Let’s Talk About Grades. Let’s Talk About Ungrading.

Contributed by Matt Luter

One of the reasons I wanted to work with TEAM this year is so that I could have some opportunities to broach the (admittedly, somewhat sensitive) subject of how we, as a community, think about grades, their purpose, and the act of grading.

I have read fairly widely at this point on the topics of grading and the nascent (but decidedly no longer fringe) movement known as ungrading. In the next few blog posts, I want to make the case for a few ideas: 1) grades, traditionally understood and used, do not support student learning and can in fact impede it; 2) de-emphasizing the centrality of grades in your classroom through ungrading practices is beneficial; and 3) we can employ ungrading practices even within a framework that uses traditional grading in big-picture ways.

A lot of what I will do here is link to other resources and research; please consider these posts an invitation to learn more from other published material. I’m not the expert researcher on this material, but I’m glad to talk about it with you and share resources.

I have come to believe that grading, in its traditional form, does more harm than good. A few observations, with links:

1. Grades, at least in American school settings, were invented not to give students actionable feedback and support their growth, but simply to sort them. (Or, you could also say, they were invented not to assist in learning, but to rank people. Ranking people—especially given the existing power imbalance between educators and students—is gross.)

2. Emphasis on grades appears to be one potential factor driving our current mental health crisis among young people. Here’s a link to a great article on the topic by Joshua Eyler (whose upcoming book on this topic Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do About It I am excited to read). Eyler focuses there on college students, yes, but there is also evidence that his argument applies to high school students (at least).

3. Traditional grading negatively affects students’ intrinsic motivation and general attitude toward school. We’re all aware of students whose early-childhood curiosity and delight in learning veers toward joylessly playing the game of school as teenagers. Often the centrality of grades is why.

4. Most importantly: it does not have to be this way. Traditional grading was not handed down from on high like stone tablets on Mt. Sinai. Educators created it. Educators can should must change it. Here are two aptly named websites, both highlighting communities of teachers thinking about this topic, that I would recommend to anyone interested in a wide variety of additional thinking on this topic. Teachers Going Gradeless runs a great repository of ungrading material on their website Grow Beyond Grades—the title alone there characterizes traditional grading as something we ought to move past for the sake of our students’ growth. Another standout is Human Restoration Project, which works a bit more expansively on topics well past ungrading—they are opposed to any educational practice that they see as dehumanizing students, and they argue that traditional grading definitely runs that risk.

I encourage you to check out all of these links on your own. I also recommend a few books: Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum (author of I Love Learning; I Hate School), is a good introduction to many of the current top thinkers on the topic. I also like the work of Thomas R. Guskey, who is less of an ungrading advocate than some and more of an advocate for thoughtful grading reform. His On Your Mark and Get Set, Go do a good job of mixing research-based theoretical underpinnings of grading reform principles with practical applications. I have copies of all on hand and am glad to lend them out. 

Next post: let’s sort out some facts and myths about what ungrading does and doesn’t mean.