Final Grades: An Airing of Grievances

A late contribution to your Festivus celebrations

I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble transitioning out of winter break and back into the swing of work. My brain is stuck in holiday mode, but I’m feeling grumpy at the same time. So, what better way to mark the moment than a Festivus-style “Airing of Grievances”! This week’s topic: assigning final grades.

If you’re not familiar with Festivus, the airing of grievances, and the Seinfeld episode that made them famous, you can find out more in this Wikipedia article.

I’m a little late for Festivus, which traditionally takes place on December 23. But in fairness, I wrote a lot of the text below in December, just after I submitted final grades. And while I’m somewhat reluctant to begin the year on a grouchy note, it might be nice to clear the air a bit, especially as we transition from one semester to another. 

I got a lot of problems with assigning final grades—and now you’re gonna hear about it. 

I’ve come to think that assigning final grades is one of the more painful processes of ungrading for me. I didn’t feel any angst at all about ungrading last semester, until I had to submit final grades. It’s not because I had to collaborate with students who were demanding undeserved As (they weren’t) or because I had awkward or disappointing final meetings with them (I didn’t). It’s for a slew of other reasons, and here are some of the most important:

It’s hugely reductive. 

Last semester, I made the decision to send each student away from our final conference with a one-pager that sums up their work over the course of the semester. You can see a template here, but I basically just made some notes about the quantity of their work, quality of their work, and growth over the semester. I put these together while looking over their final portfolios, so it’s not a lot of extra time for me—I would likely be making similar notes for myself to reference during the final conferences anyway. At the bottom, I left a space to pencil in their final grade after our conversation. 

In that conversation, I ask students to expand on what they’ve written in their final self-assessments. We have an in-depth discussion of how much work they completed, how good their work was according to the standards we set at the beginning of the semester, and how they’ve seen themselves improve (or not) in the last few months. These are, for the most part, extremely valuable conversations, full of insight, thoughtful reflection, and goal-setting for the future. 

And then at the end of that conversation, all our good work is reduced to a letter that communicates very little and is often not as reflective of student learning as I would like it to be. Settling on that letter feels, for me, anticlimactic and deflating after the rich conversations we have. This is, to be sure, a “me” problem—students don’t seem deflated, and are usually quite pleased when we finally settle on the grade. But I don’t think it’s ultimately the best way to cap the semester. 

It’s so subjective and can sometimes feel like a guessing game.

I want to clarify that this subjectivity is not due to the fact that students are suggesting their own grades or the fact that I’m grading work holistically rather than in points, percentages, and averages. In fact, I think points, percentages, and averages tend to obscure the subjectivity of our grading and make it feel fairer than it really is. Grading is always subjective. Ungrading just makes that subjectivity more evident.

It’s great that I was able to clarify last semester that I was evaluating students’ work in terms of quantity, quality, and growth—something I never would have discovered if I stuck to a traditional points system. I think communicating about quantity, quality, and growth with students helped make final grade determinations feel slightly less arbitrary.

But translating student performance on these metrics to a letter grade is sometimes fraught. To begin with, how do you balance the three metrics? How do you grade a student who demonstrated tons of growth but didn’t reach proficiency? (I found that often the rubric categories on which students demonstrated the most growth were also the categories in which they still had furthest to go.) How do you grade a student who did excellent work but very little of it?

Then there are other contingencies. How do you grade the student who completed lower quantities of work due to illness or crisis in comparison to students who were not ill or in crisis? How do you grade the student who tells you about a revelatory idea they had in a last-minute revision process that they just didn’t have time to implement properly? Or the one who would have done much better if they hadn’t gotten sick in the final weeks of the semester? What about the student who demonstrated tremendous growth within the revisions for one assignment but who went back to baseline in subsequent assignments? What about the student who I allowed (against my better judgment) to pick a bad paper topic and who would have done much, much better if I had offered better guidance? 

Add to this the sneaking suspicion that what I’m really asking students to do is play a guessing game with me: “I have a grade in mind for you; you have to guess what it is.” I preface final grade conferences by telling students that while I have my own assessment of their work, and I expect them to propose a grade that they feel is fair, I am open to being persuaded by evidence of their performance that I had not considered. This is true, and sometimes students tell me things that alter my perceptions of their work. But how persuadable am I, really? And what’s the point of asking students to assign their own grades if I already have one in mind? 

I think collaborating with students to determine their final grades has a lot of benefits, but these are all questions I’m asking myself.

I’m constantly concerned about equity issues.

There are all kinds of inequities baked into assigning final letter grades, in traditional and nontraditional grading systems alike. And ungrading, as great as it is, does introduce some potential for bias and unfairness.

I always try to be cautious about this, especially given the anecdotal evidence that women and students of color tend to suggest lower grades for themselves than white male students. I have no problem with bumping students’ grades up if I believe they’ve underrated their achievements. Obviously it’s a bit more fraught to suggest to a student that the evidence of their work does not warrant a grade as high as the one they proposed—though this doesn’t, I should note, happen very often, and the few times it has happened, I have lowered proposed grades seemingly without issue.

But the subjectivity of grades really starts to feel evident here, without the illusion of mathematical precision to fall back on. And the triviality of the distinctions—did this student do B or B+ work?—makes it feel all the more arbitrary. And yet, these kinds of distinctions are important to students, whose GPAs are on the line. I think we owe it to them to be as thoughtful and equitable as we can in assigning final grades. 

But what does equity mean in this context? What metrics should I use to determine whether to add a + or – to a letter grade? What metrics should I use to determine whether or not to bump or lower proposed grades? What if I give in to one student’s pitch for a B+ when I thought they were more at the level of a B? Does that mean I should bump everyone else’s grade up too? What if I have unconscious biases about students that are getting in the way of final grade assignments despite my best efforts to promote equity?

To be clear, I think a system in which students have a say in their own final grades is more equitable, in many ways, than traditional grading systems. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to question our practices. And given that other instructors, like

Jayme Dyer

and

Robert Talbert

have expressed similar misgivings about potential inequities in ungrading, I think we need to proceed with caution.

I’m (sometimes) uneasy about what other people think. 

My course is set up so that pretty much anyone can get a high grade if they do all the work (quantity) and make significant progress on our learning goals (growth). I would hope that the students who put in the most time and demonstrate the most growth are also the students who submit the highest quality work in the end. 

It doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes students work really hard and improve very much and still don’t produce what I might consider excellent, or even proficient, papers. Students can’t really provide good evidence for an A in this case, according to the guidelines I’ve laid out. But they can provide good evidence for a B, even, depending on the level of their work, a high one.

I’m drawing here on a labor-based grading model that is intended to mitigate inequity. Students who are not, for whatever reason, producing what we have traditionally defined as “excellent” work, can still succeed in the course by putting in the time and effort. It’s only a partially labor-based model, because students also have to show that their labor translates to progress on our course goals (growth), and they can’t attain the highest grade without doing work that I would deem excellent on at least a few metrics (quality). But the time and effort students put in do make a big difference. 

I stand by this system. Though it does occasionally make me nervous. I’m nervous about what students’ future professors would think of these grades, whether or not they would be annoyed that I allowed a student who is doing “developing” work to “pass” into their classes—with a B no less! I’m nervous about students’ futures in these classes, worried that they’ll struggle inordinately or that they’ll expect their other professors to give them an “A for effort” (despite the fact that I try to prepare them for a very different reality). I’m nervous that I’m talking about this in public, even though my department and the teaching center that I work in are unfailingly supportive of, and even enthusiastic about, my pedagogical choices.

I can and do justify this system to myself and others with the reasoning I’ve laid out above—and with other reasons as well. That doesn’t make me any less uneasy. 

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These problems, to be clear, are not problems with ungrading itself. They are problems with assigning final letter grades. Most of the issues I’ve discussed are inherent to any grading system, traditional or nontraditional. If we were not forced to assign final letter grades, none of them would exist. Other issues, I’m sure, would arise in that case. But they wouldn’t be these issues. 

All I want for Festivus is an end to final grades! 

But as gifts don’t seem to be a large part of the Festivus tradition, I guess I’ll have to wait. 

Spring 2024

This semester, for the first time since I started writing this blog, I won’t be teaching an undergraduate course. Instead, I’ll be continuing my work in the teaching center and assisting with a course designed to prepare graduate students to teach first-year writing. That means I may be posting less often over the next few months. 

But I still have lots of reflections to share. In the coming weeks, I’ll post about some lessons learned from my ungrading experience last semester. I’ll also share the thoughts I collected from my students on three different topics: ungrading, the progress tracker I’ve been writing about, and their use of AI in writing. I’m looking forward to hearing your reactions—stay tuned!