Helping Students Determine Final Grades
The fifth (and last) in a series of posts about the progress tracker for my ungraded course
One of the defining features of ungrading, as I practice it, is that students collaborate with the instructor in determining their final grade. In some classes, students have total control over that grade. I confess that I have not been that brave. My syllabus specifies that in our final individual meetings, “you will assign yourself a final grade in consultation with me (and subject to my approval).” Students first propose their grade and provide evidence for it in a written self-assessment. We discuss that assessment, and my own assessment of their work, at an individual grade conference. And through a synthesis of that conversation, we arrive at a final grade.
I don’t think, when I first started ungrading in a class of primarily first-year students, I had done enough perspective-taking about what such a process might be like for them. In particular, I hadn’t thought enough about how difficult it would be to assign yourself a grade on tasks that were totally new and unfamiliar, in the somewhat alien academic context of college, where the performance expectations were not yet very clear.
My experience with final grade assignment last year wasn’t a disaster, but it did make me remember how unsure I was, as a first-year college student, about my own academic performance. That first semester, I could have received anything from an A+ to an F on my work and I would have believed I deserved it. As it happens, I got a B+ on my very first college paper, and it sent me into a tailspin, as I thought for a couple of weeks that I just might fail all my classes. So, I wouldn’t have been prepared to assign myself a final grade without a lot of guidance—and even with guidance, it would still have felt arbitrary.
(The secret is, of course, that it mostly is arbitrary, even when instructors do it. But that’s a post for another day.)
In light of my reflection on last semester and on my own experience, I developed more robust guidelines for determining final grades in the course. And that’s what makes up the final section of the Progress Tracker. It includes both information that will help students assess their overall performance in the course and some suggestions about what might constitute good evidence for specific final letter grades.
Assessing Student Performance
I mentioned in earlier posts that my new model for thinking about what I expect from students has three components: quantity, quality, and growth. I.e.: How much work did students do? How good was that work? And how much progress did students make in achieving the learning goals?
I think I like this framework. I’m still sorting it out. But that’s what we used this semester.
The final section of the Progress Tracker explains these components, with guiding questions for each category:
Quantity of work. How many readings, journals, and drafts did you complete? Are they of sufficient length? How many classes did you attend, and how often did you actively contribute to discussion in those classes? Did you submit a Final Portfolio with all the required elements? Did you attend both the midterm and the final conferences?
Quality of work. Do your Major Assignments (as perfected in your Final Portfolio) reach the level of “excellent” on multiple metrics or are they still largely “developing”? Did you surpass ChatGPT- or five-paragraph-essay-quality work in your writing? Were your Perusall annotations, journal entries, and contributions to discussion substantive and thoughtful?
Growth as a writer, thinker, and student. Did you reach the goals you set out to reach at the beginning of the semester and the learning goals of the course? Did you learn new writing and thinking skills or improve your existing skills? Do you know more now about the topics you wrote on? Did you develop better learning habits as a foundation for your college career?
The section also includes some text boxes that allow students to make notes on quantity, quality, and growth throughout the semester. In practice, I don’t really think they did this, and the activity probably does not make a lot of sense anyway, at least until the end of the semester. I do think, however, it was really helpful to them in the final weeks—more on that below.
Assigning Final Letter Grades
The other piece included in the final pages of the tracker is “A Note on Letter Grades.” I wrote this section to help students understand what evidence they might need to provide in order to propose a specific letter grade for themselves at the end of the semester. Here’s how I framed it:
Many students are understandably nervous about a system in which they can’t accumulate points and monitor their exact progress toward a final number or letter grade for the class. However, I don’t want to prescribe a specific course of action for reaching a specific final grade—not because I enjoy withholding information from you but because everyone’s trajectory might look a little different. Each person will have a unique balance between quantity, quality, and growth.
That said, you might use the following as a rough guide to what you should complete if you are aiming to attain a specific final grade.
I follow that introduction with sections specifying what evidence students should be able to provide for each possible letter grade in the course. For example, if you’re interested in an A, you should submit the vast majority of assignments, demonstrate evidence of substantial revision over time, and reach the level of “excellent” on multiple assessment categories.
I haven’t specified that students must achieve every single bullet point in order to propose a specific letter grade, though I may suggest this a little more strongly next time. And I think perhaps I have leaned more heavily on the “quantity” category in these bullet points than I wanted to. Next time I teach, I’ll probably make some small adjustments. But I think this is a good general guide.
Did the Progress Tracker Help?
The short answer is yes. I’ll have more to say in a later post about students’ perception of the Progress Tracker, how it did or did not support their learning, and whether or not documenting their learning and learning behaviors helped them stay on track. Here, I want to talk about how the final section of the document helped to align expectations and make final grade assignments somewhat less stressful for both myself and the students.
A few weeks before the end of the semester—after students had submitted initial drafts of all major assignments but before submitting their Final Portfolios—I asked them to take out their Progress Trackers and turn to this final section. I gave students 5 minutes to make notes on quantity, quality, and growth over the course of the semester. And then I gave them a couple of minutes to look at the “Note on Letter Grades” section to see, at this point, what grade they might reasonably be able to propose for themselves based on the evidence of their work. Finally, I asked them to set at least one goal for their work in the final weeks of class that might help them provide further evidence of the final grade they hoped to propose. Their work here became the basis for the self-assessment I asked them to include in their final portfolio.
As a result, I received self-assessments that were more thorough and more on topic than they were last semester. Some students still had to be prompted to think about “quality” in terms of the specific learning goals of the course, so there may be more work for me to do there. But they were much less likely to base a final grade proposal simply on assignment completion and class attendance and more likely to consider the actual writing that they’ve done.
Students were also more likely to propose grades that were in line with my own ideas about what they should receive. While I had some quibbles here and there with pluses and minuses, there wasn’t a single case in which students assigned a grade that was radically different from what I would have assigned for them. Most grades stood as students proposed them; when I changed the proposed grades, I raised them more often than I lowered them.
My sense is that students were also less nervous about proposing grades this semester than they were last semester. This is not true in all cases: some students walked into our final grade conferences so visibly nervous that I felt compelled to assure them, before we dove into the conversation, that they would receive the grade they proposed. Once they relaxed, we had a much more productive conversation about their actual learning. But on the whole, students didn’t seem too anxious about whether or not they would receive the grade they wanted.
So, I think it achieved what I wanted it to achieve. All that said:
I still hate assigning final grades.
I’ll explore this further in a later post, but after a semester’s worth of holistic development and careful feedback, assigning a final grade feels crass. The grade is a blunt instrument. And even with the careful guidelines I set above, it doesn’t capture what students have achieved in the course.
There are so many things students learn that can’t be predicted, measured, or accounted for in the ways we have traditionally tried to do so, much less in a grade designation. In my final conversations with students, we covered a lot of good ground, but three pieces of student learning really stood out to me:
One student said they learned that writing was not just putting words down on a page; it was a way for them to express their thoughts and ideas, especially when they didn’t feel they could convey them through speech.
One student said that their main takeaway was that they didn’t know as much about writing as they thought—that they almost feel like they know less now than they did when they entered the class because they discovered that writing is a more complex activity than they assumed beforehand.
One student said that they always thought (and had always been told) that they would never be a good writer, but the class showed them that anyone could write well with enough motivation and practice.
How can you grade this kind of learning? How can you anticipate it or quantify it? These are exactly the kinds of things I want students to discover by taking my courses, but they are not accounted for in my learning goals and certainly not captured by students’ final course grades.
So, I didn’t love putting final grades into the system last week. But student takeaways like these make me think we’re ending the semester on a high note.
Looking Back and Forward
The final grade conferences, which wrapped up last week, always spark a lot of reflection for me, which means I’ve been scribbling down reams of notes over the last several days about this semester’s class. I’m looking forward to returning to these in January and putting them down in some coherent form. After the break, I’ll write about some lessons learned from the semester. I’m also looking forward to sharing some of my students’ perspectives, with their permission, on the topics I’ve reflected on in this blog.
Until then, I’ll recharge by spending the winter break with my family. Thank you for following along with my teaching journey over the last year. This holiday, I’m especially grateful for all the folks who have indulged my musings in the last few months and helped me make space for such rich reflection and conversation on teaching and learning. Until 2024!