Ungrading My Writing Class, Round 2

Changes I’ve made to my ungrading practice for fall 2023

I’m excited to be back on the blog, now in real time, to talk about my continued practice of ungrading and how things are going this fall. Below, I discuss the context of my fall course, my realizations about what needed to change this semester, and a new tool I’m using to help implement those changes. 

New Course, New Context

As an educational developer who works with instructors at many different levels across many different disciplines, I’m always going on about the importance of considering context when developing new teaching approaches. Despite this awareness, I don’t think I fully anticipated how even small changes in my teaching context from spring to fall would necessitate substantive changes in my practice. Here’s what’s different this time around:

The subject matter: My spring writing course (LIBA 102) had a theme, and that theme was “Teaching and Learning in the College Classroom.” This semester’s course (WRIT 101) is a standard first-year writing course with no theme aside from writing itself. That makes it more difficult to talk about ungrading in a kind of “meta” way, as both course subject matter and course policy—meaning I feel I have less time to discuss it. 

The curriculum: The WRIT course I’m teaching this year is much more standardized than the LIBA course I taught last semester. While there is some flexibility, the learning goals, major assignments, and assignment sequence are set by the department. The number of papers students complete in this course is also higher than the number I assigned last semester.

The students: For whatever reason, the students, and thus the classroom dynamic, are totally different this semester. For one, it’s a full house, with 21 instead of 12 students. While they’re still first-year students, these are fall first-years rather than spring first-years, which I’ve found makes a difference. And my students this semester seem to struggle less with deadlines and executive function than my previous students, at least so far. (Unclear to what extent this is a result of new policies on my part or simply differences among the students themselves.)

With this new context in mind, here are some things I was thinking about when I designed the course last July. 

What Needed to Change

In my Start, Stop, Continue post that wrapped my spring course, I chronicled a few challenges I encountered last semester. One was that students struggled to keep track of their work and, more especially, to turn it in on time in the absence of strict deadlines or late penalties. Another was that students didn’t automatically understand what constituted excellent work in the course and what was middling or not-so-good. 

After the course ended, I had another important realization. I came to the conclusion that I was evaluating students in ways that I had not fully articulated to myself, much less to them. After some reflection, I believe I was forming opinions about students’ overall performance in the course based on three main criteria: 

1. Quantity: How many assignments did students complete? How much material did they write? How many days did they attend class? How much time did they put in, generally?

2. Quality: Did students tend to reach the level of “excellent” or was their work mostly still “developing”? Were their homework assignments substantive and thoughtfully completed?

3. Growth: Did students demonstrate progress toward the learning goals of the course? Did they improve specific writing skills? Were they better off than when they started, and how much better off were they?

While I prompted students to think in these directions throughout the semester, they very often seemed to prioritize one category at the expense of the others. Mostly, the prioritized quantity. When I asked them to talk to me about their progress, they tended to tell me which assignments they completed and how many class days they missed. Growth was maybe the second-most common way in which they talked about progress: they would often say that they had improved their writing but without really being specific about how. They talked about quality least of all, perhaps because they struggled to self-evaluate. 

While students were overwhelmingly satisfied with the grading system, one or two also mentioned that it was difficult to determine “where they’re at,” in terms of the grade, at particular points in the semester—and thus, I think, to see and understand their own development. 

These were, basically, the challenges I had to think about when I began redesigning for Writing 101. And I think I’ve found a tool that is helping me address some of those challenges effectively. 

A New Tool: The Progress Tracker

What I developed is a WRIT 101 Progress Tracker, inspired in part by

David Clark

’s June Grading for Growth post about grade trackers. The document arose out of both the differing context I discussed above and the challenges I documented in last semester’s practice. 

A screenshot of my introduction to the Progress Tracker

You can view my full Progress Tracker here. The document is designed to be used by students throughout the entire semester. It has five main parts:

1. A cover sheet that provides guidance on what the document is for and how to use it.

2. A section for Readings and Assignments, where students can see due dates for homework and major papers and document the submission (or use of late tokens) for those assignments.

3. A section for Attendance and Engagement, where students can track the number of class days and individual conferences they attend and make notes about their general engagement and contributions to class discussion. 

4. A section for Learning and Growth, where students can document how the quality of their writing is progressing, what their strengths are, and the areas in which they still want to improve.

5. Some information on Determining the Final Grade, which students can consult to see the general expectations for attaining specific letter grades in the course and use to make notes about the quantity, quality, and growth of their work over the course of the semester.

I’m sharing the entire progress tracking document because I think it encapsulates almost every grading-related change I made to my fall course. There are many things I like about the tracker and some that I don’t. But it seems to be working well so far. 

I’ll spend the next few weeks talking through the different sections of the document as a way of surfacing the changes I’ve made to the course this time around. I’ll also report, in each upcoming post, about what changes seem to be effective and what might require more refinement. 

Stay tuned!