Why Ungrading?

A final thought from my Spring 2023 course

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR 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 September of 2023, it was originally written on May 19, 2023.

My final reflection on the course ended up being too long to include in one post, so I’ve published it in two parts. Part 1, from last week, discusses what I learned from ungrading last semester. Part 2, a more philosophical reflection on ungrading, is below. It turns out to be particularly timely, given the ongoing dismantling of institutions like New College of Florida and West Virginia University and the advocacy for similar projects by political actors in my own state.

---

In addition to considering potential course revisions over the last week, I’ve also been contemplating why I adopted ungrading in the first place and how I’m thinking about it now. On a basic level, I moved away from traditional grading because I thought it would help me and my students engage in more fulfilling kinds of teaching and learning. But I am also increasingly drawn to ungrading because we need to imagine a world with new systems and without oppressive structures—and deemphasizing grades might be one small step in the right direction. 

I’m not a social scientist, and I haven’t studied any of this stuff. But here is what I do know: higher education is one broken system fully embedded in many other broken systems that make up the late capitalist hellscape we currently occupy. I know that sounds bleak, but when I look at the student mental health crisis, the decimation of the humanities, the adjunctification of the profession, the rising costs of college/student loan crisis, the right-wing attacks on higher ed and DEI, the defunding of public institutions, the rates of teacher burnout etc., etc., etc., it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. 

One part of the problem is that we think of higher ed as a credentialing factory, churning out workers to “align with industry demands.” Grades help shore up this function, allowing us to rank and sort the student-products of education into buckets that employers or graduate/professional schools can sift through.

Moreover, they can encourage students to take a mercenary approach to their courses. If I’m in college to get a high-paying job, why would I bother to learn from courses that won’t directly help me get that job? Why would I bother to learn at all, if I can get the credential without doing it? What can I do to get an A so I can put this class behind me? 

A recent tweet from Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona

I hasten to add that this is not the fault of students, who have been told by everyone, for ages, that the purpose of college is to make you employable. And, of course, this is one important function of college. Students deserve an education that can help them create the kind of life they want, and that includes any careers they may wish to pursue.

But students also deserve the chance to explore a range of options for their lives, to think deeply about their desires and values, and to learn things that would enrich their existence whether or not those things “meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce,” or whatever. Every student should be offered this chance, regardless of whether they enter college seeking upward social mobility or not. To give up on this mission, especially at our public institutions, is to deny our most marginalized student populations the education they deserve.

Ungrading advances a more meaningful vision of college by prioritizing student learning and students’ experiences of learning, creating space for processing rather than producing, and honoring the humanity of everyone in the classroom. It helps us resist the forces that would make our universities into capitalist worker factories and instead frames higher ed as a public good designed to support individual and collective thriving.

Ungrading also asks us to resist the forces that would position our students as our adversaries, that would sell us surveillance technologies, that would turn us into cops. It asks us to have radical trust in our students, trust that they want to learn, that they would choose to learn under the right conditions, that they care about things beyond getting a credential to get a job to make money. 

Maybe this trust is misplaced sometimes, but very often it is not. And even when students don’t come into our courses caring about their learning, new systems might give them permission to rethink their approaches, might show them how to do that. Sometimes the trust itself can even be more transformative than the learning, especially if no one has ever trusted a student in this way before, if no one has ever assumed that they wanted more out of their education than a credential. I hope new approaches to teaching and learning show students that there is not one way to think about education or about the world. That relationships of trust and compassion, as critical pedagogues and Black feminist thinkers have told us, can be transformative. That we can imagine new systems, as abolitionist pedagogues have argued, based on care and not on punishment and compliance. 

I realize this is a tall order. But I think we sometimes underestimate the impact that one teacher can have on a student’s worldview. I had a creative writing professor in undergrad who had no late penalties, who was endlessly compassionate to students, and who didn’t seem to care about the grades on our work. At the time, I thought this was a great way to get students to walk all over you, and I know some students took advantage of his generosity. But I realize now that my response to that professor’s policies was rooted in my own fidelity to harmful systems—systems that I was adept at navigating but that nevertheless did, and continue to do, quite a lot of damage. I was unable to imagine a different way of doing school or life.

Now that I have, I hope, a better understanding, I think back to this professor often. I think about how that was the first time I saw anyone display radical trust in students, or people, to do good things on their own initiative. I think about how he expressed care for us, and we cared about him in turn. I think about how he trusted us to dedicate ourselves to our own development and to the betterment of the world around us—and we did, or at least we wanted to. I think about what kind of impact this had on me, as a young person, just beginning to develop my own views. 

So, look, ungrading won’t end capitalist exploitation or systemic racism or what-have-you. But it may help us question our assumptions about how the world works. It may show us that systems of reward and punishment are not the only way to motivate people to do good things—and in fact, are often harmful. It may illustrate the power of trust and compassion. Maybe if we get rid of grades there will be a few more people in the world who can look around and say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Maybe there will be a few more people pulling at threads to unravel the ugly fabric of the conditions we’ve created.

I think this is what bell hooks means when she says, at the beginning of Teaching to Transgress, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” What if we used our educational communities not just to prepare students for the harsh world beyond the classroom but to model and lay the foundation for the systems we actually want to create out there? I have so little hope, most of the time, that we can dismantle the many oppressive systems that (dis)order our world. But sometimes I see glimmers of radical possibility in higher ed teaching. And I hope ungrading can help expand those possibilities.

---

This is where my reflections from Spring 2023 end. I’m so grateful to readers for following this journey with me!

I do have more to share. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing both the piece I co-wrote with two students about AI and ungrading (discussed in a previous post) and some info on how my grading practices have changed since I wrapped up my formal reflections in May. Stay tuned!