What role do grades play in learning?
Susan D. Blum’s text Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) encourages instructors to consider the above question. This scholar, in addition to countless others, is a part of a recent movement that seeks to de-emphasize grades attributed to student work in an effort to re-center student efforts on the actual learning process.
What is ungrading?
Ungrading is “a practice which eliminates or greatly minimizes the use of assigned points or letter grades in a course, focusing instead on providing frequent and detailed feedback to students on their work, in relation to the course learning goals” (Kenyon, 2022). While an entire course can be ungraded, the approach is most commonly used only on specific elements in a course. For example, in a writing intensive course, students might only receive grades on the final drafts of each of their papers. For the initial drafts, students receive ongoing feedback from their instructor and/or peers, but do not receive grades/points in that process.
Benefits of Ungrading
- Encourages reflective practice
- Integrating ungrading into a course encourages instructors to take a step back and consider what role grades play in their course. What does the current grading system communicate to students? What assessments/assignments are graded the most heavily and why?
- Reduce student stress
- De-emphasizing grades can, in some cases, reduce student stress around grades and associated academic performance
- Promote growth mindset with increase learner autonomy
- By transitioning the focus from grades to the learning process, ungrading can promote a growth mindset in students as well as increase their autonomy
- Emphasizes the feedback cycle between instructor and student
- Inherently, when students don’t have grades to focus on, their attention is more closely connected to the feedback they receive. This feedback can be from the instructor and/or their peers through peer feedback
Cons of Ungrading
- Learning curve
- Ungrading is, in and of itself, a paradigm shift. For those new to the practice, it can take some time with a little trial and error to establish an ungrading approach
- Student buy-in
- Just as instructors can be new to ungrading, so can students. Learners are generally brought up in educational systems based on and around grades. Introducing ungrading to students will generally require open and regular conversations around the learning process and how students can expect to be evaluated
Examples of Ungrading
Ungrading can be done in a number of different ways such as:
- Self-assessments
- Students can be asked to reflect on their own performance on individual assignments or in the course at large
- Peer assessments
- Students can provide peer feedback to each other on individual assignments or throughout the course
- Process letters
- With each assignment/assessment, students additionally submit a process a letter that outlines students’ thought process in completing their work
Resources
Blum, S. (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). West Virginia University Press.
Crogman, H.T., Eshun, K.O., Jackson, M., TrebeauCrogman, M.A., Joseph, E., Warner, L.C., and Erenso, D.B. (2023). Ungrading: The Case for Abandoning Institutionalized Assessment Protocols and Improving Pedagogical Strategies. Educ. Sci. 13(1091). https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13111091
Kenyon, A. (2022). What is ungrading? Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. Duke. https://learninginnovation.duke.edu/blog/2022/09/what-is-ungrading/
Talbert, R. (2022). What I’ve learned from ungrading. InsideHigherEd. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/04/27/professor-shares-benefits-and-drawbacks-ungrading-opinion