How I’ll Ungrade Next Time

A Start, Stop, Continue for my ungrading practice

Photo by Tsvetoslav Hristov on Unsplash

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 19, 2023.

My final reflection on the course ended up being too long to include in one post, so I’ll be publishing it in two parts over the next two weeks. Part 1, for this week, discusses what I’ve learned from ungrading this semester.

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This week I’ve had some time to gather my thoughts on the semester. I’m still processing, but I do have a few ideas about what I might keep and what I’ll do differently next time around. This blog was initially inspired by a Stop, Start, Continue for the ungrading community—so I think it’s fitting that I end this semester’s journal with a similar activity. 

I want to be clear this is a reflection on my particular context: teaching writing to first-year students at a flagship state university. I would approach things differently, I think, with an upper-level class or at a different institution. But since I’ll be teaching first-year writing at UM for the foreseeable future, these are the things I’m thinking about. 

What I’ll Stop

Allowing any student to submit work any time up to the final week.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I think the flexibility around Major Assignment deadlines in the class potentially hurt my students’ work. I did have deadlines for every assignment. And I did have an Assignment Extension Form students could use if they needed extra time. This form asked students to tell me about where they were in the project, specify what kind of support (if any) they needed from me, and set a new due date for themselves, within one week of the original due date. 

I thought this would be enough structure and incentive to encourage students to get their work in, but it was not universally successful. Some still struggled to submit initial drafts in a timely manner—even though timeliness was part of how we evaluated the “Engagement” portion of the course. And some students simply neglected to fill out the extension form, knowing they wouldn’t necessarily “lose points” for late work. That means that some students were submitting initial drafts of some Major Assignments in the last week of the semester, when it was too late to get feedback and revise. 

While I’d like to improve this system, I’m not going to start penalizing students for late submissions, and I’m not going to force students to disclose their life circumstances in order to get an extension on their work. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing instead:

I’ll continue to have deadlines and the Assignment Extension Form, on which students can propose new deadlines within one week of the original deadlines. I will be more insistent in asking students to use this form. I will also specify that if students don’t submit their work by the original deadline and also haven’t submitted the form (or if they fail to submit their assignment by the new due date they specified on the form), that will trigger an automatic individual conference. I’ll ask that students meet with me to discuss the project and will not accept submissions until they’ve done so. I will also likely set a hard deadline 2-3 weeks before the end of the semester by which all initial drafts have to be turned in, barring extenuating circumstances. I’m hoping this will help students stay on track. 

Relying too heavily on self-assessment and co-creation of assessment criteria.

This one is difficult for me, because I truly believe that students need permission and support to develop skills in self-assessment. And I think we should start aiding this development early in their college careers. One of the main reasons I wanted to get rid of grades in the first place was so that students might stop worrying so much about what I thought of their work and start worrying about what they thought.

That said, I can see how it would be difficult to assess yourself on a skill you haven’t yet fully developed. I remember how at sea I felt when I first started doing real academic writing in the form of graduate school seminar papers. I would have had trouble saying what was good and what wasn’t in my writing because I simply wasn’t aware of the expectations of the genre and had, frankly, very little sense of inner purpose around that work myself. I did develop a better understanding of genre and stronger sense of purpose over time, but I didn’t start out with them. 

I saw my students struggle in similar ways this semester. I think I’ll keep having conversations with students about how they’ve been assessed on writing in the past and how that might be different from how their writing is assessed in college, because those conversations were helpful for both them and me. But I’ll probably skip the process of co-creating rubrics with them, at least at first. And I’ll try to help them build up their self-assessment skills over the course of the semester rather than starting with a full-fledged self-assessment program in the first few weeks. I’ll probably even make “Develop skills in self-assessment” one of my learning goals and scaffold it throughout the semester. 

What I’ll Start

Providing clearer guidelines and expectations around final grade designations. 

Grade designations weren’t much of an issue last time I taught an ungraded class. But this time, not all students were on the same page with me, initially, about what strong work looked like—it took a while to get there. I think this is related to the self-assessment piece. There were a couple that I had to work with over the course of the semester to clarify what kinds of writing (both in terms of quality and quantity) counts as excellent, what counts as fine, and what’s really not up to par. We all got there eventually. But it would be more helpful if I clarified this from the beginning.

What I’m struggling with here is how, exactly, to make these expectations clear without creating a structure that is too rigid. I admit that I was somewhat hesitant, at first, to create checklists and contracts. My students already tend to approach the class as a transaction, a series of items to check off, rather than an opportunity to learn about themselves and the world, to develop knowledge and skills that will be rewarding for them in some way. I worried that presenting them with a laundry list of requirements in the first week might orient them toward box-checking and away from learning. 

But I think the benefits of these documents outweigh the risks, for this context at least. Specifically, I think a contract or checklist will clarify expectations, help students track their progress, and make grade conversations less anxiety-inducing for both of us. At the very least, I’ll provide a holistic description of what level of work I would expect students to complete in order to make a strong case for a specific grade. For example, 

“You’ll be able to present good evidence for an A in the course if you…

• complete the vast majority of the writing practice assignments in good faith, 

• attend class every time you’re physically and mentally able, 

• undertake at least one revision of each major assignment, 

• reach the level of ‘excellent’ on multiple assessment categories, 

• contribute to class discussions by being prepared and sharing your thoughts in large- or small-group discussions.” 

I have some mixed feelings about this language, but I think it provides some structure while still allowing for flexibility. We’ll see how it goes. 

Providing more models of successful self-assessment and revision. 

Relatedly, I think students could benefit from more examples of what a strong self-assessment and a strong revision might look like. I provided models of each Major Assignment students completed (which I created myself), but it didn’t occur to me to provide examples of the work they might do to evaluate and improve on those Major Assignments. 

This is, I think, a relatively easy fix. It’s made easier by the fact that I asked students in an end-of-semester survey to grant or deny permission for me to share their work anonymously with future classes. Most students said yes, so I’ll have a pool of assignments, assignment revisions, and self-assessments to draw on as samples next year. I can envision a really productive class session in which we evaluate a first draft and a final draft of student work, or look at examples of strong self-assessments. (A quick aside: I’ll only share examples of strong student work; I wouldn’t want students still at the university to find that I’ve been sharing their assignments as examples of what not to do!) I’m hoping this will give students a little more clarity about my expectations in this work. 

What I’ll Continue

Conducting midterm and end-of-term individual conferences with students.

The individual conferences are, in my opinion, the most significant part of the work we do, and they can also be the most fun. (I have also heard this from other instructors using ungrading.) Having a conversation with students about what they’re learning, how they’ve improved, what their goals are, where they want to take their learning in the future—it’s really the meat of the course. I also think I learn the most about my own teaching practice, what’s working or not, in these conferences. And I learn a lot about student struggles and attitudes toward the class, which helps me tailor the instruction appropriately. As I noted in my last post, they often surface unexpected and thought-provoking exchanges. 

Journaling about my practice.

Keeping this journal has been one of the best things I’ve done for my teaching. We say this constantly, but taking the time to reflect on our practice is so important, and this series has provided a structured way for me to do that. As any writer can tell you, putting words on paper is a process of discovery. I often discovered things about my teaching or my class through writing about it that I don’t think I would have come to in any other way. It also helped me cement my ideas and commitments. Plus, I’ll have the journal to look back on when I design my fall writing course. I really can’t recommend regular reflective writing highly enough. 

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Next week’s post will include Part 2 of this reflection, a final thought about why I adopted ungrading in the first place and how I am—or rather was—thinking about it last May. Stay tuned!