(More) Student Perspectives on Collaborative Grading

What I learned from last semester

My classroom for fall 2025, as seen through a glass window at the back. I’m told by faculty who have offices in the building that the room is affectionately known as “the fish bowl.”

All my best teaching insights come from reflecting on a class after it’s over—primarily by thinking back on the grade conferences I had with students and hearing what they had to say on their end-of-semester evaluations. (I make my own evaluation form in order to ask the kinds of questions I’m most interested in.)

Over the last few years, I’ve written about how student perspectives have shaped my own thoughts on the relationship between autonomy and accountability, how we teach reading, generative AI, progress tracking in collaboratively graded courses, and collaborative grading itself.

This year, my evaluations asked questions focused on collaborative grading, as usual, along with questions about the new AI policies I had implemented in the class. This week, I’ll share what students had to say about collaborative grading, and in two weeks, I’ll write about their thoughts on the course’s AI policy. (All comments are shared with their permission.)

Here were some common themes:

Learning over grades

As in past semesters, students confirmed that our grading practices supported their learning in the course, with only one respondent (out of 16) saying it “partially” supported their learning. No one said it did not support their learning. Additionally, as in past semesters, many students reported that the grading system helped them focus on learning and improvement rather than on simply getting a good grade. Based on everything I’ve read about student perspectives on “ungrading,” this is the most common feature of their experience with it.

Student voice and “fairness”

This semester, I had a higher than usual number of students express that they liked “having a say” in their grade and that they thought the grading system was “fair.” I got a few comments like these:

I like that time was taken to hear what we think our grade should be. I think this supported my learning giving me a chance to explain my work and effort from my perspective.

I like how our grade was most times discussed with our teacher about what we thought we deserved and what she thought we deserved also.

I wonder if the focus on student voice here is because several students had, as they told me in the first weeks of the course, bad experiences with grades in high school. For instance, a couple of them mentioned getting low participation grades because their teacher “didn’t like them.” This perception may or may not be accurate, of course. Thinking back to my own high school days, I remember some students making this complaint as a way to evade responsibility for their choices. But I also remember many teachers who absolutely would punish students with bad grades when they engaged in behaviors the teacher didn’t like—even when those behaviors weren’t particularly disruptive or could have been addressed more productively.

Regardless, several students seemed to feel that their past grades were not really representative of their work or their learning, and they appreciated the chance to explain their perspectives to the instructor. Students and I don’t always agree about their work, but I always find it useful to hear their thoughts on it. That is, apparently, a welcome novelty.

Valuing student efforts and feeling “seen”

There seemed to be a feeling among students that their efforts often go unrecognized in traditionally-graded classes. Several students this time around expressed gratitude that the grading system valued their labor and growth alongside the actual quality of their work. A couple noted that this is especially helpful to students who struggle with the material:

Most of my teachers do their assignments based on accuracy, and they don’t actually get to the kids who have a hard time understanding. Your grading scale makes me feel seen as a student because we have those conferences, and that helps out a lot.

I should clarify that effort is not the main criteria we use to determine final grades, but it is an important one. It’s my belief that every student, including those who come to us from under-resourced school districts, should be able to succeed in college if they can demonstrate steady growth and improvement.

Rubrics?

I also got a higher than usual number of comments that referenced rubrics:

The parts that I liked best about this grading system were that each assignment we submitted wasn’t tied strictly to a points based rubric

I do like that our grades aren’t limited to a rubric.

I find these comments a little puzzling, since I do use a kind of rubric for individual assignments, along with a checklist of evidence I would generally expect students to provide for proposing specific letter grades in the course. (Maybe the latter is not quite a rubric, but it seems like one to me.) I don’t think students and I have a shared definition here. Sometimes when they say “rubric,” they seem to mean something like “writing formula”: a list of specific requirements concerning word count, paragraph length, number of quotations, sentence order, etc. that they need to meet to attain an A on a paper. Sometimes they just mean that the teacher provides evaluation criteria to which there are points attached.

Either way, students seem to find these kinds of evaluation criteria limiting. At first, I think they can feel a little adrift without strict requirements for their writing. But by the end of the semester, many students express appreciation for the freedom to make their own writing decisions, without being penalized if something didn’t work well the first time.

Not knowing “where you stand”

As for criticisms of collaborative grading, there’s always at least one student who is uncomfortable with not knowing “where they stand” in the course throughout the semester. For example:

Sometimes I would like to know exactly how you feel I am doing in the class with like a letter grade, instead of establishing it at the end of the semester.

I developed a student progress tracking document in part to address this concern. But I don’t think the concern can be totally eliminated without going back to a running, weighted average. This is what students are used to; it’s what makes them feel comfortable. Given the stakes of grades, some are simply not going to feel secure without one. That’s fair. But I also think that this discomfort is a form of desirable difficulty, a friction that can lead to reflection and growth. As much as I value student ease and comfort, I value student learning more.

The other interesting part of these comments is when students say things like “I would like to know exactly how you feel I am doing in the class” (emphasis mine). Of course, I’m the subject matter expert, and ultimately, I have final authority over the grade. So, “how I feel” about student work is important. But at some point during their college careers, students are going to have to start learning to make their own judgments about their work. While they’ll continue to get feedback from others, they won’t be graded forever. Helping students develop habits of self-assessment at the beginning of their college careers is, I think, beneficial.

Moving beyond school as transaction

Finally, in some of the exchanges I had with students, I got a tiny inkling that the grading system helped a few of them move beyond a “schoolish” or transactional mindset: the idea that the work they did in the course was a series of tokens that could be exchanged for good grades, which might, in turn, be exchanged for a good job. This may be wishful thinking on my part, because it’s really the one main thing I want students to leave my course with, the “threshold concept,” as it were, that allows them to truly experience and benefit from learning.

I do have a spiel I give students about this on the last day of class. They aren’t ready for it in the first weeks. But after a semester’s worth of operating without grades (at least in one arena), some of them may be starting to understand school differently. So, for my parting words, I make a pitch to them that they should start taking their education seriously, as a thing that’s valuable in its own right rather than as a progression of hoops to jump through or series checkboxes to tick on the way to some “indefinite future reward,” as John Warner calls it. I try to sell them on the idea that just “getting through” school—cramming for chemistry and then forgetting everything you ever knew about it after the final, or asking ChatGPT to write your papers for that history survey—is a very expensive mistake. That their future livelihoods are important, but their lives should be about more than making themselves employable.

Honestly, I feel silly standing in front of students on the last day of class, talking like this in such a ridiculously earnest way. It’s so hard to tell how it lands, and I feel like I get a lot of blank stares in return.

But occasionally, a student will say something in a final grade conference that makes me think they were actually listening, and they got it. And sometimes I think that maybe they don’t get it now, but they’ll remember it, and they’ll come back to it later. And of course, some of them will probably never buy it at all. There’s only so much we can do with 3.5 months, working against a system that is, outside a few scattered classes or experiences, all-encompassing.

However, we do what we can. And I think collaborative grading, more than any other single intervention, helps.

---

I’ll be back in two weeks with more about my students’ perspectives on my new AI policy. Stay tuned!