Ungrading and the Purpose of College
Could reforming our grading practices help students refocus on what matters?
As a teacher and educational developer, I read or hear students’ stories all the time. Here are three recent ones that I can’t stop thinking about—and that I believe raise similar issues.
Story #1:
In an episode of NYT’s The Daily last year, one anonymous student related their experience of using AI to write a portion of an assignment that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to complete by the deadline. They gave ChatGPT a page they had already written, asked it to finish the paper, reworded the output slightly, and turned it in. And it worked.
“I got an A,” said the student. “And my professor actually liked the ChatGPT part of the paper more than mine.” When they received their essay back, the student noticed that nearly all the professor’s corrections were for the first part of the paper, the part that they had written. The second part, written by ChatGPT, had almost no comments. The student concluded, “ChatGPT literally made better quality work than I did.”
Story #2:
In a recent piece for Harvard Magazine, undergraduate Aden Barton writes about being “AWOL from academics.” He relates a worrying trend among Harvard students: that they seem to spend more time on their extracurriculars and other parts of the college experience than on academics, which they view primarily as a box to tick. Barton attributes this partly to “grade inflation”—the sense that students don’t have to work very hard to earn a high grade or at least aren’t punished for shoddy thinking—but mostly to the “transactional” approach students take to college. Students write essays to please their professors, to get a high grade, to get a degree, to get whatever it is they want after graduation (acceptance to prestigious internships or graduate programs, lucrative professional positions, etc.). Because most students can earn As in their classes without putting in much thought, they focus on extracurriculars to distinguish themselves as applicants.
Of his own experience, Barton writes, “I’ve noticed that I often internalize readings or assignments only insofar as they help me to succeed in a class, leaving no time to genuinely ruminate on the material. I’ve often had to pause to ask myself, ‘Do I agree with what I’m writing?’ Mostly, though, I forgot even to ask that question: I’ve become so focused on crafting a palatable essay that the content almost becomes irrelevant.”
Story #3:
In one of my recent courses, I asked students to tell me about a piece of their past writing that made them proud. One student recalled an essay he wrote for a high school class that earned a high grade. When I asked what the topic of the essay was, he said he couldn’t really remember. When I asked what made the essay so successful, he couldn’t remember that either. He only remembered that the essay earned a high grade and praise from his teacher.
The first theme running through these stories is one articulated explicitly by Barton in the Harvard Magazine piece: purpose. Many students, as Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner write, “miss the point of college”:
They don’t see value in what they are learning, nor do they understand why they take classes in different fields or read books that do not seem directly related to their major. They approach college with a “transactional” view — their overarching goal is to build a résumé with stellar grades, which they believe will help them secure a job post-college. Many see nothing wrong with using any means necessary to achieve the desired résumé, and most acknowledge that cheating is prevalent on campus. In short, they are more concerned with the pursuit of earning than the process of learning.
Despite their differing contexts, this orientation is apparent in each of the stories above. A student turns to ChatGPT to complete a paper because they are low on time and what they need from this experience is a grade (a good one), not the value that comes from doing the activity itself. A student develops an efficient essay-writing process that allows them to skip entirely over the part where they meaningfully engage with the material to get to the part where they produce A-level work—something Ivy League students can do practically in their sleep. A student writes an essay that earns a high grade from the teacher, then promptly forgets everything that essay taught them about the subject matter or the writing process, if indeed it taught them anything at all. In each case, the student misses, or simply dismisses, the ostensible point of the assignment, of the class, and of college generally.
Fischman and Gardner add, and I hasten to do so as well, that this is not students’ fault. Since they were children, we’ve been telling them that the purpose of college is to set themselves up for a career by securing a profitable degree and a series of As for their transcripts. The credential and the GPA are the most important things—personal and intellectual development come second, if not third or fourth.
Many faculty bemoan this state of affairs and the messages students receive about college from family members, friends, marketers, secretaries of education, etc. But we’re often oblivious to the ways that our own pedagogies reinforce it. I could name many examples, but this is a blog about grading, so let’s start there.
Grades are the other theme that runs through these three stories. In fact, they are the very thing that cause students to “miss the point” of college: in each case, the student identifies the grade as the purpose of completing the assignment and the learning as secondary.
Students are not wrong here; in fact, they’re responding very logically to their academic circumstances. They judge correctly that they won’t be rewarded by their teachers for engaging in the learning process but rather for complying with course policies and producing something that looks like learning. If we award bad grades for late work, it is not in the student’s best interest to take extra time to actually engage with the material; it’s in their best interest to submit something passable, quickly, through any means necessary. If we assign work at which students can excel without making meaningful connections to their own ideas or experiences, why would they spend the considerable time and effort required to do so—especially when they could be building their résumés or simply doing something more fun and meaningful? If you can get what you need from the class (i.e., a grade or a degree) without really learning, what incentive is there to engage in that messy, risk-laden, often tedious process?
One frequently-proposed solution to this problem is simply to grade harder. In The Chronicle last year, Michael Clune suggested “raising our grading standards” as a response to the disruptions of generative AI. The thinking is, I suppose, that awarding fewer As will incentive students to do better work, to prioritize their academics, and to engage more substantively with the course material. If their grades were on the line, students would be less likely to use generative AI (since, at present, it tends to produce totally unimaginative essays) and more likely to rouse their own dormant critical thinking skills—to actually learn.
Perhaps this would work for students at Harvard, and maybe even at Case Western Reserve, where Clune teaches. But I’m doubtful. I think the proposal gets things exactly backwards. Students decline the work of thinking (by turning to generative AI or, more commonly, turning out the “bullshit essays” that Clune laments) because grades are already their first, or their only, priority. They focus on submitting whatever they think their professors want to see because they perceive that the purpose of their work is the grade they earn, not the learning that such work is supposed to facilitate. So why in the world do we think that doubling down on grades will solve the problem when grades are a primary cause of the problem in the first place?
Grades can be useful for motivating some (usually high-achieving) students to get better grades, but they’re not particularly good at motivating students to learn or particularly well-correlated with learning in general. Students know this, even if we don’t. Ask any student about the relationship between grades and learning, and they’ll likely be able to tell you about a time when they worked hard to earn a high grade in a class and promptly forgot everything they ever knew about the topic the second they walked out of the final exam. Or, like my student above, earned a high grade on a paper but retained no memory of gaining anything else from the experience. While re-orienting our grading to reward real thought and engagement might help some students, I suspect that many more would simply find ways to produce the appearance of thought and engagement without the thing itself. They are remarkably creative in this way.
And while instructors regularly complain that their students only care about their grades, our continual hand-wringing about “grade inflation” suggests that we are just as obsessed as they are. Everything about our public debates, our educational systems, and our traditional evaluation practices communicates to students that we place a high premium on their ability to churn out shiny, A-level products. Their ability to connect with the material we teach in any durable, meaningful way is, to all appearances, a nice bonus but not really our first priority.
So, what’s to be done? If you’ve been following this blog, I think you know part of my answer.
At the end of his piece, Barton wisely suggests that students should take time to reflect on what they’re doing with their time in college and why, “contemplating whether our activities truly represent our priorities” and pursuing commitments that “spring from an intrinsic desire, not from a desire to appeal to a potential employer.” This is good advice, and most students need support and permission to follow it. Instructors can help by talking with students about their priorities and about how to make decisions that align with them. Many students will still place career-readiness at the top of their list—but they should at least be offered the chance think intentionally about how they want to spend their precious time and what they really want to get out of college.
But I think we also have to create systems within our classrooms that help students to tap into intrinsic, rather than purely extrinsic, motivation in their schoolwork and that give students space and permission to embrace the messy process of learning and growth. That will mean…
Minimizing grades, to the extent possible, in our classrooms
Valuing (and evaluating) process over product, growth alongside achievement
Providing time and incentive for students to consider feedback, revise, and improve, rather than overstuffing our course with new content and extra tasks
Honoring, rather than penalizing, risk-taking and failure
Engaging students in reflection, metacognition, and self-assessment
Creating authentic assessments that allow students to make meaningful connections between the course material and their own thoughts, experiences, and communities
Rewarding students for these meaningful connections, not just for their test-taking skills or their ability to produce a polished “bullshit essay”
Helping students understand not only their personal purpose for learning but also the self-transcendent purposes for learning within our academic disciplines
This is no easy task, and it requires pushing against much larger systems in a way that often feels Sisyphean. But my experiments with ungrading have shown me that it is possible to help students (and ourselves!) refocus on learning. It’s a mission that seems to me more important than ever.