Midsemester Reflections on Ungrading

How my system may be mitigating—or exacerbating—student struggles

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 July of 2023, it was originally written on March 17, 2023.

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We’ve been on spring break this week, so I thought I would use today’s post to reflect on my ungrading experience so far and share a few things I’ve been pondering that I haven’t really had a chance to discuss in previous posts. 

The first is simply a realization about how ungrading is benefiting my students beyond their actual learning. I was thinking about the kinds of grading policies I used in previous writing courses and how my current students would have fared in those courses. It struck me that several of my students, who I know to be capable of doing good work, would have already flunked out of the courses I taught pre-pandemic—some because of absences or late work and some due to the fact that they didn’t fully understand the major assignment guidelines on their first attempt. 

Perhaps if I had harsher penalties for these things in place then students would attend every class, turn in all their work on time, and follow the assignment instructions more carefully. But given my interactions with some of these students, I’m not really convinced that that would be the case. And even if it was the case: at what cost would such compliance happen? My students are struggling with mental and physical illnesses, a slew of personal problems, and a full, challenging slate of courses, many with inflexible policies. Frankly, a lot of them are white knuckling it through their college experience. I’m not sure that harsh penalties would motivate or benefit them, and I don’t relish the thought of class sessions full of sick or unengaged students.

The notion that struggling students now have a better chance of passing my class is, in many ways, heartening. But it also really bums me out to think about all the students who have lost points, letter grades, or entire semesters of their lives to absences, late work, and a failure to understand assignment requirements. Students who are, in many cases, average or even strong writers! Who can do the work! But who missed an opportunity because of a failure to comply with one course policy or another. 

So, I’m happy that ungrading and its attendant course policies might help struggling students pass.

That said, I am a bit concerned that I may be giving false hope, here at the midterm, to students who are simply not going to put in the work (for whatever reason) to complete the course successfully. I have a couple of students who have been barely getting assignments over the finish line, and I had frank conversations with them about what the course expectations were. But I think some of them may be operating with the mindset that, since there are no late penalties, they can always make up missed work in a rush at the end of the semester. I communicated to students about which deadlines were flexible, how flexible they were, and what can and can’t be made up. But technically, they can submit their major assignments up until the finals period with no consequences—aside from the fact that the work will likely be sub-par. I am hesitant to say “Submit work by X date or you won’t receive credit,” since I want to be sensitive to students who may be in the midst of some ongoing crisis or another. But I worry that this policy makes it a little too easy to give in to the temptations of procrastination. 

One real advantage of ungrading for me: the system is really helping me address cheating (or sort-of-cheating) behaviors productively—a definite advantage in the age of ChatGPT. I introduced AI tools at the beginning of the semester, and even though we set boundaries on the use of AI, I expected that some students would have difficulty maintaining those boundaries. This turned out to be the case. While students have overwhelmingly stuck to our established guidelines, a couple have been trying to submit ChatGPT output (sometimes lightly edited) for writing practice assignments that they perceived they didn’t have the time or energy to complete.

In previous classes, I would have had to slap a zero on these assignments and then have a fraught and unpleasant conversation with the student about cheating. With ungrading in place, I’ve let go of the idea that all work for the class has to be graded and put into an average. And it has enabled me to have much better conversations with these students about their writing process, the purpose of the work I assign, and why what they’re doing is impairing their learning. I can genuinely say that getting two sentences of their own thoughts down on the page and submitting it two days late is better than 500 words of crap written by AI and submitted on time. I can genuinely say I’m prioritizing the learning not the grade, the process not the product. I can genuinely say these things because my ungrading system backs them up: students really aren’t penalized for occasionally falling short of a word count or submitting a few assignments late. Because the system is in place, students are more likely to trust me when I say I want them to learn, not to earn meaningless points. 

Will they internalize this message before the end of the semester? Who knows. But I think they’re a lot closer to understanding it than they would be in my traditionally graded courses. 

Relatedly, ungrading has helped some (if not all) students move beyond the “game” of school to pursue their real interests and work on improving their writing without worrying about a bad grade. This has been very gratifying for me—plus, it makes student assignments a lot more fun and interesting to read. I hope the class prompts a real and lasting shift in their point of view about learning, writing, and school. 

A more recent realization: students need more help than I thought with self-assessment. I wrote last week about how students were still assessing themselves for compliance rather than learning. The latter kind of assessment does not come easily, and no matter how carefully I crafted the self-assessment questions, students didn’t naturally focus on their development as writers when talking about their performance in the class. I’m now looking for ways to teach self-assessment more effectively, and if you have any, I’d love to hear them!

Finally, this semester has brought home to me just how transformational ungrading as a mindset is for every aspect of my course. Jesse Stommel writes that

Ungrading works best when it’s part of a more holistic pedagogical practice – when we also rethink due dates, policies, syllabi, and assignments – when we ask students to do work that has intrinsic value and authentic audiences. 

Overhauling each of the components mentioned—due dates, policies, syllabi, assignments—has been essential to my practice. Ungrading as implemented in my courses really can’t exist without these other components. It’s all deeply connected.

I’m looking forward to further insights as the semester progresses. Stay tuned!