Put Down the Grade Book
It’s time to consider “ungrading.”
Opinion by Emily Dosmar and Julia Williams
As faculty, we know how to develop new courses. We list topics, choose textbooks, schedule classes, determine homework, and plan exams. We accept without question the necessity of these components. But the pandemic has demonstrated that some of these elements may not be truly required. Key among them: the need for grades. Over the past academic year, we adopted an “ungrading” approach in our courses. We urge you to do the same.
Why get rid of grades? A 2011 study found that students’ interest and performance were highest when they received feedback instead of grades. When students received a grade alone or a grade in addition to feedback, the grade seemed to undermine interest in the course material and overall performance. Additional studies have demonstrated that grades have three predictable effects on student behavior: less interest in learning, preferences for easier tasks, and shallower thinking. Evidence also shows that grades do not track or correlate with actual learning or eventual success. In short, grades are somewhat meaningless.
We decided to adopt ungrading because we wanted our students to remain excited about the course content, motivated to explore areas that interested them, and willing to take on challenges. Ungrading proved to be the mechanism to achieve those goals.
Grading is all about finding fault, marking it, and then convincing the student (and truth be told, ourselves) that the evaluation is correct. High-performing students learn to imitate a form that the teacher values, to approximate the ideal essay/report/solution/design that the teacher compares all student assignments to, to prove that they are worthy of the grade. The assumption is that through the process of grading students learn to be better thinkers and writers. After using this method for years, we are now willing to admit that this is a fallacy.
Last fall, after discussing the benefits, we both committed to adopting ungrading. Our efforts spanned two academic terms and involved students of multiple levels and majors. After years of carefully doling out points to our students, we simply…stopped. We provided rich and substantive feedback but no numerical or letter grades. We allowed for revisions, multiple attempts, and opportunities for “deep dives” into course material. We met with students individually to discuss their performance and to hear their proposals for midterm and final grades rather than assigning them based on accumulated points. And students loved it. They reported that it empowered them to learn with less stress. It took the stress off us as well and allowed us to give better feedback. Throughout the term, spirits were high.
But wait, hear us out! Before you dismiss ungrading out of hand—“Students won’t do their work if they don’t get grades,” “My department chair would never allow it,” “I’m an untenured professor, and adopting ungrading will spell the end of my career”—we assert that ungrading has been adopted in a variety of different ways, from simply emphasizing feedback to complete grade anarchy. We embraced some anarchy along the way, but still assigned midterm and final grades through a collaborative process with our students. Our shared goal was to help them develop better strategies for self-assessment, a skill that they will need when they start their first jobs or begin graduate school. And we had to give up the illusion of complete authority that we often associated with teaching. We relinquished control, and ultimately, that was okay.
After our initial experiments last year, we have continued using ungrading practices in our courses this year. And we are acting as ungrading advocates with and for our colleagues who are exploring these methods, too. This year, we are teaching students at every level using ungrading methods. At the freshman level, we already know that ungrading reduces stress and encourages metacognition as students adjust to college-level course work. At more advanced levels, we expect that students will take on increased risk and explore more deeply the topics that interest them. Ungrading practices encourage greater independence, which can result in improved student self-awareness.
As our ungrading efforts continue, we recognize it as a way to create more equitable and welcoming classroom experiences for all students. Students bring varied backgrounds and levels of experience that often are not reflected in their course grades. With ungrading, we capture the learning and growth achieved over a term rather than how closely their prior knowledge matches the course content. We also can account for external factors such as illness and family emergencies.
We have taken solace in the words of legendary pedagogue Peter Elbow, who once wrote, “The deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon students.” We depend on students for our identity as teachers: if we don’t grade, then are we really teaching them anything? By giving up grades, we were able to end our dependency and set ourselves and our students free.
Emily Dosmar is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. She is deeply passionate about diversity and inclusion in STEM and has published several works on online learning, ungrading, and engineering pedagogy. You can find her on twitter @emdosmar. Julia Williams is a professor of English at Rose-Hulman. She is the author of Making Changes in STEM: The Change Maker’s Toolkit (forthcoming 2023), based on her work with the National Science Foundation and the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network. You can find her on Twitter @doctorjdub.