Learning and "sorting"
"Ungrading" resets expectations. It isn't easy. A short review of what happened in my fall 2021 class. Preliminary thoughts, maybe even a bit of a screed.
Read time: 8 minutes. A gathering of ideas for a longer piece reflecting on last fall’s course. I chose to “ungrade” last fall, and I think it improved the experience for students. I think we accomplished much more, with fewer tears and anxieties. Next week’s post is on car forums and the gatherings of car enthusiasts and tills up some ideas for a chapter in my book. If you like this post, share it with a friend.
No teacher likes to grade. That is probably one of the rare uncontested facts of teaching life. Teachers may try to view it as a necessary thing — a portion of soggy broccoli on the plate of learning — but many, if not most, see that grading in the end distracts from learning and teaching. Teachers know that in their guts, and research backs up that today’s grading system in schools is largely counterproductive.
Maybe it’s time we listen to what our conscience has been saying. Maybe it’s time to rethink, even jettison, the grind of grading in learning and replace it with work that improves student performance and, well, everyone’s well-being.
“Sorting.” What grading does.
We tend to think of the purpose of grading as a reflection of a student’s skill or achievement: an “A” grade for exceptional performance, an “F” grade for failure, and everything in between. In its worst (but not uncommon) manifestation, the grade labels the person. More profoundly and almost invisibly, grading serves the ways and the mechanics of schooling, which is not the same thing as education or learning. Schooling is an attempt to institutionalize learning, and certainly for many the school succeeds as a place that helps them learn. Grading sorts students for administrative purposes, and sometimes grades make it easier to match student abilities with learning opportunities that a school provides. Grades determine whether or not little Johnny or Mary advances to the next grade (there is the word again).
It’s surprising to learn that the history of grading is relatively recent and quite varied, with familiar “letter grading” becoming common in the 1940s. But even in 1971, only about 67% of US schools used letter grades. The practice emerged gradually in higher education in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, but it wasn’t necessarily used to record performance in individual courses or even to give students “feedback,” as we do today. Rather, grade use points to administrative contexts. Jeffrey Schinske and Kimberly Tanner report that “[b]y 1837, Yale was … recording student credit for individual classes, not just at the completion of college studies, using a four-point scale. However, these ‘merit marks’ were written in code and hidden from students” (my emphasis). The practice of withholding grades from students persists; Sarah Lawrence College and Reed College do use grades but don’t report them to students as a matter of course. Other colleges don’t use grades at all, usually preferring to use narrative reports, among them Alverno College, Hampshire College, Antioch University, Goddard College, and Deep Springs College (which, by the way, I think might be the most selective college in the US, bar none). Eighteen of the top twenty US medical schools “use only pass-fail grades for preclinical courses” (Susan D. Blum).
The point: grades and grading, for purposes of giving students “feedback,” is not a practice written into the firmament. The predominant use of grades follows a tradition — a relatively new one, at that — and it’s not glorious.
You could say that grading could be useful if it remained an administrative tool for sorting and grouping students, though I wouldn’t have all that much faith in that either. As a tool for helping individual students learn, grading seems pretty much a disaster. Schinske and Tanner tell us in more detail:
It would not be surprising to most faculty members that, rather than stimulating an interest in learning, grades primarily enhance students’ motivation to avoid receiving bad grades. Grades appear to play on students’ fears of punishment or shame, or their desires to outcompete peers, as opposed to stimulating interest and enjoyment in learning tasks. Grades can dampen existing intrinsic motivation, give rise to extrinsic motivation, enhance fear of failure, reduce interest, decrease enjoyment in class work, increase anxiety, hamper performance on follow-up tasks, stimulate avoidance of challenging tasks, and heighten competitiveness.
(I have omitted bibliographical citations that appear in the article’s text.)
It’s no wonder that students pay attention to grades. One thing that I saw when I first began teaching decades ago was how the grade at the end of a paper overrode the attention paid to the comments, the revision suggestions, the questions that I had included in the margins of the paper. That, too, has been studied: Susan M. Brookhart neatly sums it up: “[I]f a paper is returned with both a grade and a comment, many students will pay attention to the grade and ignore the comment.”
Take away the grade to reset the balance of attention?
Ungrading is just as much work as grading. Maybe more.
Sorry, but that’s the truth. Not grading doesn’t lift a burden; it might re-center energies of teaching and learning.
After having gone down the path of “ungrading” his writing classes, John Warner found he didn’t spend any less time reading students’ writing, but the purpose and the reasons for reading them changed, markedly for the better. “I found that I approached the pile of student writing not with dread but with curiosity,” he wrote in an essay published in 2020. “Rather than asking ‘What have they done?’ I was focused on ‘What are they doing?’” The switch in perspective, he continued, opened up the processes of learning and guiding, since “What are they doing?” meant reading and responding to writing, not just trudging through a “distasteful chore” and assigning a mark. For him, the shift was “a great weight lifted.”
In making the switch to ungrading, I had added significantly to the writing assignments for the fall course. In addition to class presentations, draft submissions for peer review, the peer reviews themselves, and a final research paper (all of which were tied together as a process), students completed “Almost Weekly Letters,” which I adapted from Jesse Stommel’s use of student “self-reflections.” The pieces were, in fact, “almost weekly” through the semester, a handful of weeks excepted when other class matters or writing deadlines pressed. Prompts related to the substance of the class during the weeks, for the most part. Every letter included a personal reflection on individual student’s progress through the week, whether it met the student’s expectations, and a question that the student would like to pose to others in the class. The assignment called for a different rhetorical framework than much college writing — it was a letter, after all, and therefore had a more writerly freedom than more constrained and impersonal papers demanded. But the “voice” of the letter still disciplined the prose, something that students sometimes struggled with, and a couple students never could completely give up on footnotes in their letters.
The Almost Weekly Letters occupied much of almost every weekend of my life through the semester, since I read and returned the letters before the next week — and the next Almost Weekly Letter assignment — began. Weekend tasks of reading and responding to the letters occupied about eight hours for the class of 17 students in the seminar — between 20 and 35 minutes per letter, some of which was fiddling with a scanner and uploading scanned pages into Sakai, the “learning management system” used at Duke.
I could have spent the same amount of time grading the pieces and sorting the letters into sad little boxes. Because I didn’t read-to-grade, I also didn’t dread the reading, and I can confirm Warner’s observation about the shift in perspective. The question almost every weekend was indeed “What are they doing?” and also “How are they doing?” My comments related to the substance and the expression in the letters — not as annotations justifying a mark scrawled on the last page.
The effect: By “ungrading” the Almost Weekly Letters, they became an avenue for exchange and thinking. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to do?
“Rigor”
I have long viewed myself as a “rigorous” teacher, and students have felt that I’m demanding and (usually) sympathetic, reasonable, and supportive. The substance of a class comes through in readings, exchanges with class guests who are practitioners, researchers, and scholars, and from guided discussions in class. This is part of what I mean by rigor; it’s engagement with ideas and it follows a process that brings about a firm realization, an unfolding within students, that comes about because of the engagement. Writing has a natural place in fostering that kind of rigorous engagement, and it’s not a back door to exclusion. Everyone in a class can rigorously engage, some have deeper experience doing that. It’s everyone’s attainable task and, especially in a seminar environment, everyone’s responsibility.
Rigorous engagement is the goal, not “getting an ‘A.’”
In the end, I did have to assign a letter grade. An institutional requirement, not a necessity for education, even though many might act as if it were. How did I move from ungrading to coughing up a grade? I adapted an approach that others at Duke have used. Cathy N. Davidson, former faculty at Duke now at CUNY, and others have developed a “contract” approach to grading. (She and Christina Katopodis describe it in UNgrading.) And I also drew from Paul Fyfe’s “Data and the Human,” his course at North Carolina State University that is similar to mine. Fyfe simplified the contract approach, and shifted the ways of conveying the grading process. Students “choose” grades and work to achieve them. And, most importantly I think, the approach reinforces that “Effort > Grades” — “effort is greater than grades.” It’s reasonable to say that you have to work to achieve; your work is what’s important and grades … well, they’re a feeble shorthand for achievement, or something.
Davidson’s contract scheme puts a good deal of emphasis on students reviewing other students’ works, and that seems a solid approach, assuming there are sufficient guardrails provided by the instructor. But I was not entirely comfortable with relying heavily on student reviews for a first run in this class. It’s likely that I’ll add up to a handful of student reviews for the Almost Weekly Letters in fall 2022, since the “peer-review” I built into the course’s research paper process was useful to the students, both as readers of each other’s work and as recipients of their peers’ views.
I do wonder whether the kind of ungrading that worked in my fall 2020 class scales — that is, how big a class could actually benefit from it? In fact, I wonder whether scaling should even be something we value in a “system” of education, which ungrading actually is. Breadth of human interactions matters in the seminar classroom, and matters of life experience and long learning and study do open new avenues in discussion and discovery. Maybe scale in education should be handled with care and suspicion, since scaling can easily lead a mechanized system of evaluation.
For fall 2022, I’ll be sticking with an ungrading approach, and now that I’ve got a bit of experience with it, I’ll be tweaking. I expect that I’ll be reflecting on the experience until August, when the next class begins. So I’ll likely revisit the topic in a Techncomplex post or two between now and then.
Tags: ungrading, education reform, rigor in education, grading, schooling, higher education, humanities, writing, teaching writing
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Like “rigor,” “excellence” has baggage: Moore, Samuel, Cameron Neylon, Martin Paul Eve, Daniel Paul O’Donnell, and Damian Pattinson. “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3, no. 1 (January 19, 2017): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2016.105.
“Rigor” when it’s misapplied to mean “exclusion”: Jack, Jordynn, and Viji Sathy. “It’s Time to Cancel the Word ‘Rigor.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2021, sec. Insights. Gale Document Number: GALE|A681132481. Gale.
Where grading came from, what arguments surround it, and what might be done to fix it: Schinske, Jeffrey, and Kimberly Tanner. “Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently).” CBE—Life Sciences Education 13, no. 2 (June 2014): 159–66. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054.
She doesn’t give up on grading, but isn’t wild about it either: Brookhart, Susan M. How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2008.
Two teachers talk about ungrading: Milanese, Marisa, and Gwen Kordonowy. “Why We Stopped Grading Our Students on Their Writing.” WBUR: cognoscenti, January 12, 2022. https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2022/01/12/contract-grading-education-college-writing-marisa-milanese-gwen-kordonowy.
Collection of essays on ungrading, including ones by Davidson & Katopodis, Warner, and Stommel: Blum, Susan Debra, ed. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). First edition. Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2020.
A syllabus — “Data and the Human”: Fyfe, Paul. “Data and the Human.” Humanities Commons [Repository], 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/0h18-5p41.
Another syllabus: “CS 181/181W: Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy,” Spring 2020. https://stanfordcs181.github.io/.
Something different — the old habit of “two sleeps”: Gorvett, Zaria. “The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps.’” Future. BBC, January 9, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep.
An interesting application of VR: Osso. https://www.ossovr.com/ By the way, this is not a paid plug or an endorsement. I’m looking around for constructive applications of virtual reality tools. A long-ago student of mine leads a team at the company, and I was curious.