Every few years, I think about de-emphasizing grades. (Here’s my previous blog post on it with links to discussion about grades.) I’ve tried several different things, some of which worked well, some of which did not. In upper-division elective courses where we mostly read the primary literature and discuss it, de-emphasizing grades has been relatively easy. There are no exams. I’m looking for engagement. And in a small discussion-based class with students who are interested in the topic and do the reading (also because they know I will call on them), it’s not hard for the students to be engaged. But in more “standard” courses such as G-Chem and P-Chem, this has not been so easy.
Why am I thinking about this again? Because I’m reading Ungrading (edited by Susan Blum), a collection of essays from instructors who discuss their varied approaches to de-emphasizing grades and reflect on the process. The opening essays preached the gospel of ungrading. I can summarize, tongue-in-cheek, that there were two main thrusts: a story of spiritual uplift from burden, and a demonizing of “traditional” approaches to grading. I’ve heard many of these arguments before and I’m partly sympathetic (I agree with some of the points) and partly unimpressed (by arguments I deem simplistic). After getting past the opening philosophical zealotry, I settled in to read the practices and reflections. These are interesting and quite varied – different folks have tried different things.
While science/math folks constituted a minority of the contributors, one that I read through slowly was by an instructor of organic chemistry, Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh. She provides excerpts from her O-Chem II syllabus on the “grade” breakdown. Students are required to do some writing and reflection, take some quizzes, and take exams. Her quizzes had a simple ternary scale like mine except she provided written feedback and allowed group work and resubmission. The final exam, like mine, is a summative assessment. The interesting part comes from the three midterm exams (worth 45% of the total class grade) where she incorporates a multi-tiered ungrading approach. Here’s how it works.
Sorensen-Unruh looks through the exams and provides written feedback only to the student. On the back-end she does record a score that the student would have earned if all that mattered was a score. The student then looks at the feedback and suggests an exam score (they’ll need to figure out how right or wrong they were on their answers). If the student’s predicted score is lower than the instructor score, the instructor score is used. If not, then the final score is an average of the two values. Bonus points are given if the student predicted score is within one standard deviation of the instructor’s. Points are subtracted if the standard deviation is larger than three. Sorensen-Unruh also takes the time to explain why she’s doing what she’s doing. (This was important feature of all the essays – to get student buy-in when you’re swimming against the “traditional” current.) I liked her first-day-of-class approach that had the students think about their goals, but also think about what employers think are important skills.
Another interesting aspect of her midterm exams is that next to each question she provided a box with three emojis (see above) for the students to rate their confidence in their answer. In addition, she made it a point in her comments to provide thoughtful feedback, both positive and negative. But what really struck me was the following reflection she had while doing so: “I assumed my students would thoughtfully consider the points I’d taken off each question as a stand-in for feedback. I made this assumption mainly because I thoughtfully took off those points, weighing exactly how much of the question had been missed and why it was necessary to take off the points. My major ungrading realization was that students did not get this message. At all. My students did not even recognize this kind of grading was something we regularly agonized over until they had to do it themselves. It was only when they graded their own papers for the first time that they realized taking off points had reasoning behind it and that the process of grading was muddy and difficult.”
I introduced annotated self-grading of some exams (I called them self-tests) in my G-Chem class several years ago and I’ve been tweaking my approach. However, in those self-grades, I wanted to take the pressure off and essentially gave full-credit regardless of how the student actually performed. I pitched the self-annotated grading as a tool for them to study on the graded-exams. Some students took this task seriously and benefited from the exercise. Others did not. My setup was different from Sorensen-Unruh’s and I can see how her approach worked better than mine. Not that she didn’t have hiccups, which she details in her essay. She also reported student feedback, and it was interesting for me to read about students finding the confidence-level check useful. I’ve not done that before on an exam so I’m potentially intrigued to try it.
Overall the ungrading that Sorensen-Unruh and two other contributors (one computer science, one math) employed was not as “drastic” as their fellow essayists in the humanities. I think that’s helpful to me as a chemist who thinks that grades, while they have their drawbacks, also have some value. A long discussion or argument could ensue about how to evaluate that value, but that’s not the purpose of today’s blog post. One other thing I appreciated from reading Ungrading was the heartfelt final essay by John Warner (who taught writing as part of his career) where he imagines himself like Wile E. Coyote in the never-ending quest to catch the Roadrunner. Warner’s sentiments moved me more towards ungrading approaches than the previous preaching in the early chapters. So while I overall give the book a mixed grade, there were some enlightening gems worth my reading and thinking time!
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