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

by Alfie Kohn

Prior to turning in their work for feedback, students write down their level of understanding for that concept or skill. They circle a number one through four, four being the highest level of understanding, and write down a justification for what they circled.

Examples of alternative assessments I have done are one-on-one verbal assessments, video submissions, essays, and presentations.

Students would be provided with a buffet of learning opportunities

The only required assignments would be three reflection essays: an early semester achievement essay, a midterm learning reflection, and a final learning reflection.

Students would meet with me for two learning conferences—one at the midterm and the other at the end of the semester.

we spent part of the first day of class reflecting—individually and collectively—on what we wanted to get out of the course.

Common themes arose among the students—a desire to improve their ability to read complex argumentative texts, to improve their ability to communicate arguments and engage in debates, and to gain a deeper understanding of the law and its role in their own lives.

As a result of our collaborative outcome design, I crafted a syllabus for the second class meeting where I also pitched, in more detail, my grade-anarchy approach.

Grades end learning opportunities by essentially saying, “This is done.” Feedback continues the conversation.

Self-evaluation and reflection promote ownership of one’s own learning and therefore assist in an individual’s development into a self-regulated learner who will be capable of learning and honestly evaluating themselves for their entire life.

Self-evaluation and reflection can be done in a graded classroom but are more significant in a gradeless classroom.

Students have indicated that without the grade pressure to attend, they are a little more likely to miss a class if other things come up. I don’t necessarily see this as a problem—it is not the case that students are skipping because they do not feel like showing up. Instead they are making a judgment about other commitments or deciding to take care of their health rather than risk infecting others.

Moreover I encouraged (but did not

require) students to sign up to be discussion leaders for most class periods. As a discussion leader, the student would be responsible for constructing a one-page handout summarizing the key arguments of the reading and placing it in the broader context of the class, and then facilitating discussion on key issues.

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.

Technically speaking there would not be any necessary negative result for a student who failed to complete an assignment. However, by getting more precise about what students need to do in their reflection essays and the learning conferences (discussed below), there would effectively be potential negative results for missing (too many) assignments.

So I would further emphasize the need to create a portfolio of work that indicates

achievement of the learning outcomes.

students have a better idea of their starting skill level and so—with the right guidance—can be a better judge of their overall growth.

provided written feedback on the achievement essays, often indicating particular types of assignments students should look to complete in order to achieve what they indicated they wanted to achieve,

writing their reflections, students should explicitly speak to their achievement of the course learning outcomes (which they helped to write)

For each outcome they needed to indicate either an assignment (or assignments) that spoke to it or note particular experiences in class or while reading that indicated achievement.

participation). Students would then be asked

to keep all their assignments—with my feedback—and compile the portfolio in a more formal way.

Sure, there are some students who probably would have done more work (understood simply as completing more assignments) in a graded classroom. But it is not obvious to me that they would have learned more.

Grading was something to be managed, something to be survived. It was the worst part of the job, often the only truly bad part of the job, but it was just one of those things you had to do, right?

Perfection in teaching is the Road Runner. We are never going to catch it. We need not be as pathetic as Wile E. Coyote in his failures, but we must vow to be as dogged in pursuit of our mission.

In hindsight my approach embodied some of the worst of Wile E. Coyote’s plans, overelaborate schemes with too many moving parts and a variety of components.

Proficiency is too low a bar, and an uninspiring one to attempt to jump over to boot.

frame learning to write around developing “the writer’s practice”: the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of writers.

writing-related simulations, highly prescriptive exercises that allow us to pretend students are learning something, but once the students are asked to work without the prescriptions, everything seems to fall apart.

while I was still reading everything students completed, I was not necessarily scoring it against a grading scale, which allowed me to better appreciate what students had accomplished

the ratio of my summative to formative feedback changed almost instantly from 50/50 to 2/98.

experienced my responding to student writing as one of the high callings of my personal pedagogy.

ungrading became a truer expression of my pedagogical and life values.

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”

Therese Huston advocates in her book Teaching What You Don’t Know against faculty always taking an expert position—an appeal for modeling learning, rather than modeling already-knowing.