Student Perspectives on Ungrading

More reflection from my fall course

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

We’re finally back in the groove on my Mississippi campus, after a week-long ice-pocalypse and a delayed start to the semester! I’m just grateful to be out of the house.

I’m not teaching an ungraded course this spring, so I’ll be posting here less often. But I still have thoughts from my fall course to share, as well as some general observations on ungrading, now that I have some breathing room to process the last year. 

I want to start by reflecting on my students’ perspectives from the fall, as collected in midsemester and end-of-semester feedback forms I designed. I asked about their experiences with ungrading and the progress tracker I designed, as well as about their use of AI in their writing. Today, I’ll share some of their thoughts about ungrading. Here are the questions I asked:

Do you feel the grading system in this course supported your learning?

• Yes

• No

• Partially

What do you like best or least about the grading system? How did it support or not support your learning?

I also asked whether or not students would be comfortable with me sharing their answers anonymously on this blog. All students who filled out the forms (15 for the first and the 14 for the second) generously gave me permission to do so. 

There weren’t many differences in response across the two forms. In both forms, the vast majority of students (80-95%) unequivocally said that they felt our grading system supported their learning, with only a handful of students noting that it “partially” supported their learning.

So, the good news is that students overwhelmingly viewed the grading system as a benefit. And it was really interesting to see them talk about why or why not. Below are some common themes I identified in students’ written responses. I have copied and pasted selected responses exactly as I received them, though some have been broken up to be distributed across multiple categories.

Student control, ownership, and accountability

I like the grading system because I feel it gives you more control (more than you already have) over your grade. It gives you a chance to improve on the work you completed and something to strive for as the semester goes on.

I really like how we also have our own say in our grades (if we are reasonable of course) and it made me want to make my work better because I was allowed to go back in an edit all my essays without one and done with one bad grade.

I enjoy that the grading system in this class is able to be discussed and argued. This then gives me a say and answers any question I may have about my grade, rather then just being given one.

Based on the responses, it seems like one of the things that students most valued about ungrading was that it offered them some control and autonomy that they felt were lacking in a traditional grading system. What I’m struck by here, however, is that students often followed up their comments about control with comments about accountability. Yes, they liked that they had a say in their final grade for the course. But rather than making students want to slack off, as many instructors assume it will, the feeling of ownership lead to a stronger sense of motivation. Because students were in control of their grade, they were more eager to invest in their own learning, to ask questions when they didn’t understand, and to improve their work rather than just giving up. 

Because one of my primary goals in moving to ungrading was to increase student autonomy, I’m especially proud of this set of comments. 

Stress relief

What I like about the grading system for this class is that grades aren’t necessarily looming over my head.

I like how it realizes some stress because if i feel like i am doing a lot better then my grade in the class we can talk about it and resolve the issues. 

This was the first class I've ever taken where I had to argue and support what grade I should have and it definitely takes the pressure off that I usually have with classes. Instead of worrying about getting a certain amount of questions right or writing something in 50 minutes , it allows you the freedom to get feedback and try to produce the best.

While this was a prominent theme, I didn’t receive as many comments about ungrading’s potential to relieve stress as I thought I might. But on reflection, this makes sense: having to propose one’s own grade to a college professor is not exactly a stress-free activity.

That said, it seems like the ability to revise and improve their work and to ask questions about feedback they didn’t understand did help many students feel more relaxed about their grade in the course. And, as one student noted, grades are not “looming over” students’ heads at all times. 

Honesty and communication

I like it because it gives me a chance to talk to you and figure out why i got the grade it got and how i could’ve done better overall.

I like being able to talk to you about things and explain why I do poorly on certain things.

It also promotes honesty between the students and the teachers in how you have to be honest with one another in order to get each others reasoning behind your grade

I also think that the two teacher evaluations [i.e., individual grade conferences] are an important part of it because if yu take advantage of the getting no grades, you have to sit face to face with your teacher and explain that you did no work and put in little effort and deserve a bad grade. You are forced t acknowledge the exact reason you deserve the grade you are getting which can also be eye opening and encourage students to work harder.

The many comments I received about honesty and communication came as a bit of a surprise. And I’m trying to figure out exactly why I was surprised, given that I’ve talked about ungrading and student honesty before. I wrote previously that ungrading allowed students to be more honest with me about their experiences in school, their thoughts on the topics they write on, or the personal challenges they’re facing outside the class. 

While I mentioned that ungrading also allowed me to be more honest with students about their work within the class, I guess I hadn’t considered that it also helped students be more honest with me about that work. I build in many checkpoints designed to get both of us on the same page about their progress, to communicate clearly about where students are and what they need to do to improve. And when you remove the need to justify the grades you put on student work, and the incentives for students to contest those grades, it leads to much more productive conversations. 

I was also struck by the final comment above about how face-to-face conferences can increase student accountability. I haven’t thought very deeply about how the vulnerability and honesty of those conversations can motivate students to put in the effort, but it seems that they sometimes do. And it strikes me that the natural consequences here—having to admit to your instructor that you haven’t done very much work—are much more in line with “real world” consequences than the consequences of getting a bad grade on a paper. 

Holistic, growth-centered evaluation

I liked it because i wasn’t graded on each specific assignment and was graded on my overall performance and attendance in the class.

Also something I like is that my grade depends on the amount of effort I put into this class overall, rather than what I may have received on each project I have turned in. This creates a better class environment while also giving everyone the opportunity to succeed.

I liked that the grading system had an aspect that was relating to how we grew throughout the semester.

Even if I’m struggling, but trying to improve it feels like I can still get a good grade.

Many students noted that the holistic nature of the evaluation, as opposed to the weighted average in traditionally-graded classes, helped relieve stress and support learning. They were especially happy that “growth” was taken into consideration in their final grade determinations. 

It’s interesting that while students appreciate this aspect of the grading system, it’s one of the things that I get the most pushback on from fellow instructors. It’s been suggested to me before that assigning final grades based, in part, on growth (and/or labor) means I’m lying to my students or their future employers and hurting those students I most want to help. I obviously don’t see it this way and neither, apparently, do my students. But that’s a topic for another day. 

Focus on learning and improvement

I like how I can focus on learning how to properly write and not just about passing the class.

I loved how I was not focused on the grade I received but more by the outcome in my work and improving my writing skills.

I think trying to improve the sections from the rubric on my papers makes me feel more focused on the paper itself, and not the grade I am getting.

I was so much less focused on a grade and much more focused on doing the assignments to the best of my ability and making myself proud with the work I did rather than the teacher. It also furthered my learning because I was much less focused on doing something just to get it done and get the grade, and more focused on taking in the information provided.

I like the grading system because it is really leaves no room to do bad on a major assignment. For example, your feedback allows for me to understand what I did wrong and how I wink be able to fix it.

This was by far the theme that received the most student comments, and it’s another thing I’m really pleased about. Students seemed to overwhelmingly feel that taking grades out of the equation for individual assignments helped them focus on making those assignments as good as they could possibly be—rather than on getting the highest grade they could possibly get. Enough said. 

Uncertainty about the final grade

I don’t like how I don’t know if I’m passing or not.

It’s confusing and a little scary not knowing where I actually am grading wise since it could bring down my GPA.

I tend to base my work on my grade. When I have a good grade in the class, it makes me want to do better. When I have a bad grade in the class, it is motivation for me to do better. So not having a grade in this class can be confusing for me. 

I don’t like the fact that I get my final grade at the last second

I prefer to have a grade I can constantly look at anytime to see where I am in the class. I do like that you have a say in your final grade, but personally it doesn’t work well for me.

And now to the constructive criticism. By far, the biggest theme of the negative comments I have received about ungrading is that students “don’t know where they’re at” in terms of the final grade during the course of the semester. This is fair. As one student notes above, GPA is very important for undergraduates, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, even in an ungraded class. 

I’ve tried a number of things to alleviate anxiety and clarify expectations about final grades. I created a progress tracker that helps students record and make sense of their work for the course, and also includes detailed information about how we determine final grades. I assign, in collaboration with students, official midterm grades to give them a clear grade checkpoint. I remind students that they can make an appointment with me if they want to talk more about their grade at any point in the semester or if they ever feel anxious about the final grade determinations. 

But I think there are some students for whom the graded, running average is the only thing that feels secure—and in some cases, it may be the primary thing that motivates them. In educational environments that have prioritized grades at the expense of learning, and that have often bred distrust between students and instructors, this is a logical reaction. I’ll keep thinking about how best to support the students for whom ungrading doesn’t work as well. 

Uncertainty about self-evaluation

The only part that I struggle with slightly is that when trying to choose a grade for myself it was a little difficult, because in terms of a letter grade I did not know how you gauged my pieces of work that I have done. This made it hard to see where you believed I stood so it was hard to put a certain grade in fear that I may be aiming too high.

my only thing with it is not knowing how to grade myself properly. Usually we’re given a rubric or some reading followed by questions and we see were we went wrong, but with this system it isn’t about how many questions we get wrong or that we don’t know how to use a comma but measuring our growth.

The other source of uncertainty for students was in evaluating their own work—another fair criticism of ungrading, especially since I have noted my own reservations about student self-assessment in the past. But I think there are two separate kinds of uncertainty in the comments above.

The source of uncertainty in the first comment is the alignment of expectations. The student is worried that, even though we worked quite a bit to align our expectations, they will overestimate their achievement relative to my own assessment. Or that they aren’t qualified to evaluate themselves. I understand the concern; it’s one I would have definitely had as an undergraduate. 

The source of uncertainty in the second comment is about the subjectivity of final grade designations and the difficulty in quantifying or measuring the work of learning. This is a problem inherent to grading of any kind. All I have to say to it at the moment is, “Welcome to my world, student. Welcome to my world.”

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These brief responses gave me more to reflect on than I expected! In my next posts, I’ll talk more about students’ perspectives on other elements of the course. Stay tuned.