Ungrading in the News
Reactions to a recent NPR piece—and some common critiques of alternative grading
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 29, 2023.
It’s a short week this week, since I’m heading to the Shakespeare Association of America Conference tomorrow to participate in a seminar on Shakespeare and Writing Instruction. There’s not a lot to report on from my class, so I thought I would take the opportunity to share some reactions to the most recent piece about ungrading in the press: this one for NPR. It’s a shortened version of a piece from the Hechinger Report, by Jon Marcus, published last October.
I’m heartened that this piece begins with the student perspective, which is often missing from our conversations about teaching, learning, and DEI in higher ed. I’m glad issues like equity and mental health are being given a lot of air time. I’m also happy to see leaders in the field like Jody Greene, Susan Blum, and Robert Talbert—who inspired me to write this blog—quoted. (And disappointed that the shortened version cut a quotation from my colleague Josh Eyler!)
I have especially appreciated Talbert’s public prompt for us to think more deeply about equity issues in ungrading. Here, he notes that “un-grading as a system is exactly as good as my students’ ability to self-assess. Those from more privileged backgrounds feel more competent to self-reflect, whereas other students struggle with that.”
I’ve seen something similar in my students—but I confess I have mixed feelings about the implications of this observation. Rather than moving to systems which require fewer or less intense forms of self-assessment, I think we should prioritize developing students’ ability to evaluate their own work. Honestly, teaching self-assessment is something I’ve struggled with. I personally think it will be worth the effort in the end. But I also recognize that adding “teach self-assessment” to the ever-growing list of things that instructors are supposed to do in the college classroom might be a tall order.
Unless you can build in opportunities to develop self-assessment skills, ungrading as it’s currently practiced is probably not for you—so I appreciated Talbert’s critique here.
Unfortunately, that’s the only critique of ungrading in the piece that I actually bought. Some of the other criticisms evinced a frankly astounding misunderstanding of ungrading and the assumptions that lie behind it. I just can’t get over this passage that both exemplifies the reactionary impulses around ungrading and that takes the entire article off course in the worst possible way:
But critics liken replacing traditional A to F grades with new forms of assessments to a college-level version of participation trophies. They say taking away grades is coddling students and treating them like “snowflakes.”
“To tell me that these students are too fragile at age 18 or 19 for their educators to actually give them feedback on what they've learned or what they’ve mastered strikes me as missing a pretty significant element of the purpose of higher education,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Instead of not grading them, Hess said, faculty should work harder to help less well-prepared students succeed.
“Things like grades and clear assignments can be enormously useful handrails to help you make your way,” he said.
Later in the piece, Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni makes similar remarks, expressing the fear that eliminating grades might leave a student with a “ticket-to-nowhere diploma that doesn't represent the mastery of skills that will equip the person for success.”
Tell me you don’t understand ungrading without telling me you don’t understand ungrading. The first problem is that Hess confuses feedback and grading. We know that grades are not particularly good forms of feedback. We also know that when students do receive substantive feedback with a grade attached, they tend to ignore that feedback and focus on the grade. It’s possible that marks of some kind can serve students as “useful handrails to help you make your way.” (This is why I use a developing/proficient/excellent scale on my rubrics.) But it’s not at all clear that traditional grades, with their attendant baggage, serve that function well.
Another puzzling and problematic assumption is that eliminating grades means no “mastery of skills.” But I and most ungraders I know use the alternative approaches precisely because they allow us to concentrate on mastery—whereas grades just get in the way of that goal. Students often find it difficult to focus on mastering the material if they’re too focused on the grade. This is why “mastery grading” is often thrown around in conversations about alternative grading or considered part of the “ungrading umbrella.”
Hess’s final comment about “clear assignments” is just baffling. What about ungrading necessitates a loss of clarity in our assignments? I can’t be sure, but I would guess that this comment stems from the idea that removing grades means removing structure—another myth that needs busting if we’re going to have a productive conversation about grading.
Given the egregious (and frankly embarrassing) misconstrual of ungrading here, I’m surprised Hess was even quoted. Though I probably shouldn’t be. Narratives about the “fragility” of students and the “coddling” they experience in college are popular for a reason.
But I do wonder if similar criticisms, ones made in better faith, might be a partial result of the framing around ungrading here. I appreciate the idea that begins this piece, that ungrading “is meant to ease the transition to higher education.” Though I’m not at all sure that this is what ungrading is “meant” to do, and I wonder if it’s a premise we really want to hang our hats on. Sure, I hope ungrading makes life easier for my students in a lot of the ways the article mentions—especially by removing the stress and pressure associated with grades and by giving some space, for “traditional” students anyway, to find their way as newly independent young adults.
These are really great reasons to implement ungrading. But they were only a small part of what that motivated me to move away from traditional grades. While I hope ungrading introduces some ease into my students’ lives, I also want it to introduce things like authenticity and challenge. I believe that students are actually working harder in some of my ungraded classes—it’s just that their effort is distributed more appropriately. Instead of working toward a certain grade or focusing on compliance with course policies, they’re working (I hope) on developing their writing skills. I started employing ungrading not just because it makes students’ lives easier but also because it helps them prioritize real learning over the performance of studenthood.
Moreover, I think positioning ungrading primarily as a practice to support students’ transition to college implies that helping students move into traditionally graded classes (imagined to be more rigorous) is part of the goal of ungrading. It’s not! I want everyone to adopt some form of alternative grading, not just teachers of first-year courses. In fact, in many ways ungrading is better suited to more advanced courses, where students should be transitioning to a post-college world that does not prioritize grades—where they’ll have to be self-motivated, reflect independently on their own progress, and evaluate and implement feedback received from peers and mentors.
In other words, ungrading is not just about creating a safe space for students, though I hope it does that; it’s also about helping them move beyond an obsession with grades that has nothing to do with their learning and even less to do with the world outside the classroom.
Additionally, ungrading is not just about the way we assign grades at the course or institutional level, the bits the NPR piece seemed to focus on most carefully. Deemphasizing grades requires us to rethink our entire pedagogy, and all the ways we’ve thought about teaching and learning in the past. I keep coming back to Jesse Stommel’s idea that ungrading “works best when it’s part of a more holistic pedagogical practice – when we also rethink due dates, policies, syllabi, and assignments – when we ask students to do work that has intrinsic value and authentic audiences.” While the term “ungrading” might refer to a practice, it also indicates a mindset, a new way of approaching education.
And finally, the NPR piece brought home to me once again how urgently we need additional research on emerging grading practices. People are starting to ask whether these approaches “work”—and I want to have something to tell them beyond my (or others’) anecdotal experiences. I’d like to be able to point to a robust body of literature confirming that, when employed well and as part of a holistic pedagogical practice, alternative forms of grading have been shown to reduce stress, increase motivation, promote belonging, foster equity, enhance learning, improve outcomes, etc. This work is already happening, of course. But I’m excited to see more. If there’s a study you’d like to promote, please share it in the comments!
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned!
28 years of teaching, but new to this discussion ... have to say that the first step in people "clarify[ing] their terms" should probably start with dropping the term "ungrading".
It does not covey better, more refined feedback and evaluation ... It sounds like uncritical, unthinking, unintelligent etc.
Thanks as always Emily. Yeah, while I appreciate this Hechinger Report whitepaper and the opportunity for the signal-boost via NPR, the fact is that unfortunately HR got very confused in its report and NPR more or less just paraphrased it. The worst thing was that both venues kept hammering the idea that "ungrading" means "there are no grades on anything whatsoever" including the course itself. I don't think the writers really stopped to clarify their terms, and that's really unfortunate because now everyone is talking past each other.
All this is why I wrote this post back in May: https://gradingforgrowth.com/p/a-media-guide-to-ungrading