The Frictions of Ungrading
Friction is inevitable—but not all friction is bad.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “friction” lately, prompted by two of my favorite writers (and colleagues!) in higher ed. In the last week or so, both
and spoke about friction in their newsletters. Both argued that some amount of friction is necessary for learning and that removing this friction can be harmful to our students.Sarah, for example, points out that since changing our brains requires “a challenge, a wrestling, a grappling,” a learning experience that comes easily may create an illusion of fluency rather than fluency itself:
Marc suggests that AI’s “frictionless chatbot interfaces” and reading assistants, which provide confident, instantaneous responses to user queries, are at odds with true learning experiences that require slowness, deliberateness, and critical examination:
Of course, not all friction is good, and too much of it can make learning more difficult. I’m thinking here about students who are so overwhelmed by the task or information in front of them that they put off engaging with that material until the very last minute. Or students who are so intimidated by the prospect of speaking in class and so concerned about what they might say when called upon that they can’t pay attention to the conversation that’s already happening. While engaging in productive struggle or facing one’s fears can lead to growth, excessive challenge can prevent growth.
The key, of course, is knowing which elements of our courses can be used to create helpful friction and which elements might create unhelpful friction. There are a number of ways we think about this in pedagogy. One is the concept of “desirable difficulties”: we have to consider what level of challenge promotes deep learning while avoiding the kind of difficulties that are undesirable for learning. Another is thinking about different kinds of “rigor.” As Kevin Gannon has noted, we might consider our courses in terms of their “intellectual rigor” and their “logistical rigor.” I heard Thomas Tobin refer to this the other day as “conceptual rigor” and “process rigor.” While we want our students to engage in intellectually challenging activities, we don’t want our courses to create artificial barriers to learning or extra logistical hoops for students to jump through. That’s not desirable difficulty—that’s just difficulty for difficulty’s sake.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of friction in relation to grading. I think there’s a widespread misconception that instructors who adopt alternative grading or even more equitable forms of traditional grading are trying to create a frictionless experience for students. Specifically, some believe that our main goal is to shield students from negative criticism in the form of bad grades so we can sit around singing kum-ba-yah all day with our classes. I’m talking about this kind of trash from the Fordham Institute, in which Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity is satirically renamed “Grading for Niceness” and imagined to be adopted by the fictional “Kindly Middle School” headed by “Principal Noma Faleyers.”
I do wonder what these people have against being kind to students, but I digress. As appealing as I, personally, find kindness, my primary goal is not really to protect students’ feelings. My goal is to remove the unhelpful frictions associated with grades so that students can better handle the helpful frictions associated with learning. I could spend a whole post working through examples here. But in general I’ll note that grades can create unproductive frictions like fear of failure or lack of self-efficacy. This, in turn, leads some students to avoid the more productive frictions of taking intellectual risks or persisting through challenging tasks. Minimizing grades allows me to turn down the “bad friction” dial so I can turn up the “good friction” dial. It’s not about removing friction altogether but about creating the right kinds of friction.
On the other hand, I occasionally hear people suggest that alternative grading creates too much friction for students. This criticism takes a couple of forms. One is that alternative grading systems are so unfamiliar for students that they create unnecessary burdens and stress. This is a valid critique, and I’ve seen some alternative grading systems that seem to me so logistically complex that they risk impeding intellectual rigor. In other words, students are so preoccupied with figuring out how to navigate the grading system that they can’t focus on learning.
and encourage us to “keep it simple” when designing alternative grading schemes—good advice for making sure we’re creating the right kinds of friction.I strongly believe, however, that the very unfamiliarity of alternative grading can create productive friction for students as well. Alternative grading can challenge students’ (and instructors’) ideas about what grades are, what they’re good for, why they’re needed. It can also cause some students to re-examine their relationship to grades, and even their very identity, in ways that can be transformative.
In combing through some grading research the other day, I came across this study of a gradeless classroom in a Danish business school. It’s one of the few I’ve been able to find so far in which student responses to new forms of grading are characterized as ambivalent rather than mostly positive. The authors note that the students in their study “experience both emancipatory and constraining effects when not receiving grades” in a pass/fail context. The emancipatory effects reported by students included less stress, more intrinsic motivation, and the sense that they were a part of a collaborative learning community. Constraining effects included worry about their preparation for future graded courses, less motivation to engage in parts of the class that didn’t interest them, and the loss of identity that results when grades are no longer available as measures of self-worth.
Whether these effects are a bug or a feature of gradeless learning, and indeed whether they are in fact “constraining” at all, will depend entirely on your perspective. For me, many of the negative feelings students expressed here are forms of helpful friction. Are students concerned about how to gauge their performance when there’s no one around to rank them? Perhaps this is an opportunity to develop skills in self-assessment. Do students struggle to engage with uninteresting material without the threat of a bad grade hanging over their head? Maybe they’re preparing themselves for a future in which grades won’t be a primary motivator. Are they questioning their identities now that the self-concept of “straight-A student” is off the table? Good. A student’s self-worth should not depend on such arbitrary and unreliable signifiers of achievement.
Are these frictions uncomfortable for students? Yes. Are such frictions productive? In many cases, yes, absolutely.
This is not to say that there aren’t negative frictions associated with ungrading or that the frictions above are not debilitating for some students. I do think students’ (understandable) anxiety about their final grade, the difficulty of measuring concrete progress toward a goal, or the general lack of familiar structures can be unhelpful forms of friction for many. To the extent that such frictions increase stress and impede learning, I try to minimize them. But I’m hopeful that some level of discomfort with alternative grading can lead students to new insights about school, about the world beyond school, and about themselves.
Happy end of semester to those of you who are celebrating. I know it’s been a rough one and that many of us are not exactly ending on a high note, especially given the violent responses we’ve seen to student protests across the country. Yesterday on my own campus, a small group of pro-Palestinian protestors were overwhelmed by more than 200 jeering counter-protestors who made racist remarks and threw water bottles. Of course, the University of Mississippi has a long history of this sort of thing. I’m reminded that friction, in addition to being a prerequisite for learning, is also a prerequisite for justice.
Finally, I’m aware that my posts over the last few months have been a little more abstract than the in-the-weeds chronicles with which I began this blog last May. If you’re bored, stick with me. I’ll be redesigning my Writing 101 course over the summer and teaching it in the fall. So stay tuned for more on those course revisions and more classroom experiments to come.
Wonderful post, Emily. I agree, we need to find more nuance in exploring positive examples of friction in the learning process and how this impacts alternative grading.
I've been a student at an ungraded school, and it worked well for me. We received written evaluations, which were written more as suggestions for improvement than final judgments. What we did well was equally acknowledged. I also taught at a learning center without grades. The approach for the high schoolers was to give them a pass or a do-over. There were no fails. Knowing that they would have to do things over until they got it right seemed to lead all the students to trying their best.
I agree with you about a healthy amount of friction. It seems that prior to entering school with its grades and tests, preschoolers are able to challenge themselves to just the right level, given the appropriate environment to explore. I wonder how that would be best replicated in an alternative setting for elementary students.