Ungrading: The Final Countdown

A Self-Assessment and Course Checklist

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

This post is part of an ongoing series of reflections completed during my Spring 2023 writing course. While the post is being published in August of 2023, it was originally written on April 21, 2023.

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We’re now in the last three weeks of the semester, and frankly, some of us are going to be dragging ourselves across the finish line. I’m confident that each of my students is capable of completing the work required to pass the course. But some will have to put in considerable effort in these final weeks. 

That’s why I’m glad I had the foresight to devote the last two weeks of this class exclusively to revision. We’ll spend class time workshopping student writing as a large group and then working individually on final submissions. I get a break from lesson planning and students get a break from reading for class. Instead, we can focus our energies on cementing what we’ve learned over the course of the semester and making previously submitted work as strong as possible. 

In particular, students will compile their final portfolios, which include the final (revised) versions of each major assignment and a final self-assessment. 

The Final Self-Assessment

The previous self-assessments students have completed for this class took the form of writing that was carefully directed by me. They each filled out a Google form, answering questions about how their writing was improving, what they still needed to work on, what their revision plans were, what grade they would assign themselves at that point in the semester, etc. 

I decided to mix things up for the final self-assessment. Instead of filling out a form that I create, students can assess themselves through any format they wish. They can write me a letter; they can annotate their final revisions and follow that up with a short narrative of their learning; they can make a slideshow or video presentation or “highlight reel” that discusses their work in the class. The possibilities are endless.

The only requirements are that they illustrate their learning, suggesting and providing evidence for the final grade they think they should receive in the course. I provided the following guidelines for the content of the self-assessment.

A good self-assessment will…

• Explicitly discuss your progress toward the course objectives on the syllabus

• Evaluate your class engagement as outlined on the syllabus

• Account for missing or substantively late work (including Weekly Writing Practice assignments, Major Assignments, and Self-Assessments)

• Outline how your writing has developed throughout your Major Assignments

• Suggest and provide evidence for your final course grade

• Imagine and address potential counterarguments to your position

I’ve framed this activity as the ultimate test of the persuasive skills students have been developing over the course of the semester. Their audience is me. Their purpose is to persuade me that they’ve learned at a high level. They can use any rhetorical strategies they wish as long as they accomplish that purpose for that audience. Since we’ve talked a lot about making choices based on purpose and audience, the final self-assessment seems like a fitting way for students not only to discuss but to actually demonstrate their learning. 

I’m looking forward to seeing what students come up with, though I think some are low on creative juices at the moment. We’ll see what happens over the next few weeks.

A Course Checklist 

One other thing I’ve done this week to support students as they evaluate their work is create a course checklist that includes every assignment and requirement they’ve had to fulfill over the last few months. Some students are still missing work, and I’ve noticed it’s hard for them to keep track of what they’ve done through our Google Classroom site. (Probably my fault, but that’s a topic for another day. Perhaps I’ll write a post on ungrading in the LMS…). The course checklist doesn’t have to be submitted to me. It’s just a tool to help students see, at a glance, what work they’ve completed or failed to complete.

I think this will be useful for students, but the process of creating it has caused me to question some of my course practices. 

One reason for the checklist is that some students are behind on the course requirements, and I want them to have a realistic view of what that’s done for their learning and what grade they might reasonably assign themselves. I.e., if you’re missing half your writing practice assignments or self-assessments, have only done one revision of a major assignment, have not been timely in submitting your work (and therefore in receiving feedback), and have missed a few weeks of class or an individual conference—maybe the level of learning you’ve attained doesn’t really merit an A or a B.

At the same time, I worry that this encourages a compliance rather than a learning mindset. This is already something I think students struggled with in our midsemester conferences. They tended to talk about whether they had followed the rules rather than how their writing was improving. I’m worried that the list encourages students to think “Have I checked off all the requirements for the course?” rather than “Have I learned?” and “What have I learned?” Obviously, the requirements are designed to promote learning. But honestly—the connection between fulfilling course requirements and learning is a little more tenuous than I’d like to admit. 

I can imagine a student who fulfilled every requirement on the list but who treated such requirements as arbitrary checkboxes rather than learning opportunities, and therefore didn’t end up learning very much. I can also imagine a student that did the bare minimum but was fully tuned in to their learning process and, as a result, learned a lot. I remember a case in one of my past literature courses in which a student failed to submit several low-stakes assignments but had developed extremely strong writing and analytical skills. Even though he didn’t turn in all the work, he fulfilled every course goal we had. He proposed, on the basis of his missing assignments, that he should receive an A- for the course. I couldn’t justify giving him less than an A. 

Does the misalignment I’ve noted mean I’ve failed in my course design? Very possibly. I don’t know.

As I was making the list, I was also wondering why I didn’t provide this document sooner so students could be tracking themselves as they progress through the course rather than at the end. Obviously the regular self-assessments asked students to do that work, and the Google Classroom site provides a record of student submissions (however imperfect). But students had to run the information down for themselves rather than seeing it clearly laid out like this in a checklist. Having the list from the beginning might have been more useful. 

And all of this makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just move to a contract grading model next semester. It would be so much easier if I could say an A means you completed everything on this list; a B means you completed most things on this list; a C means you did the minimum requirements. Boom. Easy. Done.

But again—does this encourage students to think about the course as a series of arbitrary tasks to be completed rather than an opportunity for holistic learning and development? Does it encourage them to do the tasks just to get them done without actually thinking very much about the process of doing them? Does the labor-based model that such a system is built on inadvertently disadvantage students who don’t have as much time or ability to do extra labor? 

I have misgivings. But what else is new. I’m hoping to expand on these reflections in an end-of-semester wrap-up, but I’d love to hear your thoughts! Stay tuned for more.