Ungrading: The First Week

An introduction to my system, and how I share it with students

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 May of 2023, it was originally written on January 27, 2023.

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The first week of classes is in the books! Here are some details about how I plan to ungrade this semester, and how I’ve spoken to the class about it so far. 

How I’ll Ungrade

To start with, here are my major assessments, as they appear on the syllabus:

A fairly minimal first-day introduction to the assignments students can expect to complete. 

Students will do weekly Writing Practice assignments that ask them to respond to our course readings, complete brief writing activities related to the content for the week, or submit preparatory work for their Major Assignments. Since there aren’t many students in the course, I think I’ll have time to write short, informal comments on these most weeks.

For Major Assignments, students will receive substantive feedback. In addition to longer commentary, I’ll indicate whether students are doing developing, proficient, or excellent work according to each category of our co-created rubric.¹ The image I included in my last post, and which I’ll share again below, will give you an idea of how I did this last time and how I plan to do it again.

A rubric from my Spring 2022 ungraded literature course.

I am conflicted, as I mentioned last week, about my decision to use the categories of developing, proficient, and excellent in providing feedback on student work. I realize that some will view these rating categories, and possibly rubrics themselves, as antithetical to the principles of ungrading. 

I don’t disagree, really. But I do worry that without these benchmarks, many students will struggle to understand where they are in the course and whether or not their work is meeting the learning goals and assignment expectations. My first-year students struggled with this last year, and since I’m teaching a first-year course semester, I’m trying to provide as many kinds of feedback as possible. 

I also think assigning a rating to each rubric category, rather than the work as a whole, makes the evaluations more nuanced and helpful. Students can understand exactly where I believe their work is succeeding and where they might need to concentrate their efforts in the future.

The risk is, of course, that students will view these as grades by another name. Excellent = A, Proficient = B, Developing = C. And I suppose that’s not entirely wrong. But anecdotally, I’ve found that students see these ratings as useful feedback that formalizes the longer qualitative commentary rather than a grade that such commentary only justifies. 

Students may revise all of their major assignments up to three times, and are required to revise at least one for inclusion in a Final Portfolio that will showcase their work across the semester.

Students will also submit three Self-Assessments. These are Google forms that ask students to assess their progress toward the course learning outcomes, their engagement in the course, and their growth toward some personal learning and engagement goals, among other things. Each self-assessment form will also ask students what letter grade they would assign themselves based on their work in the course so far and allow us to address any discrepancies between their understanding of their work and my understanding of it. 

Finally, the students and I will holistically assess their Class Engagement, which includes things like regular attendance, participation (broadly defined), timely assignment submission, support for fellow students, and other contributions to the learning community. 

Introducing Ungrading in Week 1

Here’s what I wrote about the grading system in my syllabus:

“In the class, you'll read, think, write, and collaborate with each other, completing work that is difficult to quantify or reduce to a single number or letter grade. Instead of assigning letters or numbers to your work, I'll provide substantive feedback on every major assignment you submit and will indicate whether I think the submission is developing, proficient, or excellent. For these assignments, you will have the opportunity to revise and receive more feedback should you wish to do so. I'll also build in multiple opportunities for self- and peer-assessment throughout the semester.

We will meet once at midterm and once at the end of the course to discuss your progress. In our final individual meeting, you will assign yourself a final grade in consultation with me (and subject to my approval). At this meeting, you will make a case for what grade you think you should receive based on the evidence of your submitted assignments, overall class engagement, and my feedback. I will, in turn, provide my own assessment of your progress toward our learning goals. The meeting will offer a holistic assessment of your work this semester rather than an average of graded activities.

We will talk more about the evaluation procedures for the course, and why I use them, at the beginning of the semester, but I invite you to contact me with questions or concerns about this system at any time.”

A brief first-day introduction to the (un)grading system for the course.

I know this leaves open a lot of questions for students. But I try not to overwhelm them in the first days of class, and I think this summary offers a good balance of the “why” and the “how” of ungrading.

I also chose intentionally not to employ the term “ungrading” right off the bat as I think it may be confusing for students. Last year, I didn’t use the term at all, and it was never an issue. This semester, I’ll likely introduce the term when we talk about grading as part of the course content. But I don’t necessarily feel the need to label what we’re doing.

This syllabus statement is the first introduction students get to the grading system. This week, I had them read over the syllabus in class and annotate it on Perusall with comments and questions.

One of the first questions I got was “What is the grade break down in terms of percentages for this course?” I responded that rather than averaging graded assignments together, we would instead be looking at all the work holistically over the course of the semester and thinking about how it illustrated progress toward the learning goals. I explained the system briefly, and said we’d talk more about it in Week 2. But I’m not sure this allayed the student’s concern. 

Other students, however, seemed excited. One wrote, “I like this way of grading because it focuses more on the students learning and progress throughout the course instead of just the numbers.” Two also commented on the Self-Assessment portion of the course, noting that it would be a good way to reflect on and measure their progress. 

That said, students (understandably) find the system quite foreign, and it will take time for them to adjust. I’ve already been asked by a student if they would “lose points” for leaving class a little early. I think I’ll need to explain more fully how “engagement” works as an assessment metric, and how attendance fits into it, when we talk further about the grading system next week. 

In our next class session, we’ll be discussing Alfie Kohn’s “The Case Against Grades.” I’m viewing this as an opportunity not only for students to learn more about the grade debate in teaching and learning literature but also to explain our grading system, and the principles behind it, more fully. I hope to be able to write next week about why I chose Kohn’s piece, students’ reactions to it, and further developments in our shared understanding of ungrading. Stay tuned!

1. Though I may have changed the wording of these categories (I can’t remember), I stole the idea from my colleague Pam Butler at Notre Dame. Thanks, Pam!