Language Teaching Pedagogy

In recent years, there has been growing support for what has been coined “ungrading,” or an approach to grading that questions the pedagogical utility of the type of quantitative feedback that letter grades and percentages represent. In lieu of traditional grading – which tends to orient focus on the grades themselves instead of the process of learning – proponents of ungrading emphasize developing systems of feedback that encourage students to become more reflexive about their performance in class, while also guiding them to become more autonomous, self-directed learners. In order to accomplish these goals, educators adopting an ungrading approach prefer forms of feedback that are detailed, student-specific, and invite students to participate in the process of evaluation and critique.

This page includes resources – both online and from the library – that explain further the rationale for ungrading. Below, there is a list of alternative assessments that many proponents of ungrading have implemented with success.

Online Resources for Ungrading

Alternative Approaches to Assessment as Explained by Jesse Stommel on his Pressbook Page "Undoing the Grade"*

Grading and assessment are two distinct things, and spending less time on grading does not necessarily mean spending less time on assessment. Assessment is inevitable, constantly happening whether we’re intentional about it or not. Ungrading asks us to question our assumptions about what assessment looks like, how we do it, and who it is for. Ungrading works best when teachers feel they can fully own their pedagogical approaches (which requires that administrators and institutions defend the academic freedom of teachers, especially adjuncts). There are lots of different possible paths toward ungrading, and smaller experiments can be just as fruitful as larger ones.

Grade Free Zones

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine diving right into the deep end of removing grades, so you might consider having the first third of the term be ungraded, a sandbox for students to experiment inside before moving on to the more formal activities of a course. Or decide to grade only a few major assignments. 

Self-assessment

I’ve already talked at length about how I use self-assessment. What I’ll add is that this work is both part of my approach to the problem of grades and also a pedagogical end in and of itself. Ann Berthoff writes in “Dialectical Notebooks and the Audit of Meaning,” “Learning to look carefully, to see what you’re looking at, is perennially acclaimed as the essential skill for both artist and scientist.” Metacognition is a practical skill that cuts across disciplines. In addition to reflecting on our own individual work, I would add that we — teachers and students — should evaluate our collective work together, the class itself. 

Process Letters

If you’re only grading a few assignments, you may not feel like you have enough information to determine a final grade at the end of a course. I have students write process letters, describing their learning and how their work evolves over the term. These work particularly well for creative and digital work that might otherwise seem inscrutable within traditional grading and feedback systems. A process letter can be text, including (or pointing to) representative examples of work students don’t otherwise turn in. You might also ask students to take pictures of their work as it evolves, add voice-over to a screencast, or document their learning via film (a sort of behind-the-scenes reel for the class).

Minimal Grading

In “Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer,” Peter Elbow describes what he calls “minimal grading,” using a simple grading scale instead of giving students bizarre grades like 97%, 18/20, or A−/B+. Scales with too many gradations make it difficult for teachers to determine grades and even more difficult for students to interpret them. The only legible difference between 94% and 97% is that 97% is higher than 94%, so a percentile scale is effective at ranking students against one another but not very effective at conveying clear information about performance. Elbow recommends scales with fewer gradations: turned in (one gradation), pass/fail (two gradations), strong/satisfactory/weak (three gradations). He also describes a “zero scale,” in which some work is assigned but not collected at all. This frees teachers from feeling they have to respond to, evaluate, or even read every bit of work students do. And this last, moving away from student work as a thing to be collected, can help build intrinsic motivation to do the work of a course.

Authentic Assessment

In my film production courses, I often ask students to organize a film festival or premiere in order to share their work for the class. These usually include talk-backs with the audience. Increasingly, I don’t ask students to turn any assignments into me (aside from their self-reflections). The community of the class (including me but not just me) becomes their audience. I allow myself space to be one member of that community, a genuine reader of student work. In a service learning course, this community expands even further beyond the boundaries of the class. In short, how can we create reasons more meaningful than points for students to do the work of a course?

Contract Grading

Grading contracts convey expectations about what is required for each potential grade. In “A Grade-Less Writing Course That Focuses on Labor and Assessing,” Asao B. Inoue argues for “calculating course grades by labor completed and dispensing almost completely with judgments of quality.” Contract grading pushes against the relegating of people into categories (“A student,” “B student,”) by keeping the focus on the work. Contract grading can be humane in a way that standardized teacher-centered rubrics usually are not. Contracts do run the risk of centering grades even more than traditional grading, but at their best, the negotiating around the contract becomes a way for students to collectively worry the edges of grading as a system.

Portfolios

Increasingly, many corporate e-portfolio platforms are walled gardens, giving students a regimented way of gathering together their work for the purposes of assessment. I prefer more authentic portfolios that have use value beyond the needs of individual, course, programmatic, or institutional assessment. Having students build personal or professional sites on the Web, for example, can help them craft a digital identity that exists outside (but also in conversation with) their coursework. The key is to use a portfolio not as a mere receptacle for assignments but as a metacognitive space, one with immediate practical value (as a way for students to share their work with potential collaborators, employers, graduate schools, etc.).

Peer-assessment

Peer-assessment can be formal (having students evaluate each other’s work) or informal (having students actively engage each other’s work). It can be particularly useful when students work in large groups. I frequently ask students to work on projects that have an entire class (of twenty-five or more) collaborating. When I do this, I ask every student to write a process letter that addresses their own contributions as well as the functionality and dynamic of the team they’re working with. I do not ask students to grade each other. With large-group projects, it is hard for me to see what and how each student contributes, but peer-assessment helps me get a view into a process I might not otherwise be able to see. If it is a project students work on across the entire term, asking students to write process letters multiple times also allows me to get the information I need to step in and help when and where I’m needed.

Student-made Rubrics

I’ll be honest. I don’t love rubrics. Alfie Kohn, in “The Trouble with Rubrics,” describes them as an “attempt to deny the subjectivity of human judgment.” Rubrics are often recommended as a way to make standards for evaluation transparent, but rubrics have never helped me make sense of grading or being graded. Learning is just too complex to fit into neat and tidy little boxes. Peter Elbow encourages making rubrics plainer and more direct, a 3 × 3 or smaller grid. The rubrics I find most exciting are ones crafted with students — so that the making of the rubric becomes an act of learning itself rather than a device (or set of assumptions) created in advance of students arriving to a course.

Each of these alternative approaches can work on their own or in combination. With classes of twenty-five or three hundred. (You aren’t going to write an individual letter responding to every student self-evaluation in a class of three hundred, but you can write a letter to the whole class, talking about the trends you notice and suggestions for moving forward.) Ultimately any assessment strategy demands us to adapt, in the moment, as we encounter each new group of students. This attention to context, our own and our students’, is what critical pedagogy calls for.

Grades are a morass education has fallen into that frustrates our ability to focus on student learning. But, as long as grades remain ubiquitous in education, can we be more creative in how we approach them? At the very least, our talk of grading shouldn’t be reduced to our complaining about its continuing necessity.

*Adapted from Undoing the Grade Copyright © 2023 by Jesse Stommel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License