Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

by Susan D. Blum (Editor), Alfie Kohn (Foreword by)

Overview

The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K-12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

CONTRIBUTORS:
Aaron Blackwelder
Susan D. Blum
Arthur Chiaravalli
Gary Chu
Cathy N. Davidson
Laura Gibbs
Christina Katopodis
Joy Kirr
Alfie Kohn
Christopher Riesbeck
Starr Sackstein
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
Jesse Stommel
John Warner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949199826
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Series:	Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Susan D. Blum is professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on education builds on her academic specialties of linguistic, psychological, cultural, and educational anthropology. She is the author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture and “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, among other works.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Why Ungrade? Why Grade?
Susan D. Blum

From birth onward, humans, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore, and they do not require extraneous incentives to do so. This natural motivational tendency is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development because it is through acting on one’s inherent interests that one grows in knowledge and skills.
—Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions”

Instead of focusing on getting a good grade, I focused on actually learning the material. I was less stressed out, and more interested in the actual class content.
—Undergraduate in my grade-free (until the end) class, Fall 2018

Humans, in recent memory, invented a way of looking at students’ learning. We in the United States call it grading; in Canada, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, they distinguish between marking on particular assignments and final grading. Though grading seems natural, inevitable, a part of the very fabric of school, it isn’t. It was created at a certain moment, for certain reasons not entirely well thought out, and then became embedded in the structures of schools for most students.

But because we invented it, we can uninvent it. We can remove it.

And many of us believe we should.

There’s a growing movement at this end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I call it ungrading. Others call it de-grading or going gradeless. Though the destination tends to be generally the same, there is variation in the routes, the reasons, the contexts, and the specific ways various individuals at different levels of education enact our changes. This book is an effort to assemble some of the practices faculty have devised to question the apparent centrality of grades as an unchanging, unyielding fact of schooling (according to both teachers and students).

After I published a short article online in 2017 called “Ungrading: The Significant Learning Benefits of Getting Rid of Grades,”  I was invited to a secret Facebook group called Teachers Going Gradeless, TG2. There was already a group that Starr Sackstein had been part of called Teachers Throwing Out Grades. Since then I’ve discovered more and more evidence of faculty going gradeless—most at the secondary (middle and high school) level, but increasingly in higher education. Much of the material in this book is available as blog posts, podcasts, Twitter threads, and interviews. Little has been published in print or peer-reviewed formats. We’ve retained some of the flavor of those posts, to keep the sense of energy and conversation of each author.

Almost everyone I approached was delighted to contribute to this book (those who declined had other commitments) and excited to push the conversation into a broader public realm. We believe that putting these pieces together produces a picture of what is possible—a picture greater than any individual alone can produce.

All the authors included in this book are troubled by some of the consequences of and reasons for grades. It could be because grading dehumanizes and flattens nuances in students’ practices and understanding. It could be the mechanistic approach, derived from the factory model of education, that we wish to challenge. It could be that we are concerned about the fixation on grades, which leads to cheating, corner cutting, gaming the system, and a misplaced focus on accumulating points rather than on learning. It could be that people wish to be more responsive to individuals in the classroom, to be more informative about feedback, to join students in a collective effort that isn’t primarily focused on assessment, evaluation, sorting, ranking. It could be that people are rebelling against audit culture, or what Jerry Z. Muller in his book The Tyranny of Metrics calls “metric fixation.”

It could be that people are propelled by insights—robust insights—from the last fifty years of educational psychology, findings on motivation research that show a loss of intrinsic motivation when extrinsic motivations are dominant. It could be that they are influenced by progressive educators such as Alfie Kohn. It could be that they are concerned about how when comments on papers are accompanied by grades, students disregard our comments—often not even reading them, and certainly not using them to improve or learn more deeply. This finding has been shown over and over again beginning with researchers such as Ruth Butler. Those who focus on increasing students’ intrinsic motivation often tap into students’ curiosity (which exists as a motive not only in humans and other primates but in all mammals and even birds).  They attend to social and emotional rewards of learning and also to authentic application.

Obviously the effort to make education more genuine, authentic, effective, engaging, and meaningful is scarcely new. Numerous educational challenges have existed since conventional education as we know it has become more ubiquitous. Under the labels of progressive, democratic, humane, Deweyian, utopian, experimental, open, experiential, feminist, or anarchist education, all kinds of other frameworks have existed. Entire schools have been constructed without grades—Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Waldorf, Summerhill, Sudbury Valley, Big Picture Learning—and all of these schools have wonderful things to offer. They add up to something important and revelatory. But they are far from the majority, and they tend to be smaller than average, somewhat out of reach of the bulk of students, and sometimes expensive, even with financial aid and even though many were initially started expressly to serve children from low-income families.  Still, there are whole classrooms and programs, some public, trying to create student- and learning-centered grade-free educational settings, emphasizing mastery rather than arbitrary deadlines and measures, learning rather than compliance.

At the level of higher education, too, some institutions are either entirely or optionally grade-free, emphasizing narrative evaluations. Grade-free institutions include Hampshire College, Evergreen State College, Deep Spring College, New College of Florida, Alverno College, Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University, Prescott College, Antioch University, and Goddard College. Others, such as Sarah Lawrence College and Reed College, record grades but don’t automatically report them to students. Brown University gives students the option to take most courses for satisfactory–no credit. For a time the University of California, Santa Cruz, was grade-free but changed its policy.  Entire organizations of college teachers have questioned the need for grades.

Most elite medical schools (eighteen of the top twenty medical schools) use only pass-fail grades for preclinical courses.  In 2017 as many as ninety-six medical schools used simple pass-fail systems; twenty-six used honors, pass, fail; and thirteen used honors, high pass, pass, fail. Only twenty-eight used numerical or letter-grade systems.  The argument is that students’ grades in basic science courses show no meaningful correlation with their later quality as practicing physicians. Medical schools have also largely eliminated a focus on grades because they have been plagued by high rates of suicide; these reforms aim in part to ameliorate some pressures by creating more cooperative communities—something that surely is relevant for institutions serving undergraduates, said to have “epidemic” levels of anxiety.

Aiming to reduce the focus on grades and internal competition, some elite law schools—Harvard, Yale, Stanford—have likewise modified their grading systems, though they have basically replaced a letter-grade or numerical system with another system with verbal labels. Harvard moved to honors, pass, low pass, and fail; they have no curve and no class rankings, but students still get GPAs, and the words are converted to 4 (honors), 3 (pass), 2 (low pass), and 0 (fail). Yale has only pass and fail for first-semester students; thereafter the evaluations are pass, low pass, and honors. Stanford has honors, pass, restricted credit, and no credit. These systems are both evidence of discomfort with grades and retention of the essential process of sorting.

Grades are attacked for a variety of reasons, sometimes while faith is retained in their usefulness and necessity. Sometimes it is because there is no consensus on what grades are in the first place. Attempts at consistency and uniformity have tended to fail, or at least falter, leading to lack of clarity about their meaning (and student lore about which faculty are easy graders). Complaints about grade inflation circulate in society and administrations (though grade inflation is really grade compression, as a smaller range of grades is actually employed for most students).  Grade compression is a complaint especially at elite schools.  The problem with grade compression, critics argue, is that students are harder to distinguish. In going gradeless, most of the authors of this book act on the conviction that our principal task is educating all students, not ranking them.

Some colleges have systemic regulations aiming to combat grade inflation, sometimes by restricting high-level (i.e., A) grades and sometimes by requiring a fixed distribution (30 percent A, 30 percent B, etc.) or a preestablished median. However, not all colleges do this, and communication of the meaning of grades may be challenging. Perceiving that outsiders may regard their grades as lower than those at other universities, Dartmouth (and also Cornell in the past) includes information on students’ transcripts not only about students’ own grades but also about the median, for the professor or the college, to contextualize the stricter system. The University of California, Berkeley, has been mandating a lower set of grades to fight grade inflation; some students avoid Berkeley entirely to avoid getting “deflated” grades.  Princeton in 2004 implemented a cap on A-range grades, mandating that only 35 percent could be at that level; it is considering rescinding the policy.
All this is to show the long-standing discomfort with grades as they are and the manifold attempts to improve, or save, them, as those aiming to combat grade inflation are really committed to doing.

Where Did Grades Come from in the First Place?
It is helpful to know a little about the origin of grades, not entirely lost somewhere in the mist of time, so natural have they come to seem.  It seems grades began as a way of simply conferring exceptional recognition on some individuals who stood out in examinations. But under the model of other industrial systems, grading took hold of most levels of education by the early twentieth century. There had been a few precursors in formal educational systems, but largely this was a novel approach, not undertaken with any sort of plan. Previously there had been one truly rank-conscious educational system, in imperial China. In higher education, China had written examinations (Civil Service Examination, keju) for over thirteen hundred years, with various rankings that determined administrative and professional placement.  The current incarnation, the gaokao, is the subject of much critique but also defense for its relative fairness.

In the European context, medieval and early modern universities had public, oral examinations—“marked” at Cambridge with letters and pluses and minuses. These examinations were really more like debates than our familiar examinations. There may have been some written examinations, especially in mathematics, as early as the sixteenth century, with some kind of ranking of students at Cambridge, but it is only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that written examinations became dominant at institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, likely because of the increased numbers of examinees, where the scale made oral examinations impractical. (Some minor vestige of oral examinations, especially for higher levels such as the dissertation, remain.)

Though there is little concrete evidence for it, some attribute the practice of grades to the chair of mechanical engineering at Cambridge, William Farish, who is reputed to have used marks for individual examination questions beginning in 1792. In contrast, Oxford downplayed ranking. Ranks using Greek alpha, beta, and gamma existed, but all students could be ranked alpha. In many European universities, especially in Germany, examinations were often simply pass or fail; students were permitted to retake their examinations until they received a satisfactory result. But things were different in the United States.

Yale began to differentiate students into four classes in the late eighteenth century. Harvard began in 1830 to use a twenty-point scale for rhetoric examinations. The fluctuation between numbers and letters has been ongoing. The University of Michigan used a numerical system, then in 1851 switched to a pass–no-pass system, and in 1860 returned to a numerical scale of 100.

Our familiar letter-grade system started in 1897 at Mount Holyoke College and has spread to most schools. This style of evaluation has been tinkered with, but along with tinkering has come much serious questioning of both the method and purpose of grading.

The Enduring Tension between Progressive and Scientific Approaches
There have been, for a hundred years, those who believe human learning and schooling can be broken down into little bits and assessed, just like other types of production, using principles of scientific management, or the Taylorian method of breaking factory production and other tasks into smaller ones and maximizing efficiency, normed outcomes, curves, and the like.  One of the names associated with this is Edward Lee Thorndike, from whom we have inherited our standardized and normed tests.

Intelligence tests, originally designed to sort out people with the capacity to overcome their impoverished backgrounds, measured an individual’s score on a test against a “normal” person of that age, resulting in a quotient, hence the intelligence quotient. IQ and even the notion of general intelligence, or g, have been criticized as being racist, classist, sexist, ableist, and more.  They derive from the notion that there is a single, fixed amount of intelligence—fixed mindset—and that every individual can be arrayed against all others in an objective distribution.

Because some things in human behavior, such as height, may be distributed along a bell-shaped curve, and because normed tests (such as IQ tests) have been made to conform to such distributions as well, some believe human “aptitude” falls into a bell curve (normal distribution curve or Gaussian curve). But the belief that this applies to human learning is a claim and an assertion, not a finding.  The twentieth-century rise of a focus on assessment stems in large part from the scientific management views of schooling as consisting of a limited number of identical, measurable tasks, along with the notion that scarcity and competition are the essence of schooling. And a twenty-first-century push for assessment (of entire systems) has largely been seen to have failed.

Contrasting with scientific management approaches to education have been contrary strands from the beginnings of what has come to be called progressive education, exemplified in the work of John Dewey who questioned many dimensions of our formal schooling, including the idea that schools should be separated from the world and that the focus should be on abstract, “academic” learning. Instead, Dewey favored integrating learning with life and embracing practical learning. He experimented with this in the Chicago Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, which he founded in 1896.

Enduring tension between the ideas that all students can learn equally well—the more democratic assumption—and that schools should be in the business of sorting has given us arguments about competition and scarcity, credentialism versus citizenship, democracy versus meritocracy. It is here that we see questions about vocational versus academic preparation, about education preparing for work or further school or for citizenship and fulfillment, about ability grouping or equity. (These assumptions vary globally.)

A relatively recently established but very exciting field that contributes to this work in higher education is the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Scholars such as Joshua Eyler, Daniel Willingham, Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Viji Sathy, Kelly A. Hogan, Saundra McGuire, Oscar Fernandez, Thomas Tobin, James Lang, and many others have written about and given faculty development workshops on “how humans learn,” based on rigorous work in cognitive science, neuroscience, and the “learning sciences,” plus a deep commitment to inclusion and equity.  Much of this work focuses on innovative pedagogy, including flipped classrooms, active learning, peer education—all the new, sometimes-disparaged buzzwords a new generation of young faculty is taking up in earnest. Overall the research on teaching and learning challenges the effectiveness of old teaching methods from the days of medieval lecturing. Books in this series, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, tend to build on these studies. Sometimes based on experiments and laboratory research, they discuss motivation, social and emotional learning, and more. This body of research overall does not support the old early twentieth-century views of sorting students along bell curves, of threatening and using behaviorist techniques, or of disregarding the social and emotional elements of learning.

Appreciative but slightly critical of such cognitivist approaches, however, are some feminist and critical views of learning. Focused on care, or on the nonpredictability of learning as is evident in, say, composition studies, they challenge the cognitivist approaches that tend to emphasize the individual as the unit of analysis and to rely on experiments conducted in North American college populations (WEIRD—Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic).  SoTL tends to assume the endurance of bounded classrooms and degree-granting institutions—which are, obviously, not required for deep and lasting learning. And studies of learning, they may charge, tend to focus on learning as information which may then be assessed through simple testing or limited observations. As John Clifford, a writing teacher, put it,
Protocols [lab experiments] certainly tell us something, but their web has not been precise enough to catch the important ingredients that go into cognition, memory, perception and attention, to say nothing of intention, desire, self-esteem and all the other variables of the rhetorical situation. . . . The use of protocols is indeed problematic. If writers are forced to order their responses so systematically, isn’t their composing behavior significantly changed? Is the context of these experiments relevant to the psychological and social morass of the classroom? The “context-stripping” that their empirical scrutinizing demands casts serious doubts on how closely protocols mirror real classrooms with all their peer pressures, grades, authority figures and motivational nuances, plus the stylistic and rhetorical idiosyncrasies of individual instructors.

It is certainly very difficult to measure the affective and social gains that accompany a rich semester of immersive learning, in contrast to a single laboratory variable-controlled experiment, but that is what some views would require.

Even in terms of cognitive gains in critical thinking, studies have been very difficult to conduct. One of the most famous, that of Arum and Roksa (2011) in the much-cited Academically Adrift, relied on computer-graded assessments (reliability correlated with human scorers),  but this methodology has been deeply criticized in terms of its statistical basis, the use of computer-assisted scoring, and the actual researchers’ logic.  I dwell on this only to remind you that it is extremely difficult to assess learning, and that methods matter.

Enduring tensions regarding the nature of schools and indeed of the person and society are evident in some of the different models in this book. But despite some disagreements, all the contributors converge in our rejection of conventional grading practices.

Challenges to Conventional Grading Systems: Foundations
Faculty object to conventional grading systems on a number of grounds, supported by research and scholarship of many sorts. Many of the contributors in this book refer to the topics of motivation (citing Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, Alfie Kohn, and Daniel Pink) and the contrast between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Whether arguing for Kohn’s seven principles or three ideal characteristics of classrooms (collaboration, content, choice), or Pink’s three concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, the authors aim to create positive atmospheres devoid of fear and threat and focused on learning.

Inconsistent Meanings of Grades
Incommensurability of grades is another long-standing problem. One professor may include homework in the calculation, either simply points for completion or actual evaluation of accomplishment. One may include all tests while another may drop the lowest score. One may ignore attendance; one may offer extra credit for things like watching a movie or attending a lecture.  Many include participation—up to half the points in seminars—which may or may not include attendance; others disregard it. (This may reward students who are extroverts, as well as those who are fortunate enough to avoid serious illnesses, financial challenges, and family responsibilities.) Though some faculty recognize other ways to acknowledge participation and involvement in courses, as a way of acknowledging more differences, abilities, and so on, most commonly participation means speaking in class. Attendance is legendarily low in some courses where it doesn’t count; when it does count, students may sign one another in for the attendance points. One professor may weight more heavily assignments later in the semester. Some may curve the grades, attaining a predetermined distribution. Some may assess simply for final mastery, while others include intermediate efforts.

Grades, despite their apparent solidity, have been inconsistent from the start. Research from 1912 and 1913—early in grades’ ubiquity—jolted the profession. Two researchers attempted to test how much consistency (reliability) they would find among faculty evaluating the same papers. They found little agreement in English and history—there was a range of 39 percent—but perhaps, the researchers thought, this resulted from the inherently less clear-cut nature of the subjects. Assuming judgments of math work would be more uniform, they sent out a geometry paper, where they found even less agreement: some faculty gave scores of 38 to 42, and others of 83 to 87. Some incorporated neatness or organization, though others did not.  Lest you think this would have been improved in the intervening century, Dean Stevenson reported on a September 2019 investigation in which he asked for volunteers to assess student assignments; more than fifty teachers volunteered to participate. The grades they assigned ranged from 1 to 6 points.  This shows that it is common for grades to be inconsistent, subjective, random, arbitrary.

Yes, judges can become consistent—but only with a great deal of training, as in the strange task of creating inter-reviewer consistency for SAT scorers, and then evaluating a restricted dimension of the work. Peter Elbow, renowned educator in composition studies, is not impressed: “The reliability in holistic scoring is not a measure of how texts are valued by real readers in natural settings”—where, for example, in “real life” some people may adore and others despise particular movies, music, books—“but only of how they are valued in artificial settings with imposed agreements.”

Beyond inter-rater consistency on the same assignment or test, there are many other forms of inconsistency. One example, with huge implications for equity, has to do with well-resourced secondary schools awarding higher-than-perfect (“weighted”) grades for honors and advanced placement courses, so a student graduating from such a school may have a GPA above 4.0. Yet a student whose school does not offer many of such courses may, “just by going to the wrong school,” have a lower GPA to offer in the college application process.

So what do grades mean? What are they for? And can we accomplish our aims with different methods?

Desire for Substantive Communication
If grades in part are designed to communicate feedback, to say for example, “This is pretty good because you’ve done this well, and it would be stronger if you did . . . ,” then it has been shown for a long time that grades fail at this task. Narrative evaluations do, along with conferences and more.

Another problem with grades is the serious question of how to understand the grades of learners with different beginning baselines: if someone begins with a good bit of knowledge and doesn’t put in effort, but ends “higher” than someone who started with no knowledge, worked very hard, and made great strides, how should this be evaluated? One way, of course, is to say just that: “You worked very hard and made great strides, and you still have more to learn about X, but I can tell you care about the topic” or “You began as a very accomplished student but didn’t put a lot of effort into the class. You may want to assess your interest in the topic, or your time management, or your goals.”
The point is, when we grade, we really convey very little information about what is being assessed. But we can convey it in other, fuller ways.

Side Effects, Unintended Consequences, Perverse Incentives
The critique of grades focuses, often, on their failure to produce the desired outcomes—learning—and on their potential negative outcomes. Yong Zhao has suggested that we take seriously the negative “side effects” of educational structures, just as we do with medicine.  If cheating is a frequent side effect of a bottom-line mentality, where the goal is the grade, rather than learning, perhaps improvement might be possible if institutions and courses could explicitly focus on learning and either downplay or eliminate a fixation on grades.

We can disagree about whether grades should be what educators distinguish as formative (allowing some learning still to occur using the information here) or summative (a final pronouncement about what has been done).  Writing, composition, and rhetoric teachers usually regard their feedback as encouraging revision, and only the final product gets a grade; the intermediate steps often get a grade simply for completion (contract grading). Narrative evaluations, as long as teachers have the time and freedom to engage substantively in them, accomplish this. But despite the time harried faculty put into writing comments, the sad and enduring fact has been that students rarely read them, as Ruth Butler demonstrated in the 1980s. Comments alone, however, especially when they are used for subsequent tasks—in other words as “formative assessment”—may have some efficacy.

Further evidence about the effects of grades is that grades discourage risk-taking and encourage replication of safe tactics. In studies of divergent-thinking tasks of students in fifth and sixth grades, the more rewards they received, the less creative the process they employed. One explanation is that focus on grades emphasizes teachers’ control, and thus produces extrinsic orientation. Praise without feedback is not productive: “Praise did not yield higher subsequent intrinsic motivation than grades and did not even maintain initial interest at its baseline level.”  Kvale argues that assessments in higher education have focused on control, discipline, and selection, which contradict goals of learning.

There is even a connection between student evaluations of teaching and the deplored grade inflation: if faculty, whose careers depend on students’ perceptions, desire to be regarded favorably by their students, there is no better way to do that than to give uniformly high grades. This certainly incentivizes mutual rewarding of high numbers.

Fixation on grades and GPA leads students to seek easy classes. My own students report a frenzy of inquiries during the class registration period, when students ask one another for information about easy classes, the desirable ones that yield high grades with little work. A Reddit thread I observed asked for “Easy Online GPA Booster” courses that offer an A+ and are preferably upper division. Further desirable characteristics are that they have no schedule so they can be completed immediately, that answers are online (Course Hero, Chegg), and that they do not require much writing.

Furthermore, the use of “learning outcomes” and “assessment” for accreditation agencies appears fair, accountable. But it’s often merely an appearance of fairness. If someone comes in, say, to a language class as a heritage speaker of a language—a popular tactic for boosting a GPA—then doing well on tests may reveal the initial condition of mastery and little growth. Grading promotes a deleterious focus on an appearance of objectivity (with its use of numbers) and an appearance of accuracy (with its fine distinctions), and contributes to a misplaced sense of concreteness.

Surely no educator worth her salt would consider these to be desirable characteristics of a meaningful learning experience. The authors of this book largely regard many of these negative outcomes as stemming directly from, as ineluctable consequences of, the system of grading.

Solutions in the Plural
For all these and other reasons, many are questioning the utility, morality, and negative effects of grades. The individuals contributing to this volume are noteworthy not only because as individuals we are committed to focusing on our students’ learning but also because we operate within structures that are conventional. It’s one thing to have students who reject the conventional model and select a school that is entirely gradeless. It’s another thing to have students, in a conventional system, show up in one person’s class and find out that, wow, this professor or teacher is different from the others and ask, How do I navigate this class? For me personally, this is a (sometimes daunting) challenge every semester, when I get a new batch of students who have perhaps never questioned the conventional structures before. We believe it is helpful, for teachers and professors who want to implement a different system, for us to spell out some of the challenges we face, and to provide some of our own solutions, as well as some of the failures, in order to be realistic and give some ideas about approaches to try. Though this is not precisely a how-to book (we don’t say, “Do these five things”), we hope readers will appreciate the many practical suggestions in each chapter.

The authors of this book’s chapters are not uniform in our approaches. We offer honest, earnest accounts of our own trials at creating more effective communication with our students in order to create more learning-focused conditions. In many ways this nondogmatic, problem-based (design-thinking?) approach to learning how to teach in new ways is a model for how our students might learn anything as well: we’ve recognized a problem, learned about previous research, prototyped solutions, iteratively improved them, shared our experiences, failed a little, risked a lot, succeeded a little more.

Our solutions are not in lockstep: some have more prespecified outcomes while others craft them in dialogue with students; some have more fluid notions of what is supposed to be accomplished. Alternatives to conventional grading incorporate a variety of techniques. Some use rubrics while others have rejected this approach. Some employ contract grading; some grade for completion, effort, quality, or quantity. Some administer conventional tests; some measure learning against uniform predetermined learning outcomes and others differentiate goals, using variants of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).  Some regard the syllabus as a contract; others see it as a promise. (I frame it as an invitation.) Practitioners vary along a continuum of radicalness, from co-constructing the syllabus (chapter 7, Katopodis and Davidson) to tweaking the existing frameworks. Most emphasize that they trust students.

Each of the authors elaborates on her or his own approach. It is often a personal and sometimes emotional journey, but it is not as lonely as each one of us may have initially thought. There is tension among these approaches—appropriate but worth examining in the future.

A Baker’s Dozen Approaches
Here we have a baker’s dozen faculty reporting on what they have done, in a variety of settings, using a variety of approaches, and how it has worked.

Some are old hands, engaging in ungrading for as long as two decades (Blackwelder, Davidson, Gibbs, Riesbeck, Sackstein, Stommel), and some are quite new to the practice (Schultz-Bergin, Sorensen-Unruh). Some teach writing (Blackwelder, Chiaravalli, Sackstein, Warner) and several teach STEM subjects (Chu, Riesbeck, Sorensen-Unruh). Some are at relatively elite institutions (Blum, Riesbeck) and others at relatively democratic/less-advantaged ones (Katopodis and Davidson, Sorensen-Unruh). Some use contract grading (Gibbs, Katopodis and Davidson); many use portfolios. One teaches online (Gibbs). Several have developed shorthands for explaining their practices (“All feedback, no grades” [Gibbs], “do-redo-review” [Riesbeck]). Some have found nothing but acceptance and appreciation, while others have encountered resistance.

This book includes five chapters from secondary school teachers (Blackwelder, Chiaravalli, Chu, Kirr, Sackstein) who teach writing, social studies, and math. They report on their own practices, and Kirr offers student responses to it. Eight chapters are from faculty in higher education (Blum, Gibbs, Katopodis and Davidson, Riesbeck, Schultz-Bergin, Sorensen-Unruh, Stommel, Warner).

We hope that this set of foundational pieces, presenting a variety of models, along with assorted practices and reflections on this experience, will at least cause you to think, possibly to experiment, and to have conversations about what is at the heart of learning and teaching, and the role of grading or ungrading in this multidimensional, human set of interactions.

If there’s something happening here, perhaps you should know about it.

 

Table of Contents

Foreword
Alfie Kohn
Introduction: Why Ungrade? Why Grade?
Susan D. Blum

Part I: Foundations and Models
1. How to Ungrade
Jesse Stommel
2. What Going Gradeless Taught Me about Doing the “Actual Work”
Aaron Blackwelder
3. Just One Change (Just Kidding): Ungrading and Its Necessary Accompaniments
Susan D. Blum
4. Shifting the Grading Mindset
Starr Sackstein
5. Grades Stifle Student Learning. Can We Learn to Teach without Grades?
Arthur Chiaravalli

Part II: Practices
6. Let’s Talk about Grading
Laura Gibbs
7. Contract Grading and Peer Review
Christina Katopodis and Cathy N. Davidson
8. Critique-Driven Learning and Assessment
Christopher Riesbeck
9. A STEM Ungrading Case Study: A Reflection on First-Time Implementation in Organic Chemistry II
Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh
10. The Point-less Classroom: A Math Teacher’s Ironic Choice in Not Calculating Grades
Gary Chu

Part III: Reflections
11. Grade Anarchy in the Philosophy Classroom
Marcus Schultz-Bergin
12. Conference Musings and The G Word
Joy Kirr
13. Wile E. Coyote, the Hero of Ungrading
John Warner
Conclusion: Not Simple but Essential
Susan D. Blum

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

I love this book. It undermines the mythology around grading, helping us understand that (a) grading is a construction, and a relatively recent one at that, and (b) we’d be better off without it—as would our students.”
Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World

“Nuanced and well balanced.”
​​​​​​​Choice Reviews

From the Publisher