“Ungrading” is one of those topics that inspires a lot of pushback when it comes up in faculty circles. Susan D. Blum, editor of a new book on the subject, says that’s because most administrators, students, and professors “assume that the central activity of school is grades, and that the central work of faculty is grading. In that case, a professor who isn’t giving grades isn’t ‘doing their job.’”
But for the growing number of advocates of ungrading, the whole point is to focus on learning rather than on “sorting or judging” students.
“I like to phrase it as ‘the central work of faculty is facilitating learning,’” says Blum, a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and editor of Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). “Sometimes we are forced to give a simplistic grade, but that’s really not very useful. The comments, narrative, and conversations are where the real learning and growth happens.”
In Ungrading, a baker’s dozen of professors and elementary and secondary educators offer up their experiences and insights about the vast educational benefits of forsaking traditional grading. From a diverse range of fields, they tell us what worked for them, where they failed, and what their students have said. One of the main things that comes through in each of the disparate essays is something that seems as if it should go without saying: These teachers trust their students. They believe that students want to learn. And they feel that grades are not a good motivational tool and are often at odds with real learning.
These ideas — which have been swirling around since Peter Elbow’s 1973 book, Writing Without Teachers — have had a variety of different labels: ungrading, de-grading, going gradeless, contract grading. As the writer and lecturer Alfie Kohn writes in the foreword of Ungrading, “We begin by accepting the idea that a ’growth mind-set’ is desirable, and we set about helping students to see the role of effort in determining success.” He points to the inverse relationship between a learning-oriented classroom and a grade-oriented classroom.
My own grading practices lean toward ungrading. For those of us who teach writing courses or whose courses have a strong writing component, I talked with Blum (via email) about how to apply the principles of ungrading to the teaching of writing. “The benefits are essentially limitless,” she said. “Ungrading allows students to take risks without being afraid that their imperfections will be averaged in with their final drafts. With ungrading, you don’t get an A; this is a reminder that writing is never complete, never perfect.”
John Warner, a contributor to the new collection and author of Why They Can’t Write, underscores that argument in his chapter: “If there is no terminal proficiency in writing — and I know this to be true from my own experience — why would I pretend such a thing is true for my students?”
Why, indeed?
Professional writers know how important it is to learn to take editing — to figure out how to fix problems that we weren’t able to see ourselves. As academics, we rely on and value peer review. But when it comes to teaching, we sometimes forget that the writing process involves a lot of false starts and failures.
In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott devotes an entire chapter to bad first drafts. Blum pointed to that chapter and its relevance to teaching writing: “When I allow my students to be imperfect, it’s as if a new universe has been opened to them. They’ve been so terrorized by the idea that anything less than ‘excellent’ at all times will harm their grades, that they’re paralyzed.”
The focus on grades can be intense. “We know from research,” Blum said, “that when there are grades, students see feedback as there simply to justify the grade. Without a grade, students are more likely to hear the feedback. These are ongoing conversations, and students see me — I say this explicitly — more as a coach than as a judge.”
But students also want to please those of us who teach them — to believe that they’re doing things “right.” Alfie Kohn has pointed out that when students are focused on how they’re doing, they think less about what they’re doing. So while it’s true that faculty members need a shift in their thinking about grades, we also need to convey to students that they’ve been essentially indoctrinated into habits of mind that might not be so useful when it comes to actual learning.
In her graduate writing course, Blum spends a lot of time “essentially doing group therapy about all the trauma — and I don’t mean that metaphorically — that school has imposed on them as writers. Most of them are truly afraid to write.”
The fear of writing cripples many of us from our earliest experiences with literacy. When the excellent writer Walter Kirn visited my class some years ago, he talked about the shame that accompanies writing about things that matter. When he was growing up, he said, he learned the alphabet song, and it ended with “Now I know my ABCs, tell me what you think of me.” That’s also the way I learned it. The lyrics changed at some point to the kinder “Next time won’t you sing with me?” But the reminder of how writing and judgment are intertwined has been with most of us from a young age. No wonder students tend to panic about revealing themselves on the page.
Unless you’ve written for publication — especially for an outlet that allows anonymous online comments or reviews — it’s easy to forget how much one note of criticism can drown out a chorus of praise. It’s that way with grades. Once students see anything less than what they expected to “earn” on a paper, the ding to the ego can be crippling and the motivation to go back and do more work can be lost.
And the key to good writing, as we all know, is revising. It’s being able to look at what you’ve done and — once you get over the relief of having finished a draft — look at it again to figure out what’s not working. A grade of A causes students to believe that they couldn’t do better. But especially when it comes to writing, most of the time most of us can.
Most writers often know, given enough time away from it, what the problems are with a draft. Years ago, I realized that when I had finished a piece (or a book) — or, rather, thought I had — and was about to send it off, I usually knew which problems remained. I would hope that I was being too hard on myself, or that my editor might not notice. More often, even if I knew what wasn’t working, I was too pleased with myself for having finished or too lazy to keep working, so I just sent it off.
That tendency, it turns out, is far from unique to me. Students, once we’ve taught them to read as engaged and generous peer reviewers, can often turn those skills on their own work. I’ve learned to ask people to say what they’re worried about in a piece of writing. When students or colleagues ask me to comment on a piece of their work, I seek direction on what they want me to read for: What are you worried about in this draft? What do you think isn’t working?
At first, my students might be at a loss and say things like “I’m afraid it’s boring.” Or, “It sucks.” But over time, with prompting and reminders of what they’ve learned to look for in published essays and in the drafts of their fellow students, they are soon able to come up with a list of problems and I get to say, “Yes, yes, yes.” Then we talk about how to move ahead.
Assigning grades, at that point, would be meaningless.
Blum, like most of the authors in the collection, is required to confer a final grade for each student. She does so in individual conversations with students, who suggest their own grade, based on their entire portfolio of work and overall learning from the semester. “I have very brief mid- and end-of-semester portfolio conferences, preceded by students’ reflections on their initial and evolving goals, understanding, skills, and learning,” she said. “Nearly every assignment has been shared with the class during the semester, and they’ve given one another feedback as well. Students are honest. Many report that for the first time they learned for themselves, not for the grade.”
The book’s essays, from teachers and professors in a variety of disciplines, give accounts of how they’ve used ungrading in their courses and showcase ways they’ve tried to make assessment meaningful. “However faculty decide to provide feedback to their students, whether ungrading or in more conventional terms, I really hope we return to the fundamental questions of what our ultimate goals are,” Blum said. “For what are we preparing students — real human beings who will be living real, complex lives? How do our courses play a role? How does each assignment fit in?”
