Ungrading and Student Honesty
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This blog post is part of an ongoing series of reflections completed during my Spring 2023 writing course. While the post is being published in July of 2023, it was originally written on March 24, 2023.
One thing I’ve been reflecting on this week, in another feedback lull, is how ungrading and other changes to my pedagogy that I’ve implemented over the past few years have seemed to increase the amount of honesty between myself and my students. This happens in a number of ways and with a number of consequences, both good and…well—uncomfortable.
One of the biggest advantages of my newer approaches is that I can be more honest about what I want and expect from students without The Grade standing in the way of our communication. I don’t have to worry about justifying my grading all the time—I can just give honest feedback, responding to student work as a reader or coach rather than as a judge. I can also be more honest about my ambivalence around grading and around many educational systems in general.
Just as importantly, students are much more transparent with me about their thoughts and feelings regarding…well, everything. We have honest conversations about grades, about school, and about the topics they write on. One of my hopes in implementing ungrading was that students would stop worrying so much about what I thought or what I wanted to hear and would write for themselves rather than writing to please me. This has turned out to be the case. When I invite students to be honest about their experiences, they actually are honest. Without the threat of “losing points,” students seem less apprehensive about expressing attitudes I wouldn’t endorse or opinions I might not share.
Most of the time, this is a positive exchange on all sides. Students write something that conflicts with my views, and we have a generative conversation about it, writer to writer. Or they express frustrations with the school system, find a sympathetic ear, and gain confidence in their thinking and writing. Or they speak candidly about their struggles, and we identify possible solutions.
But student honesty can also be troubling. Sometimes they’re honest about pretty heartbreaking things: ongoing mental illness, health issues, family or interpersonal problems, poor living conditions. I try to listen to these students empathetically and refer them to helpful resources where appropriate. But obviously doing more than that is beyond my range of qualifications—which can also be heartbreaking.
It can be just as difficult when students express things I find deeply flawed, problematic, or even morally bankrupt. They sometimes share things about their personal behaviors and values that I don’t think they would have admitted to other teachers: how they’ve cheated in the past, how they’ve clashed with previous teachers, what they really think about the value of a college education. I’m being a bit vague here to protect my students’ privacy. But they can be surprisingly direct about some pretty heavy stuff when given the opportunity.
To be clear, I appreciate and encourage that honesty. I want students to share their authentic thoughts and feelings, even when we disagree. I want them to tell me about their struggles, especially the bad ones, so I can get them the help they need. I think it’s best to get all these things out in the open so that they can be addressed, not swept under the rug so that we can go about our business pretending like the things students describe don’t inform every aspect of our interactions with one another.
But that means I do have to deal with those things. I have to decide how I’ll respond to students in the moment and afterward. I have to choose whether, when, and how to address assumptions I find problematic. I have to figure out how and when to direct students to campus resources. I have to deal with mental and emotional fallout for myself, the loss of sleep from thinking about that one student who said that horrible thing.
Karen Costa wrote on Twitter recently that teaching work is, increasingly, care work. And perhaps this is only tangentially related to the focus of this blog, but I think that implementing ungrading and other equity-focused pedagogical practices makes it more likely that we’ll be doing more care work with our students.
Earlier in the semester, I moderated a panel conversation on the future of grading. I remember one panelist, Courtney Sobers, saying (either on Twitter or in the webinar) that she wasn’t implementing ungrading this semester because it was just too much, mentally and emotionally. I can understand why. Ungrading and its attendant practices can take a toll, and we should be honest about that.
Stay tuned for even more honesty.
Thanks for sharing this Emily. I appreciate this framing of teaching as the work of caring for students as whole persons, with all the attendant messiness of real life. While challenging, this work of care, even more than the skills that students learn in our courses is what has the most significant influence on them.
In a world where education is increasingly becoming focused on acquiring a certain set of skills or credentials, ungrading and the conversations that it fosters are likely to be a welcome balm for students wrestling with what it looks like to live a flourishing life.
I really do appreciate you being willing to share this journey, and the difficulties that come with it. I can imagine that fully moving to "ungrading" takes these kinds of tolls. You have mentioned in other posts about the positive sides of ungrading. I appreciate that too.
A small speculative comment: I teach at a small liberal arts institution, where I know my students relatively well (25-student classrooms is average), and the institution I work at is known to be fairly "high touch." Even without formally using Ungrading, I get a lot of the kind of sharing you mention. I think part of this is that I'm a woman, part that I'm approachable and have several un-grading-like practices in my class; and that the post-pandemic college student is much more likely to be the kind of student with challenging issues to share. I have a colleague in business who goes out of his way to be "avuncular" with his students; he reports similar kinds of sharing. I imagine it is more intensive with an Ungrading model, but I think we are going to have more of this kind of sharing either way. And your series is making clear the benefits of Ungrading in this context.