Making the ‘Case Against Grades’
Student reactions to ungrading in the first two weeks
This blog post is part of an ongoing series of reflections completed during my Spring 2023 writing course. While the post is being published in June of 2023, it was originally written on February 3, 2023.
We started to hit a rhythm in my class this week—and had some interesting conversations about school and grading. Here, I’ll talk about students’ initial reactions to the ungrading system, along with the readings and activities I used to spark thoughts and discussion around it.
Initial Reactions
So far, my University of Mississippi students seem less concerned about the grading system, and have fewer questions, than my students at Notre Dame. My challenge with ND students was that many were intent on getting an A in the course and were nervous about how they were going to monitor their progress toward that goal. I think my challenge with UM students will be to motivate them now that the immediate incentive of grades, both for student work and class attendance, has been removed.
The syllabus notes that I expect regular attendance, but doesn’t outline any grade penalties for missing class. Instead, we evaluate attendance holistically, under the category of “engagement,” in our individual conferences. I asked my students to reflect on their typical course engagement behaviors and to set personal engagement and/or attendance goals during the first week of class. Some of them weren’t as specific as I would have liked. And some already seem to be struggling with attendance, despite our conversation about its importance on the first day. “Struggling” is my word—perhaps they aren’t worried about their attendance. But given that a few students have been absent multiple times after only four class sessions, I’m a little concerned about how conversations about engagement will go at our midsemester conferences.
But so far, they don’t seem too worried about their grades or the grading system.
I had an enlightening conversation about grading methodologies with one student in our individual conferences last Monday. He told me that in past writing classes, he would work really hard on an assignment and put in his best effort and still end up with a B—which didn’t seem fair. This seemed like a good teaching moment, so I shared that there were lots of ways to think about grading. One might, as his observation indicated, grade based on the amount of effort or labor put into an assignment. One might also grade according to an “objective” standard of some kind. Or by comparing a student’s work with that of other students and ranking them against each other, or on a curve. And then I asked how he thought we should grade.
I’ve had this conversation with students before, and his answer echoed that of my previous students. He thought that maybe the grading method should depend on the subject. With math, where there are right or wrong answers, you could grade according to an objective standard. I asked how he thought we should grade writing, and he replied that it was difficult to say: writing was usually about sharing your opinion. And how do you grade an opinion?
At this point—pedagogy nerd that I am—my head was exploding with thoughts to share, so I reined myself in. I said that in my classes I typically liked to evaluate students according to their effort, their own self-assessment, and the extent to which their work demonstrated progress toward the learning goals or aligned with the standards we set for the class. And that while writing often involves sharing opinions, those opinions may be shared more or less effectively. That effectiveness was what we were going to evaluate together, with rubrics that we would co-create for each assignment.
I have a lot to say about how students conceive of grading differently in humanities contexts than in STEM ones—but I’ll save that for another day. For now, I’ll just say that having these conversations with students is one of my favorite parts of ungrading. I always leave them feeling like I’ve learned something.
Reading and Activities
In our class discussions, students were mostly on board with ungrading and seem to have been confirmed in their opinions by reading Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades” and the first chapters of John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and other Necessities—two texts I highly recommend for ungraded writing courses. Kohn’s work is a bit more polemical than a lot of what I see about ungrading, so I find it useful for provoking reactions and discussion among students.
In general, students agreed with Kohn that grading tends to cause stress and anxiety, stifle creativity, squash motivation, and reorient students’ focus to grades rather than learning. One or two partially disagreed, noting that grades were sometimes a motivator for them. But they all seem happy, nevertheless, to have a (mostly) gradeless class on their schedule. Students were really interested in Warner’s work as well, and they said a lot of the same things about the five-paragraph essay that they said about grading: all the “rules” they have to follow in standard writing assignments tend to cause anxiety and limit their ability to explore, to think outside the box, and to produce anything even remotely interesting.
I also showed students one of the things that first convinced me that traditional grades were mostly meaningless. This thought experiment began with reading Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity but grew from there. I asked the class to imagine two hypothetical students, Student A and Student B. I wrote on the board the assignment grades and final averages for each of these students:
Student A
90
95
0
85
95
Final average: 73
Student B
70
80
75
65
85
Final average: 75
I then asked the class to tell me a story about Student A. They pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the student knew the material, but had had a bad day in the middle of the semester: maybe they got sick, had a family emergency, overslept their alarm, and couldn’t make up a big test. As a result, they tanked their grade.
I asked them to tell me a story about Student B. Average student, they said. Started off okay, mostly maintained their grade, did pretty well on the final.
I pointed out that both students ended up with a C-range grade for the class. I then asked, Who understood the material better? They were unanimous: Student A, of course.
We did this two more times: What’s the story here? I asked.
Student A
65
65
75
80
95
Final Average: 76
Student B
70
75
80
70
75
Final Average: 74
They said: Student A started off badly. They slacked off. Or maybe it wasn’t their strong subject. Maybe their high school experience left them unprepared for the college course. But they got better over the semester. By the end, at the final, they were doing great. Student B, though, was average. Did just enough to keep their head above water. Maybe they struggled a little, but they got through.
Both students ended up, again, in the C-range. But who, I asked, had better mastery over the material by the end of the semester? Student A, of course.
A final exercise: What’s the story here?
Student A
95
100
100
95
95
Final Average: 97
Student B
55
65
75
65
85
Final Average: 69
Student A really knew their stuff. They worked hard. Maybe they’d already taken a course like this. In any case, they succeeded. Student B, though, struggled. Maybe they slacked off at the beginning, or maybe they just didn’t understand the material. But they made steady progress. By the final exam, they were doing solid work—though not solid enough to make up for their early failures.
Who learned? I asked. Student B, of course. The student who ended up with a D.
I think this exercise really effectively illustrated for students what traditional grades can’t do. They certainly can’t tell us, with any reliability, how students stack up against one another or how much a given student has learned—they often don’t even tell us whether or not a student has mastered the material by the end of the course. Traditional grades, then, are mostly meaningless.
I realize that this information might be dangerous. I sometimes feel like I am inadvertently fomenting rebellion among students, even if they don’t suddenly turn into ungrading activists. But my intention is not to sow distrust in other professors. My hope is primarily that students will begin to shed the bothersome identities of “A-student” or “C-student” and recognize the uselessness of grades in illustrating their worth or even their learning.
We also had a really interesting conversation about rubrics, formulas, and criteria for student work. During class discussions, one of my students noted that she hated rubrics and felt that they limited her writing. When I asked what she meant by a rubric, she described something that sounded, to me, more like a formula than a rubric: she didn’t like being evaluated on whether or not she had the right number of paragraphs or whether she had included the correct number of quotations in the correct places. I explained that we would be co-creating rubrics in the class, but that the rubrics wouldn’t prescribe specific writing rules; rather, they would provide criteria by which we would evaluate the effectiveness of their writing. For example, how well did they tailor their work to their specific audience? How clear was their purpose for writing? How appropriate was their chosen style to their chosen genre or venue for publication? She seemed satisfied by this answer, but I asked her to keep me updated on how the rubrics are working for her. The last thing I want to do is stifle creativity.
So, all in all, we had good conversations. I do worry somewhat that in expressing their opinions about grades, students are simply telling me what I want to hear. If there’s one thing students are good at, it’s divining an instructor’s beliefs and repeating those beliefs back to them. Time will tell, I suppose. But for now, I’m mostly satisfied with how we’re all adjusting to the system.
Next week, we’ll be talking about generative AI in the class—so stay tuned for more thoughts about the relationship between new tech and new approaches to grading.
"With math, where there are right or wrong answers, you could grade according to an objective standard." -- Sad noises. I realize that's your student's thought about math, but it makes me think we math people need to do a better job with telling the story of how our discipline works.
Also - I think it's ok to foment a little rebelliousness in students about traditional grading. At the very least I would hope students feel comfortable asking instructors why their grading systems are built they way they are built, traditional or otherwise. In fact the traditional systems deserve the greatest scrutiny from students because those are the ones least challenged. Any real change in higher ed is going to start with students asking simple but pointed questions, I think.
Great series. I downloaded the Substack app exclusively to follow it and have shared with colleagues. Thanks for your work!