So, I'm currently trying to figure out how to push against traditional grading in my online courses. I find that a bit more difficult than my onsite courses. But I want to experiment with it soon, to figure it out.
I don't teach a lot online, but I can imagine that building the trust and relationships required would be much trickier virtually and asynchronously. What kinds of alternative grading are you considering? Collaborative grading or something else? I'd be happy to suggest some resources based on your goals--though you may already be aware of them! I've run across a few articles about "ungrading" (collaborative grading) in online courses.
I appreciate your distinction between ungrading and collaborative grading, Emily. If "ungrading" is a useful term at all, I believe it's only as an umbrella term. But, I think "alternative grading systems" does an even better job of playing the umbrella role. At least "collaborative grading" is helpful in distinguishing it from other forms of alternative grading.
Your definition of collaborative grading is helpful. Because of the entanglement between grading and assessment, I feel it would be stronger if you said more about the "work" students complete. I suspect you elaborate elsewhere, but the type of work students do is as important as what you do with it as a grader. In other words, an instructor could give misaligned, opaque, backward-looking, unscaffolded, etc, assignments and still meet your definition of collaborative grading. Maybe this is OK in your conception. I'm suggesting that some of the philosophical underpinnings about ungrading that Strommel argues could be helpful here. As you know, all grading systems are much more than assigning assignment-level or course-level grades.
I'm so excited for your book; please keep us posted about when it will be released!
I realized in reading this post that I've been doing something -- let's call it "ungrading-adjacent" -- and with mixed results. I teach a smallish gen-ed course to STEM students that's discussion-based, so I rely a lot on students' participation. I give them some guidelines about what practices constitute different letter grades for the participation component of the course, and about four weeks in to the semester, I ask them to assess their participation according to these guidelines. There are usually a couple of students who under-rate their participation relative to what I would have given them. But I find it's much more common for students to cherry-pick an item or two from the grade description -- completely excluding all other items -- and say they should get an A. In some cases, they pick another item entirely from the syllabus (eg "I've done all of the reading responses, so I think I deserve an A for participation")! LOL I don't blame them, I suppose, but it does make me wonder about going farther down this road, at least for the classroom context I'm in.
But I'm excited to learn more about ungrading; it may just take learning more from your work and from some of the authors you've been citing -- and more practice! -- to implement it more effectively.
Thank you, Danielle! I do think this is a particularly tricky thing to implement. I have to do a lot of work to align expectations with my students early on and to head off problems like the one you describe. I find in general that they are very honest in their self-assessments--right up until the point when the grade enters the conversation.
I really appreciate the approach you're taking here though. A lot of people would have seen these student responses and then just abandoned the practice altogether. But any teaching experiment, I think, requires practice and refinement.
First, I am thrilled with the way you are honing your argument here, defining your practice, and making progress on your book! Of all of the ways in which alternative grading systems have been outlined, this approach tempts me the most. I can't wait to read more.
I still have questions about your resistance to grades, or a final grade, in a general way, as in: "Let me be clear: I do want to get rid of grades entirely. If I had my way, I would never have to assign a final grade again. So, if that’s the connotation of the word, I’m not bothered, personally."
I wonder if this comes down to temperament or personalities of the teacher. Here's the analogy that I think about when it comes to the reason for a final "performance" grade. I like to play golf, and mostly I just like to practice, take lessons, play rounds for fun, and be social with my wife or friends on the course. But I also like to push myself sometimes to achieve a particular score, or even enter a tournament. Whatever score I achieve in those rounds gives me a concrete sense of where my skill level stands, both in relation to my prior performances and the skill levels of others. And golf has a particular system, called the handicap index, which averages my scores over many rounds to give me a sense of my performance level over time, so no single performance is definitive. So one could argue that practicing and playing for fun, which I do about 90% of the time, is capped by the final grades in those more competitive rounds. I value all of these features of the experience: the learning, the practice, the feedback, and seeing my "final grade."
If you not a sports-oriented person, you might think about this from the lens of artistic creation. We can enjoy, practice, and learn and improve in an artistic field just with practice and feedback and reflection. Many artists, though, push themselves to deeper levels of their craft by challenging themselves to enter exhibitions or engage in public performances, and the pressure that this puts on the learning process can deepen the learners' skill or knowledge level. These challenges usually require some form of "grading": for example, how well did your work stack up against the other submissions? Likewise here, I think having these occasional formal evaluations of our performance shouldn't necessarily interfere with the process--although maybe it does for some people. But based on what we see in the world, many people do value it and find it motivational.
In other words, you might not find that "final grade" interesting or appealing, but I expect at least some of your learners do, and I see no theoretical reason why it should interfere with the learning process, as long as it doesn't dominate the whole experience. And perhaps even further, I expect some learners will never achieve their deepest potential without having a performance challenge in front of them--which, in education, might take the form of striving for a particular grade.
Hi Jim, thanks for your comment! I’m afraid that, knowing little about the skills required or how they’re best evaluated, the golf analogy is a bit difficult for me. The lens of artistic creation makes more sense.
I certainly don’t have a problem with the educational equivalent of exhibitions or public performances as a kind of challenge for students and a summation of their work. I also don’t have a problem providing a “formal evaluation” of this work. I do believe there is a place for summative assessment at the end of a course, even if formative assessment should be our focus throughout. Many of us, students included, are motivated by the existence of these summative evaluations (in ways, of course, that can be both good and bad for our learning). I’m more dubious about the value of telling students how they “stack up” against other students—but I suppose I could even see some situations in which this might be helpful.
The problem for me is that assigning traditional grades seems like a poor way to provide a formal, summative evaluation of student work—just as awarding placements in an art exhibition or a talent show or what-have-you seems like a poor way to evaluate artistic achievement. For starters, no two panels of judges would make the same determinations. The rankings would be made based on a million individual values and preferences held by each evaluator. And they would be necessarily reductive. I once won best-in-show in a youth photography competition, but I do wonder how my photo of a sunrise on Hilton Head could be compared to a portrait of someone’s sister or an action shot of a soccer player or a photo of a beautiful old building. The judging also didn’t account for the fact that I had no idea how to use my camera and that I just happened, entirely by accident, to find aperture setting that worked well with the light on the day I took the photo.
This is not to say I think awards or competitive rankings should be abolished—but I do question their value if the object is learning. Especially since so many of my students, at least, need a break from the educational rat race they seem to have been subjected to since they were very small.
Pedagogically, I would much prefer narrative evaluations to letter grades. A few sentences about student work crafted in collaboration with that student (even a *very* few) would provide a much richer window onto their achievements than a letter grade. And the formal evaluative aspect could still serve as a kind of “performance challenge” that motivates students to do good work. If some students find it difficult to engage without an element of competition with other students, that strikes me as a problem we should address, not an orientation we should encourage.
To carry the art metaphor a little further:
My ideal summative, end-of-semester activity would be an exhibition of student work in which we, as a class community, could all admire and give feedback on each person’s achievement. This one could use some work on composition but shows unbelievable creativity. This one made great strides on their brushwork and hopes to keep improving on their use of light and color. This one needs further instruction on their technique but met their own goal by learning the new skill of oil painting. Perhaps we could even recognize some students who have made notable achievements in particular areas. I don’t see this, ultimately, as a space that eschews formal evaluation but one that makes it much richer.
I’m sure that sounds ridiculously utopian! But I think preparing for this kind of evaluation would create a much more fruitful learning experience than striving for a particular letter grade.
That evaluation scenario sounds fantastic to me, and not all utopian or unrealistic--although that probably reflects the fact that we are both coming from a humanities background.
We might getting closer to the heart of our disagreement here: "If some students find it difficult to engage without an element of competition with other students, that strikes me as a problem we should address, not an orientation we should encourage." You are assuming that competition has to be with other students. The competition might be with earlier versions of my self. The grades I receive give me a recognizable way to mark my progress. Language can be messy (that's why we love it!). Parsing the words of the evaluator each time might just be confusing (good job, great work, well done, etc.). Seeing myself moving on a numerical or alphabetical scale, as a concrete marker of progress, can be helpful and motivating.
Of course, as you point out, grades can be subjective and individual. We can respond to that by rejecting them together, as we swing from one binary to another. But we can also try to get better at the work, both individually and collectively. This reminds me of William Perry's stages of learning: when we first perceive the subjectivity of the world, we reject completely the idea of standards and objectives altogether. But then we move forward together into the gray, striving to create better processes, even though they will never achieve some objective level.
You don't need to respond to these comments, Emily--as friend, reader, and editor I am just pushing your thinking and I hope you see these responses as opportunities to help you firm up your ideas, and reach more readers with your arguments.
Hello Ana, thank you for your comment! I teach a class of 21 and could imagine, if I was teaching full time, doing this with 2 or 3 times as many. So I hope some of the posts will be useful to you. But I'm also hoping to address the issue of larger class sizes, at least to some extent, in my book.
This is *very* helpful. For my own practice this semester, I may be going with "collaborative assessment and grading" in order to put some emphasis on "assessment" (ongoing, collaborative) and take a little emphasis off of "grading," which is required at my school at the midterm and end of the semester. Both will be collaborative but "assessment" feels more a formative process and "grading" carries more of a summative sense..
Thanks, Mike! I agree. I do think that the term "collaborative assessment" or "collaborative grading" could be more legible to students, in particular, than "ungrading."
This is very helpful!
So, I'm currently trying to figure out how to push against traditional grading in my online courses. I find that a bit more difficult than my onsite courses. But I want to experiment with it soon, to figure it out.
I don't teach a lot online, but I can imagine that building the trust and relationships required would be much trickier virtually and asynchronously. What kinds of alternative grading are you considering? Collaborative grading or something else? I'd be happy to suggest some resources based on your goals--though you may already be aware of them! I've run across a few articles about "ungrading" (collaborative grading) in online courses.
I appreciate your distinction between ungrading and collaborative grading, Emily. If "ungrading" is a useful term at all, I believe it's only as an umbrella term. But, I think "alternative grading systems" does an even better job of playing the umbrella role. At least "collaborative grading" is helpful in distinguishing it from other forms of alternative grading.
Your definition of collaborative grading is helpful. Because of the entanglement between grading and assessment, I feel it would be stronger if you said more about the "work" students complete. I suspect you elaborate elsewhere, but the type of work students do is as important as what you do with it as a grader. In other words, an instructor could give misaligned, opaque, backward-looking, unscaffolded, etc, assignments and still meet your definition of collaborative grading. Maybe this is OK in your conception. I'm suggesting that some of the philosophical underpinnings about ungrading that Strommel argues could be helpful here. As you know, all grading systems are much more than assigning assignment-level or course-level grades.
Thank you for this, Michael! This is a good point, and I'll have to mull it over...
I'm so excited for your book; please keep us posted about when it will be released!
I realized in reading this post that I've been doing something -- let's call it "ungrading-adjacent" -- and with mixed results. I teach a smallish gen-ed course to STEM students that's discussion-based, so I rely a lot on students' participation. I give them some guidelines about what practices constitute different letter grades for the participation component of the course, and about four weeks in to the semester, I ask them to assess their participation according to these guidelines. There are usually a couple of students who under-rate their participation relative to what I would have given them. But I find it's much more common for students to cherry-pick an item or two from the grade description -- completely excluding all other items -- and say they should get an A. In some cases, they pick another item entirely from the syllabus (eg "I've done all of the reading responses, so I think I deserve an A for participation")! LOL I don't blame them, I suppose, but it does make me wonder about going farther down this road, at least for the classroom context I'm in.
But I'm excited to learn more about ungrading; it may just take learning more from your work and from some of the authors you've been citing -- and more practice! -- to implement it more effectively.
Thank you, Danielle! I do think this is a particularly tricky thing to implement. I have to do a lot of work to align expectations with my students early on and to head off problems like the one you describe. I find in general that they are very honest in their self-assessments--right up until the point when the grade enters the conversation.
I really appreciate the approach you're taking here though. A lot of people would have seen these student responses and then just abandoned the practice altogether. But any teaching experiment, I think, requires practice and refinement.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Emily -- it's useful to know that you spend time aligning expectations, and that that seems to help with this issue.
First, I am thrilled with the way you are honing your argument here, defining your practice, and making progress on your book! Of all of the ways in which alternative grading systems have been outlined, this approach tempts me the most. I can't wait to read more.
I still have questions about your resistance to grades, or a final grade, in a general way, as in: "Let me be clear: I do want to get rid of grades entirely. If I had my way, I would never have to assign a final grade again. So, if that’s the connotation of the word, I’m not bothered, personally."
I wonder if this comes down to temperament or personalities of the teacher. Here's the analogy that I think about when it comes to the reason for a final "performance" grade. I like to play golf, and mostly I just like to practice, take lessons, play rounds for fun, and be social with my wife or friends on the course. But I also like to push myself sometimes to achieve a particular score, or even enter a tournament. Whatever score I achieve in those rounds gives me a concrete sense of where my skill level stands, both in relation to my prior performances and the skill levels of others. And golf has a particular system, called the handicap index, which averages my scores over many rounds to give me a sense of my performance level over time, so no single performance is definitive. So one could argue that practicing and playing for fun, which I do about 90% of the time, is capped by the final grades in those more competitive rounds. I value all of these features of the experience: the learning, the practice, the feedback, and seeing my "final grade."
If you not a sports-oriented person, you might think about this from the lens of artistic creation. We can enjoy, practice, and learn and improve in an artistic field just with practice and feedback and reflection. Many artists, though, push themselves to deeper levels of their craft by challenging themselves to enter exhibitions or engage in public performances, and the pressure that this puts on the learning process can deepen the learners' skill or knowledge level. These challenges usually require some form of "grading": for example, how well did your work stack up against the other submissions? Likewise here, I think having these occasional formal evaluations of our performance shouldn't necessarily interfere with the process--although maybe it does for some people. But based on what we see in the world, many people do value it and find it motivational.
In other words, you might not find that "final grade" interesting or appealing, but I expect at least some of your learners do, and I see no theoretical reason why it should interfere with the learning process, as long as it doesn't dominate the whole experience. And perhaps even further, I expect some learners will never achieve their deepest potential without having a performance challenge in front of them--which, in education, might take the form of striving for a particular grade.
Hi Jim, thanks for your comment! I’m afraid that, knowing little about the skills required or how they’re best evaluated, the golf analogy is a bit difficult for me. The lens of artistic creation makes more sense.
I certainly don’t have a problem with the educational equivalent of exhibitions or public performances as a kind of challenge for students and a summation of their work. I also don’t have a problem providing a “formal evaluation” of this work. I do believe there is a place for summative assessment at the end of a course, even if formative assessment should be our focus throughout. Many of us, students included, are motivated by the existence of these summative evaluations (in ways, of course, that can be both good and bad for our learning). I’m more dubious about the value of telling students how they “stack up” against other students—but I suppose I could even see some situations in which this might be helpful.
The problem for me is that assigning traditional grades seems like a poor way to provide a formal, summative evaluation of student work—just as awarding placements in an art exhibition or a talent show or what-have-you seems like a poor way to evaluate artistic achievement. For starters, no two panels of judges would make the same determinations. The rankings would be made based on a million individual values and preferences held by each evaluator. And they would be necessarily reductive. I once won best-in-show in a youth photography competition, but I do wonder how my photo of a sunrise on Hilton Head could be compared to a portrait of someone’s sister or an action shot of a soccer player or a photo of a beautiful old building. The judging also didn’t account for the fact that I had no idea how to use my camera and that I just happened, entirely by accident, to find aperture setting that worked well with the light on the day I took the photo.
This is not to say I think awards or competitive rankings should be abolished—but I do question their value if the object is learning. Especially since so many of my students, at least, need a break from the educational rat race they seem to have been subjected to since they were very small.
Pedagogically, I would much prefer narrative evaluations to letter grades. A few sentences about student work crafted in collaboration with that student (even a *very* few) would provide a much richer window onto their achievements than a letter grade. And the formal evaluative aspect could still serve as a kind of “performance challenge” that motivates students to do good work. If some students find it difficult to engage without an element of competition with other students, that strikes me as a problem we should address, not an orientation we should encourage.
To carry the art metaphor a little further:
My ideal summative, end-of-semester activity would be an exhibition of student work in which we, as a class community, could all admire and give feedback on each person’s achievement. This one could use some work on composition but shows unbelievable creativity. This one made great strides on their brushwork and hopes to keep improving on their use of light and color. This one needs further instruction on their technique but met their own goal by learning the new skill of oil painting. Perhaps we could even recognize some students who have made notable achievements in particular areas. I don’t see this, ultimately, as a space that eschews formal evaluation but one that makes it much richer.
I’m sure that sounds ridiculously utopian! But I think preparing for this kind of evaluation would create a much more fruitful learning experience than striving for a particular letter grade.
That evaluation scenario sounds fantastic to me, and not all utopian or unrealistic--although that probably reflects the fact that we are both coming from a humanities background.
We might getting closer to the heart of our disagreement here: "If some students find it difficult to engage without an element of competition with other students, that strikes me as a problem we should address, not an orientation we should encourage." You are assuming that competition has to be with other students. The competition might be with earlier versions of my self. The grades I receive give me a recognizable way to mark my progress. Language can be messy (that's why we love it!). Parsing the words of the evaluator each time might just be confusing (good job, great work, well done, etc.). Seeing myself moving on a numerical or alphabetical scale, as a concrete marker of progress, can be helpful and motivating.
Of course, as you point out, grades can be subjective and individual. We can respond to that by rejecting them together, as we swing from one binary to another. But we can also try to get better at the work, both individually and collectively. This reminds me of William Perry's stages of learning: when we first perceive the subjectivity of the world, we reject completely the idea of standards and objectives altogether. But then we move forward together into the gray, striving to create better processes, even though they will never achieve some objective level.
You don't need to respond to these comments, Emily--as friend, reader, and editor I am just pushing your thinking and I hope you see these responses as opportunities to help you firm up your ideas, and reach more readers with your arguments.
Thank you, Jim! I appreciate your thoughts.
I would appreciate tips for implementing ungrading models for classes with 20-50 students since that's my typical load.
Hello Ana, thank you for your comment! I teach a class of 21 and could imagine, if I was teaching full time, doing this with 2 or 3 times as many. So I hope some of the posts will be useful to you. But I'm also hoping to address the issue of larger class sizes, at least to some extent, in my book.
This is *very* helpful. For my own practice this semester, I may be going with "collaborative assessment and grading" in order to put some emphasis on "assessment" (ongoing, collaborative) and take a little emphasis off of "grading," which is required at my school at the midterm and end of the semester. Both will be collaborative but "assessment" feels more a formative process and "grading" carries more of a summative sense..
Thanks, Mike! I agree. I do think that the term "collaborative assessment" or "collaborative grading" could be more legible to students, in particular, than "ungrading."