The Life or Death Consequences of Grading

Is ungrading appropriate for fields like medicine and engineering?

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Unsurprisingly, public discussions about ungrading often generate questions and pushback from instructors and other interested parties. One response ungraders often get is that the kind of work we do with our students is fine for a discipline like writing but potentially disastrous for other disciplines, particularly those in which students’ mastery of a subject may have life-or-death consequences.

Many questions about this arise in good faith. After all, different ways of learning do require different approaches to assessment. Other criticisms are less than helpful. Here I refer to comments like, “I hope you're not teaching medicine, or engineering, or anything else that actually matters”—a real response I received on a social media post a few months ago about my discomfort with assigning final grades.

Let’s set aside for the moment (though I am loath to do so) the implication that writing, unlike medicine and engineering, doesn’t “actually matter.” It's true enough that my students’ level of proficiency in writing is not immediately consequential to anybody beyond themselves and their future teachers and employers. If they don’t become strong writers, no very dire consequences are likely to ensue, at least on an individual level. No one, presumably, will die. 

But I’m bothered by the idea that ungrading is only good for some disciplines, and I think there are several misguided assumptions that undergird it. The first assumption is that I assess student work the way I do because proficiency isn’t important to me. I’ll readily admit that I don’t care for some of the traditional ways we’ve defined “proficiency” or “mastery,” especially in student writing, and I think these concepts are a lot more slippery than we generally believe. I’ll also admit that, in many cases, helping students develop meaningful relationships to or enthusiasm about writing seems more useful to me than assuring that they meet particular writing standards, at least in their first year of college. Sure, I and others ungrade because we want students to develop an appreciation for our subject matter, and bad grades often nip that in the bud. 

But I also ungrade because I want students to write and succeed at a high level and grades get in the way of that. Grades keep my students focused on GPAs and transcripts rather than on growth and improvement. They draw attention away from the careful feedback I provide on student work—and when students do engage with feedback, it’s primarily to game a points system rather than to further their learning. Grades ask students to focus on producing rather than processing, generating a paper rather than developing as a writer. In many cases, they stunt proficiency rather than encouraging it. And if we really believe, as I do, that grades inhibit learning, then we should be even more invested in grade reform for disciplines where learning is life-or-death.

The idea that ungrading isn’t good for disciplines that “actually matter” also seems to assume that without grades there would be no way to motivate students to undertake difficult tasks and no way to determine, certify, or communicate that they have “mastered the material.” I don’t have time to get into all the ways that this is wrong in the short space of this blog, though fortunately I’ve addressed some of them before. At the risk of repeating myself: research tells us that grades are good at motivating students to get high grades but not so good at motivating students to learn. And there are many ways to assess student work and to communicate their progress without reducing their achievement to a letter grade. In fact, since grades aren’t particularly good at measuring student learning, investing in creative alternatives may offer us more robust ways of understanding and transmitting information about that learning.

When people sarcastically ask me if I would want my surgeon to have gone through school with no grades, I would say yes, absolutely. And I would counter with another question: “Would you want your surgeon to have spent their time in school trying to game the GPA system or would you want them to have focused their energies on actually gaining the knowledge and skills they would need to excel in their field or serve their community?” Because that is, in part, what I’m trying to accomplish by minimizing grades.

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But all this is just a prelude to what I really want to talk about. I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago that made me think that asking about the efficacy of alternative grading in these scenarios really gets things backwards. What if traditional grading, rather than alternative grading, is the thing that produces potentially dire consequences in life-or-death fields? What if our choices about grading schemes themselves are matters of life and death? 

Recently, Jeffrey Schinske, a biology instructor at Foothill College, was a guest on The Grading Podcast, hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. Jeff is a co-author of the influential article “Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently),” one of my first introductions to the problems of traditional grades and a piece I cite all the time. He will also be a keynote speaker at this year’s virtual Grading Conference (register now!).  

In the episode, Sharona, Bos, and Jeff were discussing Jeff’s experiences teaching historically marginalized students in pre-health fields. He observed that given the kinds of racial disparities we see in our healthcare systems, making sure that his students reach their goal of becoming nurses or other health professionals is a matter of life and death. Many of our health disparities result in part from a “mismatch” or “lack of concordance” between the identities of patients and those of their healthcare providers or a lack of cultural competence in healthcare more generally. “If my students don’t get to be nurses,” Jeff noted, “there’s the real possibility that that will cause unnecessary death.” 

Unfortunately, our pedagogical practices, including our grading systems, often stand in the way of these students’ progress. If students can’t make it through gateway prerequisites because they come from under-resourced school districts and don’t have appropriate levels of preparation, then they can’t proceed to higher level courses. If they can’t take those courses, or don’t achieve high grades in them, they can’t become nurses. And as Jeff observes, if they can’t become nurses, our healthcare fields, and the patients they serve, suffer. 

And before I get more angry comments: the solution being proposed here is not to lower academic standards or hand out As in the name of equity to students who couldn’t hack it in a traditional grading system. What proponents of alternative grading and other progressive practices are suggesting is that we create evaluation structures that actually help students learn and grow rather than ones that are designed to gatekeep or “weed out” students for a major or a field. That we re-examine our pedagogical approaches and curricula to ensure that what we’re doing and teaching is really supporting students’ development rather than setting up arbitrary hoops for them to jump through. (One example from Jeff’s research: the traditional A&P course.)

So maybe what we should be worried about is not whether alternative grading is appropriate for fields in which student learning is a life-or-death matter, but whether traditional grading is. 

As far as teaching writing is concerned: I’m not in the business of saving lives, but that doesn’t mean that my students’ investment in writing is unimportant. Like Jeff, I teach many historically marginalized students whose educational systems have failed them due to discrimination, lack of funding and resources, etc. And just as in healthcare, many of these students are the people our world most desperately needs in influential positions. 

A high percentage of students come into my courses with the idea that writing is another hoop to jump through, often having been told that they aren’t very good at it. They may see writing as a skill that could benefit them as professionals, obliquely, somewhere in the distant future. They rarely see it as a way to process, develop, and hone their own thoughts or to convey those thoughts to others in sharp, persuasive, and meaningful ways. They rarely even recognize that their own ideas might be important or worth conveying—or even that they have ideas. They’re most focused on getting a grade and getting out. 

I do my best to convince these students that the world needs to hear from them, and that they can develop (and are developing) the skills necessary to make themselves heard among many different audiences. My grading system is one important means of accomplishing this goal. It encourages students to write in ways that align with their values and aspirations. It gives them real chances to respond to feedback and engage in revision without worrying so much about what the teacher wants or what will earn the most points. It rewards them for labor and improvement rather than for having gone to a good high school and come into the class with strong writing skills. I hope it helps them see the ways that they can continue to grow as writers and use their knowledge and abilities to contribute meaningfully to the communities in which they find themselves. 

Does any of this “actually matter”? I’ll defer to the medical, engineering, and business acolytes who seem to have designated themselves as authorities on this question. But I think it does.