The Autonomy-Accountability Paradox

How collaborative grading gives students the freedom to take responsibility

Photo by Jose Fontano on Unsplash

I think one of the biggest fears about collaborative grading is that if you give students too much control over their grade, they won’t do the work to earn it. That is: too much autonomy means too little accountability. We must assign grades and points to students so that they’ll take responsibility for their learning. We can’t let students propose their own grades because they’ll just propose an A, regardless of the work they’ve done.

This is a logical train of thought. After all, in traditionally-graded courses, grades often seem like the only thing motivating students to do any work. And even then, it’s pretty touch and go. If we don’t attach grades to students’ assignments, what will hold them accountable? If they can’t even take responsibility for their attendance when there are points attached, what will happen when we take the points away? If they don’t work for the grades we assign, how much less will they work for grades when they’re in charge of assigning them?

I get why people think this, logically. But in practice, I find that these assumptions are often wrong. In my classes, at least, it seems that giving students more autonomy does not, in fact, result in lower levels of accountability. I’m always struck by this when I receive student comments about my grading system at the end of the semester. Here are a few representative examples from my last two surveys (shared with students’ permission):

• I like the grading system a lot. I like how we have a conversation about what we think our grades should be. It supported my learning because it helped keep me accountable for turning in my work on time.

• I love how open the grading is. It gives us students the responsibility to obtain our grades. I want to have good grades, and this way of grading leaves it up to me. I have a weird way of learning, so sometimes, basic classes and grades don’t represent me as a student. This way of grading allows me to be accountable for myself, and there is no excuse for my grade because it was up to me. This also makes me want to show up and put the work in because I know it[’s] all for me, and it makes me more proud of my work.

• 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[d] edit all my essays without one and done with one bad grade.

I want to clarify here: I talk with students about how this grading system is designed to support their learning, but we never discuss the fact that it makes them accountable for their own work. They come to these conclusions entirely on their own.

I should also say that not every student feels that collaborative grading keeps them accountable. I received this comment from a student last fall:

I think the only downside has been keeping myself accountable not even necessarily with work/assignments but with attendance. I found I was quite stressed with higher stakes exams coming up causing me to forget or not be able to prioritize this class as well.

I think the experience of students prioritizing work for less-flexible classes will feel familiar to many collaborative graders. While some students have told me that the autonomy they have over their attendance in my class makes them more, not less, motivated to attend, others have struggled to take responsibility for this aspect of their engagement.

Additionally, I’m not sure whether students in my collaboratively graded classes actually behave more responsibly or whether they just feel more responsible for their own behaviors. It’s possible the grading system does not increase accountability so much as help students better understand their own role in their education.

Even still: giving students more autonomy over their grades does not appear to decrease their levels of accountability. It may even help students take more responsibility for their work.

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Why does this feel paradoxical, or at least counterintuitive, to us? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I suspect there are some vestiges of behaviorism at work. Behaviorism was a school of thought pioneered by people like Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner.¹ I’m veering way out of my expertise here (psychologists: please don’t come for me), but I think one way of characterizing behaviorism as posited by these thinkers is that humans and animals can be conditioned to behave in certain ways through positive and negative reinforcement or systems of reward and punishment. Think: drooling dogs and rats in cages, who are trained to respond to specific stimuli in specific ways.

Skinner’s ideas apparently had some influence on the development of modern schooling in the first half of the twentieth century. And while twenty-first century psychologists have moved on from behaviorism, some educational structures informed by this theory of human behavior remain intact. Arguably, our grading systems are a prime example.

This was partially the subject of Alfie Kohn’s 1993 book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes, an extended critique of Skinnerian behaviorism and its various manifestations in work, school, and parenting. Kohn argues here and elsewhere that the extrinsic reward of a grade undermines learning by dampening intrinsic motivation—an argument that will likely be familiar to most alternative graders.

Kohn and others base their arguments on more modern theories of human motivation, like self-determination theory. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that one of the major pillars of self-determination theory is autonomy: having a sense of choice and acting on one’s own volition is a major psychological need—and, it turns out, an important element of human motivation. It’s hard for people to feel motivated when they feel they have no control.

So, maybe we’re surprised that more autonomy in grading = more accountability in schoolwork because the grading systems we’ve been working with are all tangled up with behaviorist thought. When we start thinking in terms of self-determination theory, it’s really not surprising at all.

But perhaps the relationship between autonomy and accountability I’ve described also feels counterintuitive because under current conditions, we do seem to need carrots and sticks, at least in some form, to make this whole thing go. Here’s a thought experiment to illustrate what I mean:

If, on the first day of class next semester, I promised all my first-year writing students that they would receive an A for the course whether or not they completed any work for it or even attended our class meetings, how many would show up the following day, just for the learning? A few, probably. In other kinds of teaching contexts, maybe more—maybe all. It’s not impossible; I’ve heard of this happening. But for my students, in my required gen ed course, at my SEC-football-and-Greek-life-obsessed state flagship? Not many.

This is not, contrary to what some may believe, because students are naturally lazy or deficient. It’s because we’re not operating in a culture that values learning or a system that supports it. Students have been working under the threat of punishment and promise of reward for so long that it barely even occurs to many of them that there are other reasons to engage in school. They also know that their transcripts and resumes matter immensely for their future economic opportunities and whatever intellectual or personal growth they experience along the way will probably be secondary, at best.

This system makes it difficult for students to develop any real sense of accountability. They’re always working to please someone else, to earn that reward or avoid that punishment from whoever’s doling it out this time: the parents, teachers, or employers who set the deadlines and make the rules. You can’t be accountable for yourself if you’re always under someone else’s control. You can’t take ownership over something you don’t own.

We, as instructors, think we’re helping students develop a sense of accountability when we double down on behaviorism, adding more carrots and sticks to the learning process. “Stricter rules! These kids have to learn responsibility!” But what we’re actually doing is exacerbating the problem: hampering students’ autonomy, forestalling the development of any real accountability, and trapping both them and ourselves in a never-ending cycle of mere educational transactions. You do the work, you get the reward, over and over and over.

So, this is part of what I’m trying to do with collaborative grading: change the conditions of school so that students can develop a sense of agency and accountability in their own learning. I am trying to give students the freedom to take responsibility.

And, okay, maybe I’ve got to have some extrinsic motivators to get that process started. They’ve got to hang with me long enough for me to convince them that there are other ways to approach school and life. When they’re working their butts off for their other classes, they need a little push to remember that their writing class is important, too. And maybe some forms of extrinsic motivation aren’t so bad. I, myself, love a gold star. I’ll do anything for praise. I am sometimes motivated to complete unpleasant tasks simply for the sweet, sweet dopamine hit I get from checking them off my to-do list.

But what I ultimately want is for us to live in a world where I don’t have to hang rewards and punishments over students’ heads to get them to engage in the deeply interesting work of learning. The extrinsic motivators I use now are, for the most part, concessions to an imperfect system. I want to change that system.

Maybe that’s idealistic, but I think we can do it, eventually. I think we can help students, and ourselves, take baby steps away from the transactional, reward-based model we’ve built and into more meaningful learning experiences. I think we can start by prioritizing student autonomy.

1. Incidentally, I learned this week from John Warner’s excellent new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI that B. F. Skinner was also “obsessed with the creation of a teaching machine” that would provide students with “immediate feedback” and “self-paced learning,” ultimately freeing teachers from…doing the work of teaching, I guess? Sound familiar to anyone?