Ten Grading Memories

Excavating my experiences with grades

In the early stages of my ungrading practice nearly four years ago, I, like many others, read the collection Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum.¹ This book was my first introduction to many people who are now my pedagogical role models, and I’ve been revisiting it lately for various reasons. I had forgotten some chapters of it and recalled others more thoroughly. But one thing that’s been burned on my brain ever since I read it is the opening of Laura Gibbs’s chapter “Let’s Talk about Grading”—not so much for what Gibbs says in the chapter (though that’s great too) but for the activity she asks readers to do:

“My own ungrading practices evolved from a long history of dissatisfaction with grading, both as a student and as a teacher. And so I’d like to suggest you do a quick study of your own dissatisfaction: try jotting down ten memories that come to mind when you think about grading, any memories at all. A few memories will come quickly, experiences that have crystallized and probably already guided your grading practices. If you delve deeper, though, you might find some memories that are rawer, less routinized, and thus offering new insight into your grading dissatisfaction.”

Gibbs shares her own list of memories at the end of the chapter—and some of them are quite vivid.

I admit: when books ask me to do activities like this, I usually don’t. I just breeze on by, ignoring my own advice about the importance of self-reflection and assuming that I’ll get the same thing out of the chapter whether or not I pause to engage. So, it was unusual for me that I felt compelled to follow Gibbs’s advice and jot down some notes on the blank page opposite the chapter’s opening. The notes are sloppy and incoherent, and I can’t remember, now, exactly what memories some of them referred to. 

But I do remember that this activity was very generative for me. I thought I would return to the exercise, re-do it properly, and share it with you, in the hopes that you’ll find my memories as entertaining and instructive as I found Gibbs’s. So, with some level of vulnerability, I present…

My ten grading memories in chronological order

In high school, I was a straight-A student, but math was not my strongest subject (surprise, surprise). One time I received a B on an exam in an advanced math course and got angry with myself. When a group of us went to the bathroom right after class, I slammed the stall door so hard that the other girls thought there was something wrong with me. 

In high school English and Spanish we regularly had vocabulary competitions in which the winner was awarded with extra points on tests. Memorizing vocabulary came easily to me, so I won pretty much every time. Once, a fellow student complained loudly to the teacher that I always got the points even though I didn’t need them. Before that, I sometimes threw the competitions, intentionally letting other students win. After that, I never did. 

My worst high school subject was physics, and my grades in that class were slightly lower than I was used to. Fortunately, I was able to manage an A by participating avidly in class and cashing in my “bathroom points.” Because I didn’t go to the bathroom during class at all over the course of the semester, the teacher added three bonus points to my final average, taking it up half a letter grade.

I and a few other girls were in the running for valedictorian of our high school. One of them was in my Spanish class, and I was jealous of her excellent pronunciation. Once, I happened to see that she scored lower on a test than me and was consequently elated that my chances of getting valedictorian had gone up. I feel bad about this now. 

When I got to college I had no idea what to expect, academically. When I received my first essay back, it was an 89. Until my next paper was graded, I was convinced I was going to become a “B student,” a fate (apparently) worse than death. 

I took my first English major course the second semester of my freshman year, which was really too early. My final 13-page final paper for that class was returned with an A and the comment “Not exactly compelling but well-written and coherent.” Something beside the A, a + or - symbol, had been scribbled out.

I got a B on one of my first poems for a college creative writing class, which didn’t matter very much for my average but really rankled me anyway. 

In the second year of my master’s program, I taught two sections of English composition per semester. I had one student who was personable, bright, and wrote the best essays in the class. But he was absent all the time and consistently turned in his essays only half-finished. Given his writing abilities, I was sorry to have to flunk him, and I’m even more sorry about it now. 

When I was TA-ing for a class in my PhD, I had one first-year student who worked super hard on her papers but could never quite get there. Even though she met with me to discuss her work and revised based on my notes, the final versions were somehow just as bad as the originals. She was ultimately unsatisfied with her grade and wrote lengthy, angry comments on my evaluations. I felt her inability to succeed was both her fault and mine.

In grad school, we all knew that grades didn’t matter much. Everyone was going to get an A unless a professor was trying to send you a wake-up call or wanted to signal that you really didn’t belong in grad school. But the A could be either a plain A or an A-. I was always disappointed when I received an A-. 

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I could keep going with these, but I’ll stop, as the exercise recommends, at ten. Most of these memories make me feel silly, looking back, but I think they provide useful points for reflection.

The first thing I’m struck by is how many negative memories came up for me even though I have had comparatively good experiences with grades. I didn’t have to work very hard to get A’s at any point in my academic career. And while my parents always conveyed to me the importance of education and expected me to do my best, they never pressured me about my grades or discussed the importance of my GPA. Any pressure I felt was from expectations I put on myself or stresses that arose from the incentive structures of the school system itself. 

It makes sense, then, that many of these memories come from my final years of high school when the title of valedictorian was up for grabs. In earlier years, I wanted A’s but was not driven by them. I don’t remember being particularly bothered by B’s on my middle school progress reports, for example. But the competition for valedictorian seems to have brought out the worst in me. I wasn’t trying harder than I used to—I always put my best foot forward academically—but I was more worried about my GPA and more competitive with the other students. So competitive, apparently, that I avoided using the bathroom during physics class to secure extra points on my final grade (taking advantage of a bizarre and frankly ableist incentive). 

I’ve mostly forgiven myself for being a silly teenager, but I’m left wondering: why do we do this to children? What’s the point? The sense of accomplishment I felt about being valedictorian is in direct proportion to the crushing inadequacy I would have felt had I lost the title. I’m confident that I would still have been salty about it to this day. And why honor me for academic accomplishments when, as my classmates astutely observed, such accomplishments came easily to me, and I had every possible advantage in securing them? As adolescents, grades were a big part of our self-worth, at least for some of us, and they poisoned our views of ourselves and our interactions with one another. 

It’s not only children, of course. Even though GPAs didn’t really matter in graduate school, a single minus on a final course grade had the power to make me feel bad about myself, if only temporarily. And I’m not sure what it accomplished. I got the message that, yes, I could hack it in grad school but that I wasn’t quite as sharp as some of the other students in the class. I’m not sure whether or not these were the messages that my professors actually meant to send by awarding A-’s. But those are the messages I received. Was this really necessary? Was it helpful?

The same goes for my first semester of college, when every letter, number, and comment on a paper was some kind of signal about whether or not I was worthy of being there. Of course, such an educational system was practically designed for students like me, and I was never in danger of failing or even in serious danger of earning less than an A-! But I was still somehow convinced that I might not make the cut in college. Even now, thinking about the negative comments I received on my early papers makes me cringe. 

These experiences now deeply inform my teaching and grading practices, but that was not always the case. Even though I lived or died by professorial judgment throughout my entire college career, that didn’t prevent me from rendering what I’m sure were overly-harsh judgments of my own students when I first started teaching. I try not to dwell too much on these early missteps. But they’re good reminders of how much my teaching and grading practices have evolved.

There’s much more reflection I could pull out of these experiences, but I think that’s enough for today. I’m interested to hear about your experiences of grading and how they’ve influenced your practice now. I encourage you, whenever you have some free time, to try out Gibbs’s reflection activity. You might, like me, generate more insights than you think. 

1. You can hear Susan speak about the book at this year’s Grading Conference!