Revisiting Ungrading

I’ve made several attempts to reduce the emphasis on grades in my classes. For example, I have written an open letter to students signing up for my class to explain what I am doing and why. However, it’s not enough to present this in a class syllabus and discuss any issues of concern on the first day of class. I’ve learned, through trial and error, that the what and the why must be constantly reinforced. Students often have a fixed notion of how grades work in a science class, not through any fault of their own – the successful ones have adapted well to the ‘system’. Therefore, changing the way things work introduces some anxiety, especially among students who have ‘done well’ in previous classes.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know how you’re doing in a class as a student. It’s an important skill to ascertain what you don’t know and what else you need to learn. The trouble is that students easily fixate on the grade and don’t think about the learning. The grade is a quick-and-easy measure, a proxy of sorts – an A means you’re doing well, a C perhaps not so great. Part of the problem is that the purpose of grades has been conflated in the two types of assessments used to gauge ‘learning’: formative assessment and summative assessment. It’s not just students who confuse the two; teachers do the same. Summative grades were used early in the meat packing industry. Over time, they have completely pervaded the education industry (and yes, it’s an industry).

If you regularly read higher education news, you’ve likely heard of the Ungrading movement among college professors. For example, when ‘grading’ a paper, a professor writes comments without providing a score or letter grade. In the paper drafting process, students ideally use those early comments to improve. The draft is not a ‘final’ work that is assessed summatively; the comments provide formative assessment. The professor might assign a tentative grade in his or her gradebook without telling the student what it is, and revise that grade after assessing the final paper. But when you’re grading a large stack of papers, and you want to motivate students not to turn in complete rubbish in the first draft, you might explicitly assign a portion of the student’s final grade to the quality of the draft. This fear-motivation can be well-meaning and practical, but it blurs the distinction between summative and formative assessment, and furthermore reinforces the students unhealthy focus on ‘the grade’.

More recent versions of Ungrading go a step further. Students are asked to reflect on their learning and suggest what their final grade should be at the end of the class, based on their learning progress and their achievements. There are caveats, though. The professor still ‘controls’ the grade and may disagree with the student’s assessment, thus providing some standard of summative assessment. While most examples have come from the Humanities, where students typically write papers and such assessments are often assumed to carry a higher degree of ‘subjectivity’, there are recent movements in the sciences using the same approach. Including, yes, organic chemistry.

My recent forays into Ungrading focus on a cleaner separation between formative and summative assessment. I’ve done this by asking students to participate in annotated self-grading. In G-Chem, I’ve introduced this for midterm exams (I typically give three to four per semester). In P-Chem, the students annotate their problem sets. My approach thus far does not save me any time in G-Chem, but I have noticed a significant reduction in my ‘grading’ time for P-Chem when I look over the problem sets. In both classes, if students make a good faith effort to follow my instructions, I give them full credit, i.e., they are not penalized. The whole point of this approach is to encourage the students to reflect on what they know and what they don’t know – so they can better target their learning. Is it working? Partially, I would say. I don’t yet have enough data, but I suspect that it doesn’t work so well for struggling students at the low end. My approach needs refining.

Last fall, I introduced a ‘replace your lowest exam grade’ option in my Quantum class. Students could opt to submit a reflection on what they had learned related to the material that was tested on the exam they wanted to ‘replace’. I had what I thought were clear guidelines in my syllabus, along with an exhortation that the reflection needed to be substantial and would benefit from weekly journaling BEFORE even taking the exam. I hoped that students would, in the process of reflecting, actually learn the material in greater depth and then actually do better on the exams. This didn’t happen, of course. Again, my approach needs refining.

So, I’m thinking of an approach that combines my reflection-journaling idea with the ‘suggest your grade’ approach my upcoming special topics course a year from now (because I’m on sabbatical!). I think the special topics course lends itself well since the class will primarily consist of reading and discussing primary literature. Students also participate in leading some of those discussions and coming up with guiding questions for papers that we read. There will be a final project culminating in a written research paper and an oral presentation. I am planning to thread reflection-journaling assignments throughout the semester that will culminate in a final reflection where each student proposes his or her overall course grade. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I’m excited about the prospects of my Ungrading approach for this course! I’m sure students will be anxious and I will need to figure out how to allay their concerns while promoting the benefits of my approach.