Authored by Matt Luter
My last two blog posts here introduced the idea of ungrading by making the case that grades are not effective and talking about what ungrading is and isn’t. I wanted to follow up on the latter—which emphasized that ungrading is an imprecise blanket term for a wide variety of practices that decenter grades—by proposing a few ways that ungrading practices can start to take shape even in a school like ours that uses traditional grading systems. These are far from the only good ungrading practices out there, of course, and I’d love to chat with colleagues about even more possibilities. I hope some of these can find a home in your classroom next year.
Returning work with no visible grade. Perhaps you have noticed that every learning management system, even while including options to attach feedback to a grade, makes it far easier for students (and parents, and teachers) to locate grades than to locate feedback. The grade is foregrounded; the feedback requires extra clicks to find. That dynamic sends a pretty specific message. Why do we recreate it in person?
Instead, how about simply returning graded work with feedback, but with no number on it. I do this frequently with larger writing assignments already and plan to begin doing so with smaller ones also. The message is clear, I hope: the important feedback here is the descriptive, generative feedback from a teacher who knows your work. And I’m not hiding anything from you, because you know where to find the numerical grade, which will be entered at the end of the day.
Offering evaluative feedback, but with fewer categories and/or no numbers at all. The check-plus / check / check-minus system, for example, conveys information to students about their performance, which paired with some descriptive feedback, can provide a successful assessment. That it does so with only three possible categories and without a numerical element makes the responding quicker and the message lower-stakes.
Retiring the zero. A traditional 100-point grading scale in which 0-59 counts as an F claims that there are sixty different points of failure, but only ten different points of excellence. To what extent do any of us actually believe in that level of variance among poor grades? And should one particularly poor grade exert such mathematical weight over that many stronger grades?
Instead, making the lowest possible grade a 50 actually matches the 4.0 scale on which our school calculates GPAs. On that scale, an A (4.0) and an F (0.0) average to a C (2.0). Why should, on a 100 point scale, an A and a 0 then average… to an F? A 50 still sends the message that a student’s work was concerningly deficient in some important way, without utterly derailing an average for the semester.
Self-assessment. This one can be the toughest for many teachers to wrap their heads around, because it requires surrendering control over the assessment process. But at its best, self-assessment encourages students to build some self-awareness about their working habits while also creating space for generative conversations about individual students’ strengths and weaknesses as developing students.
Toward that end, a final note: I have essentially ungraded the new advanced humanities course here, SEARCH, by incorporating self-assessment. While the class structure had built-in checkpoints that required work to be turned in on certain dates, none of that work was given a numerical grade. Instead, I conferenced individually with students in December and May and assigned grades to each student’s work, portfolio-style, for the semester. In those conversations, I asked students what grade they would give themselves for the semester. And in each case, taking into account quality of work but also time management and deadline awareness, the student responded with the grade I had in mind—or lower. This matches what almost all research on ungrading has pointed out—that students are rarely inclined to grade themselves substantially higher than teachers would, as long as expectations are made clear. To be fair, the SEARCH class is a small, self-selecting sample set of strong, motivated students who opted in to an additional class. But I found this example revealing and wanted to be sure to share.
I’m not claiming to be an expert on ungrading, as I’m still in the process with my own classes and practices for sure. But I do think it can go a long way in discouraging our students from thinking of themselves as numbers, and encouraging them to think of themselves as active learners with agency and potential for growth. I’d be glad to talk about it more with any of my colleagues or recommend additional resources.