Booknotes: Ungrading, edited by Susan Blum

Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)

edited by Susan D. Blum

Finished 5/15/21

A book exploring alternatives to grading in classrooms, based on the premise that grading, as traditionally practiced, hinders learning.

I’m not primarily an educator, though I’ve spent a lot of time in classrooms as a student and as an instructor. But like the contributors to this book, I want my few experiences as a teacher to be meaningful and help the students I work with learn skills, facts, and ways of thinking that will stay with them throughout their lives. The educators who wrote chapters of this book are drawn from K-12 and collegiate environments, as well as from across science and humanities disciplines. What they have in common is a dissatisfaction with grading as a means of evaluating and promoting learning, and a diverse set of alternatives to grading.

The dissatisfaction stems from Threebasic problelms. First, grading leads to a focus on metrics rather than learning. Both students and teachers focus on grades and performance rather than content or enrichment, leading to least-cost strategies and for getting through classes, including cheating, plagiarism, and short-term memorization over engagement. Second, grading is a poor way to evaluate course performance. Grading all performance along a single metric (letters, percentage, etc…) flattens student experience and background–i.e. a student with pre-existing subject knowledge slacks off in a class and gets the same grade as a student with no knowledge who works their butt off. In other words, there is no clear consensus about what grades are actually measuring. Third, grades transform the complexity of student-teacher relationships into an abstract one that can produce anxiety, suspicion, rule-making and rule-evasion. The hierarchy inherent in grading leads even the best educators to force students to treat them as an oppositional gatekeeper, rather than as a partner in learning, growth, and enrichment.

The chapters of the book, written by a diverse group of educators, articulate different practical solutions to these problems, but all under the broad umbrella of doing away with grades entirely, or as much as possible in a given institution. What generally replaces individual grades on classroom assignments is a narrative or qualititave evaluation of student work, most often in consultation with the student. The goal is constructive improvement of existing skills and knowledge rather than a finalized and abstract assessment of work. It also requires building a relationship with each student such that they embrace or at least accept some responsibility for guiding themselves through the class rather than an instructor taking them from graded-assignment to graded-assignment. In several cases elaborated here, instructors have students choose their grades, based on their own assessment of their performance rather than one externally derived from a syllabus, rubrics, and instructor evaluation of both.

Several chapters in the book include excerpts of syllabi, evaluative material, and assignments to provide a framework for how to practically implement nongrading. Others discuss ungrading in philosophical or historical terms, locating it within progressive or radical pedagogical frameworks. All in all, it was a very inspiring collection, and got me thinking about how to utilize its insights in the small amount of teaching that I do.

Leaving aside the idealism and morality of ungrading as a pedagogical goal, there are a number of tensions and uncertainties in the implementation of ungrading. First, every chapter made clear that ungrading, no matter how it’s done, is a lot of work. The simplicity of grading makes it relatively straightforward, particularly for large classes–you build a grading rubric, students submit their assignments or tests, and you assign them a ranked number or letter based on how well they fit that rubric. Redesigning a class around qualitative assessment and regular feedback is daunting in its own right, and then actually doing it for large classes sounds completely exhausting, especially for instructors who are already burning every candle at both ends. Every contributor talked about how much work they put in, though all spoke of how much more rewarding such classes eventually became upon doing the work.

Another point of tension was around instructor autonomy versus the hierarchical nature of educational institutions. Many instructors worked in institutions where grading formed an integral part of student experience and instructors who wanted to implement ungrading were forced to do so quietly or in a limited way. And all of that is leaving aside contingent or employment-insecure instructors who have little control over what they teach and how. In other words, ungrading seemed to work best for instructors who already had some kind of institutional power to change their pedagogy. Others, with less power, might find a book like this of little use.

Third, the book’s attempt to flatten the hierarchy of instructors and students might not find receptive ears for students who see education as a commodity, purchased with the goal of future employment. The neoliberalization of higher education in particular (not to mention the standardized testing that has been institutionalized in US K-12 education) has had the cultural effect of making education into an exchange of tuition for grades, and many students have embraced this (entirely reasonable though contridictory) logic in their dealings with instructors. Beyond this, the neoliberal model of higher education has increased the total number of college students, decreased tenured faculty, and increased contingent/adjunct faculty, leading to an exascerbation of all of the previous problems heretofore mentioned. I came from reading this book inspired by the righteousness and genuine humanity of the contributors, but daunted by the prospect of implementing their vision in an increasingly inhumane and hierarchical higher education landscape.

Finally, (and perhaps most pettily), many of the contributors are from humanities and social science backgrounds where narrative and qualititative evaluation of student work is already commonplace. I can imagine that for STEM educators, or technical educators finding ungrading a more complex task, though both groups are represented among the contributors and offer novel solutions to ungrading in those contexts. Still, it’s an easier sell for people who are already doing some of the methods described.

All in all, I came away impressed and inspired, and found myself wondering about how to do ungrading strategies in some of my teaching contexts. I suspect others who find themselves frustrated with their experiences with students or unhappy in their pedagogical methods will relish the opportunity to rethink or reflect on them using ungrading as a framework.