s worth acknowledging the problems and challenges. A thread:
I started ungrading largely b/c I found that grades at least implicitly force students to conform to (what they perceive as) my view of the material—a problem esp in gen ed courses, where a/the main task is to empower students to find their place in a field that's foreign to them
So, in addition to offering my feedback on their work, I decided to rely heavily on frequent (weekly) student self-assessments. I asked them to report on what they did, but also asked some Qs about their experiences (successes, joys, and also challenges). Two issues emerged:
1) while many students appreciated the freedom to explore and make the material their own, the work piled up for some students, and they got behind. My syllabuses had reduced workloads to accommodate, but the frequency was still a real challenge for some.
2) the work piled up for me! I wasn't able to read everyone's work with care. I had the bad luck of a heavier teaching load + pandemic. I don't know if I could do this with more than 50 students total even in a good semester. OK, but the biggest challenge with "ungrading" was...
The end of the semester, when I had to enter final ... grades. With only a handful of exceptions, I followed the grades that students self-reported in an extensive final self-assessment. As one can imagine, not every student turned in this final self-assessment, so...
for those students, entering a final grade was as close to divination (and not the cool ancient scientific kind) that I ever get. I list some narrative descriptions on the syllabus of what each grade means to *me*, but I didn't have anything to calculate, plus...
ungrading means (to me) enabling students to have some control in shaping their own goals and pathways. So, the final grade once again becomes something that is unmoored from student learning. And lastly (sorry for the long thread) ...
It's prob not a surprise to hear that I had some real affective connections to the act of grading. It's such an intimate part of my (decades-long!) training. I was struck by how embedded grades are in my identity as an "evaluator" ...
To be blunt, I would read some students grade their work as "A"-level, but disagree on a deep level, at least initially. For most of those, their explanation convinced me (really! and in often inspiring ways), but some ... didn't. In some cases I was able to request add'l info...
but in others (really only 2-3 out of 90 students), I wasn't. And I decided just to let go. It didn't feel great, I admit, but I committed to a process and I felt I couldn't pull the rug out from under the students. OK, that's it. Thanks for reading. I welcome any suggestions!
CODA while I'm here. I feel lucky that I teach mostly (but not only!) gen ed & intro-level courses, esp. in the humanities, in which content is important to be sure, but the content can be customized for indiv. student needs and still remain within the purview of the course
I actually felt much worse about ungrading in a graduate course (where I tried it out a year earlier). Grades matter less in grad courses, yes, but I as an instructor felt much more responsible for students' "disciplinary" training (in multiple senses of the word)
