Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (Teaching and Learning in Higher Education)

by Alfie Kohn

The second intervention was to provide students with a set of midterm exam questions. These were basically short answer and essay questions that covered all the major ideas we had explored in the first half of the course and easily could have been the basis for an actual midterm exam. But rather than requiring completion of the exam, I made it available to students to complete any or all of it. This intervention was a bit more beneficial, because a few of the students who admitted to not doing enough in the first half of the course had a way, nonetheless, of producing some work that indicated learning throughout that part of the course. And so I did receive a couple of submissions.