Contributed by Matt Luter
The easier thing to define is what ungrading isn’t.
- It is not a sudden decision to stop giving assignments or doing evaluations of student work altogether.
- It is not inherently easier than traditional grading (as both formative and summative feedback can be tougher and more time-consuming than assigning a number and stopping there).
- It is not simply letting students grade themselves in an unguided fashion, though reflection and assigning grades in collaboration with students’ self-assessments are both powerful ungrading practices. (It’s also worth adding here that almost all research out there on self-assigned grades finds that students do not, as many expect, give themselves substantially higher grades than teachers would).
- It is also not standards-based grading—I mean, the centrality of grades is still right there in the name.
So what should we know about ungrading, then? The first thing to understand is that ungrading is more of a dial than a lightswitch. Everything I’ve read on ungrading practices emphasizes that, because ungrading can be a difficult shift for some students (and parents!—and especially for high-achieving ones), ungrading one’s classroom over a period of time might be the best idea. Surely some teachers have stopped doing traditional grading all at once; many more have transitioned in this way gradually over a period of several school years, testing out what works well and what doesn’t.
The second thing to understand is that ungrading is a menu of options and not a single meal, so to speak. There is no definitive right way to do it, in large part because the core goal is less to eliminate evaluative feedback and more to de-center the act of placing a letter or number on student work. If you’re interested in doing just that, then the way you ungrade will probably vary by the age of your students, the discipline you teach, and your usual classroom procedures.
I’m keeping this one short just to lay out a couple more foundational principles. In next month’s blog post on this topic, I’ll address what you may be thinking right now. We are a school that uses grades in fairly traditional ways on report cards and college transcripts. How can someone ungrade a classroom while grades are still part of the fabric of the institution? And how does this even work within K-12, since many of these practices began in higher ed?
Glad you asked. There are a variety of practical strategies to de-emphasize grades while working within some traditional K-12 frameworks, and we’ll talk about some of them next time.