August 2025, after my last term of teaching
I've been experimenting with ungrading in various forms for 35 years now, since before the word was invented. Some folks aren't happy calling it "ungrading," but I like it: it says "I don't want to do what's been called grading, and I want to undo the harms grading has caused." I started c. 1990 with increasing student choice and agency: letting students choose what work they would do, when they would hand it in, and how much of the grade it would be worth... within a framework of limits and rules, to make it both acceptable to administration and equitable for students. By 2023, I was letting students in many courses assign themselves marks for either some or all of their work. I gave feedback and checked their work against their self-assigned grades, and I only moved a mark if I believed someone had assessed themself either way too low or way too high. I tried a bit of labour-based grading, and it worked best in the courses with publishing projects, but mostly I liked self-assessment the best. It's not for my first-year classes, whom I give other kinds of choice and agency. First-year students aren't yet experienced enough with kinds of work in different disciplines or with standards of merit in different disciplines to be able to make the best choices of what work they want to do or what marks they've earned. In second-year courses, I've made up to half the final grade self-assessed; in third-year courses, up to 100%. In the fourth-year writing-intensive courses, I took my department's Undergraduate Curriculum Committee's advice not to have students self-assess...or not for the majority of their final grade, anyway!
Along the way, I've also worked on both experiential and authentic learning, e.g. having students choose the readings for the course, doing my text-ordering project with 387 Children's Literature and the library, having students edit and publish their work, and doing hands-on maker experiences with classes.
So, how do I feel about all those experiements in all those courses over all those years?
1. We learn more and learn better when they have some input and control. If students can find ways to make work meaningful and personal, that leads to more engagement and more long-term impact.
2. Students tend to feel overwhelmed if you give them all the control--not just the neurodiverse and ADHD students, but especially them. We need to be careful in finding safe ways to introduce any ugrading practices and give support to those students who need it.
3. We need to incorporate reflection into ungraded courses, asking students to think about what worked for them and didn't, what they learned about themselves, etc.
4. Ungrading, overall, changes the time I would have spent on marking to a slightly lower amount of time giving feedback. The course design and assessment design take a little bit longer. So, there isn't a net increase or decrease in the time part of my workload; however, there is a significant reduction in the emotional workload. I'm all for that!
5. The new world of GenAI interacts with ungrading in ways that vary with the kind of assessment. AI is messy in a more-often-negative way; ungrading is messy in a more-often-positive way. I'd hate to see us revert to all in-person testing of knowledge aquisition and understanding as the main way we do this thing called Education.