Final Conferences in an Ungraded Course
Students assess themselves—and our grading system
This post is part of an ongoing series of reflections completed during my Spring 2023 writing course. While the post is being published in September of 2023, it was originally written on May 12, 2023.
Well, we made it. This week, I had 20-minute meetings with each of my students to reflect on their learning, discuss their final portfolios and self-assessments, and confirm their final grade. All in all, I think they went well. In today’s post, I’ll discuss both the self-assessments/conferences that students completed and pieces of student feedback about ungrading I’ve received in the past couple of weeks.
Students Assess Themselves
The final grade conferences were subtly different from the midsemester grade conferences in ways both good and bad. About half of them, unlike the midsemester conferences, were joyful, celebratory even. Some students seemed to get a lot of pride out of looking back on their work over the course of the semester and documenting the ways that they had improved and the things they had learned. Seeing their improvement, and having it validated, also seemed to make students more receptive to feedback about areas for future development.
While almost every student proposed a grade that was very close to the grade I would have proposed for them, I did find that some were slightly less honest about their work here in the final week than they were at the midterm. One or two admitted to approaching the activity like they were haggling at an antique store, proposing a grade that was somewhat higher than what they thought they had realistically achieved in the hopes that I would go for it anyway. But in the end, everyone seemed satisfied with where they ended up.
The results of the self-assessment were mixed. Some students produced final reflections that were quite sophisticated, and some struggled or completed their work in a rush. I’ll write more about this next week, but I think I’ll rely less heavily on self-assessments if I continue to teach first-year students exclusively. This is in part because I had the sense that many of them, as early college students, just didn’t yet have the skills and knowledge yet to do this activity very successfully.
I’m also thinking of relying less heavily on self-assessment because despite my best efforts, some students still struggled to understand what I was really asking them to do. As at midterm, many wanted to discuss the timeliness of their submitted assignments, number of absences, and amount of completed work rather than what they had actually learned in the course—without seeming to understand the connection between those things. For example, they said things like, “I think I deserve a C because I didn’t submit some of my homework assignments”; they didn’t say things like, “I think my writing was not as strong as it could be because I didn’t do the assigned preparatory work and get feedback along the way.” In the future, I think I’ll want to make the link between course attendance, completing homework, etc. and performance on major assignments a little clearer.
But many students had interesting, even surprising, things to say about what they learned in the class, both in their written self-assessments and in our conversations. Some of the most important takeaways from the class were not, I’m finding, in the knowledge or skills students gained but in the subtler shifts in their attitudes, their realizations about writing, and what they learned about themselves as students. Instead of saying things like, “I learned how to research more effectively” or “I now write stronger topic sentences,” they tended to say things like…
I learned that I can write for many different audiences—not just the teacher or class.
I learned that I benefit from structure as a student.
I learned that there are differences in how people within education think about education.
I learned that I have things to contribute to conversations about education.
I learned that in writing, less is more.
I learned that I benefit from talking with other students and hearing their perspectives.
I learned that real writing is not like writing for standardized tests—it’s not one and done.
I learned that I struggle to meet deadlines when there are no penalties for missing them.
I learned that I can only work productively in environments with natural light.
Lots of these were unexpected—I wouldn’t have made “recognize how fluorescent lighting affects your working habits” one of my course goals—but they all represent important takeaways. I’m also glad students gained insight about themselves as students and about their own learning processes. I think I had forgotten how much of being a first year student is just about adjusting to adulthood and the college environment. But these conferences reminded me that I have many assumptions about college, learning, and writing that my students didn’t necessarily share coming into the course. And that students gaining the tools to navigate college is as big a victory (at least in my view) as improving their writing skills.
I was also struck again, as I have been in the past, by the absolute meaninglessness of the final grade I was forced to assign. Slapping a grade down on a holistic conversation about what students have learned, how they’ve learned it, and what they want to learn in the future felt reductive, at best. The real work, the real assessment, and the real meaning, was in the conversations we had about their learning.
Moreover, the final grades I assigned in collaboration with students this time around didn’t, in every case, reflect their learning or ability—they simply reflected the quality of their submitted work when judged according to the relatively narrow parameters we laid out at the beginning of the semester. Some students learned a lot from the course but didn’t necessarily learn things that were in line with our goals. Some students learned a lot, but external circumstances prevented them from turning in the quality of work that would fully demonstrate that learning. Some students had really high potential for learning but couldn’t, for whatever reason, fulfill that potential. Some students didn’t learn much at all, but they performed well on the assessments.
This semester confirmed my priors about just how useless grades are in learning, and how little information they provide us about students. While narrative evaluations might make it more difficult to rank and sort students (a business we shouldn’t be in, in any case), they would be far easier for me to produce and provide much more information about student learning and experience in my courses. If med schools and law schools are looking for reliable information about student learning and potential, grades don’t, in my opinion, provide it.
Our final meetings were great, for the most part. But assigning final grades was painful. Frankly, as soon as grades, or the idea of grades, get introduced into this system, it feels like we all start to veer off course. And I’m not the only instructor to have this experience. From my perspective, it would be easier for all of us if we got rid of grades entirely.
Students Assess Our Grading System
I’m not sure, however, that all my students would feel the same way. For the most part, as at midterm, they seemed to like the grading system—but there were a few less positive responses. I got feedback from most of them, both through a short (non-anonymous) course evaluation I created and verbally in our meetings together. I anticipate receiving further (anonymous) feedback through the university evaluations.
My evaluation form yielded the most comprehensive information. In response to the question “Do you feel the grading system in this course supported your learning?” 100% of surveyed students said yes. I asked an open-ended follow-up: “What did you like best about the grading system? What did you like least? How did it support or fail to support your learning?” This is what students said (shared with their permission):
I liked the fact that things were looked at it more holistically rather then set into categories.
I liked how there was feedback and opportunities to resubmit assignments. It showed me what I was doing right or wrong and gave me opportunities to better my self.
I liked the grading system, because it gave me time to work on my assignments without a sense of rush or a sense of pressure. It gave me enough time to work on my work and make it good well-rounded work.
I really enjoyed the grading system because it forced me to really focus on doing good on my essays and being able to back up my reasoning of getting a good grade.
It's good overall. Nothing I don't like. By motivate me to write better.
I liked being able to learn from my mistakes without having to worry about a number being attached. I felt that I was able to make mistakes, learn from them, and become a bigger writer.
I like that it is based on my overall completion of the class but I dont like how I couldnt see my progress throughout the semester.
I liked the ability to argue for my grades and the availability to re submit assignments
I loved the amount of stress the grading style lifted off of my chest. Instead of doing whatever I can to get a certain grade, I was able to focus purely on bettering myself as a writer.
Lots of good stuff here, many opinions unchanged from the midterm. I’m glad students are reporting that (and seeing how) the system helps them concentrate on producing good work rather than getting a good grade. And I’m pleased that students feel less pressured and more able to make mistakes and learn from them rather than being penalized for them.
The survey and my conversations with students did, however, unearth some ambivalence. I think much of this feedback was more about the flexibility around deadlines than about the grading system per se, but those two things are connected. Some students communicated that they had difficulty staying on top of their work, and they thought more structure would help. I’m curious about what kinds of structures they would find most helpful. Since I already have assignment deadlines, and a mechanism for helping students set alternative deadlines, I do wonder if “structure” really means “penalties.” This is something I’m still thinking about.
Some students also voiced a concern here (that I didn’t hear as much at midterms) about being unable to “track their progress” or “see where they’re at” at any given point in the course. I think this is related to the feedback about deadline flexibility: some of the students who had trouble tracking their progress also didn’t turn in their final major assignment until the last possible moment, didn’t complete many (or any) revisions before the end of the course, or neglected to fill out a self-assessment form assigned in early April. It is, of course, difficult for me to provide feedback that would help them track their progress if I don’t have work to provide feedback on.
But the point about tracking progress is a fair one that students often raise in ungraded courses. It can be difficult and nerve-wracking to translate, or reduce, holistic qualitative feedback into a letter grade at the end of the semester, and students naturally want to know, when they’re in the middle of the semester, what that feedback “means” in terms of the final grade. I’ve tried to address this problem by having students assign themselves a letter grade at certain checkpoints throughout the semester. If that grade is not in the neighborhood of a grade I would assign, then that triggers a conversation with me to align our expectations.
I’ve also tried to address it by providing a rubric whereby students can track progress through their revisions, seeing how they move (or fail to move) from “developing” to “proficient” to “excellent” in a variety of categories. But of course, these categories are not letter grades, and translating them to letter grades is not always straightforward. And all of this assumes that students will be completing and turning in work more or less on time throughout the semester.
I’ll talk more comprehensively in my next post about how I intend to address these problems for future courses. But I want to close by sharing one more surprising element of our final grade conferences.
I did get some unsolicited advice from a couple of students about changes I might consider for the course next time I teach it. I typically do not take kindly to unsolicited advice. In all honesty, I was at first inclined to rankle at these comments. But all semester, I’ve been asking students to think critically about their own educational experiences. So I can’t be annoyed when they apply that critical thinking to my own course. In fact, after some reflection, I take it as a mark of accomplishment that students are fully aware of how they interacted with my course and confident enough to make suggestions for future improvements. Even if I didn’t necessarily agree with everything they suggested, I’m considering their comments and am proud that they were reflective enough to offer them.
Next week, I’ll wrap up my own reflections on this course by sharing what I’ll keep doing and what I’ll change next time I teach. Stay tuned!