There are many different ways to approach “going gradeless” or “ungrading.” But whatever approach you embrace, if you are reading this, most likely you do not need further convincing that grading is problematic and that we can do better.

There is abundant evidence that grading isn’t about learning, it’s about ranking and sorting. That grading is detrimental to motivation. And that it perpetuates systemic inequality. So we look to do something better for our students, whether that is using feedback, conferences, mastery-based learning, contracts—there are many approaches to explore. And we’ve been exploring these alternatives for a long time, as documented a half-century ago in Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education. (I’ll come back to this book later.)

As teachers, we have some control over how we approach grading in our own classrooms. Many of us on the ungrading journey engage in subtraction, by removing traditional letter or percentage-based grading from our classrooms. We also engage in addition, introducing new practices and routines centered around feedback and growth. In this post, I argue that we need to work on the addition of something even bigger. We need new infrastructure to connect our individual efforts to the larger educational systems our students must navigate. 

Let’s begin with a definition of infrastructure. In the U.S., we have become used to thinking of it as roads, bridges, pipes, and wires. The large-scale stuff that enables modern life. But the sociologist Susan Leigh Star, who studied information systems as a form of infrastructure, argued that infrastructure interacts with and creates practice in deep ways. Infrastructure becomes embedded and invisible, but its presence shapes standards and conventions, which in turn shape our practices, which in turn become learned as part of membership in a community. And as a result, practices that are shaped by infrastructure are hard to change without also changing the infrastructure in radical (and therefore challenging) ways.

Consider transportation. Urban planners have long recognized that when you address road congestion by building or expanding highways, people are only encouraged to drive more, leading to new congestion in a self-reinforcing cycle. Most people will admit that cars are dangerous and bad for the environment, but still won’t give them up. “Cars are more convenient to use,” they’ll say. Or, “Public transit doesn’t go to the places I want or at the times I want it to.” Clearly, we need serious investment in public transit infrastructure to encourage people to leave their cars. But without demand for public transit, where is the political will to invest in it?

In education, we understand that “If you build it they will come” doesn’t work. You need both the infrastructure and a set of practices and cultural norms that work together, and must be developed together in a mutually-reinforcing way. But if you never get started on building that infrastructure, the change you desire will never happen. And infrastructure building is a collective enterprise, not an individual one.

What is the infrastructure that shapes our current grading practices? The infrastructure behind grading is things like the grade book built into your school’s Learning Management System (LMS), the report cards and other systems like PowerSchool used to communicate with parents, and the transcript that keeps a record of student performance overall and within courses, with its cumulative grade point average (GPA) and its embedded assumptions about the value of measuring learning as an average.

But wait, there’s more!

Standardized testing. Advanced Placement. The Common Application for colleges. These are all pieces of infrastructure that shape our classroom-based practices in deep ways. When learning is only valued in terms of end-of-year performance on a statewide or national test, “teaching to the test” is a rational response, even though we know this leads to shallow and brittle learning. When outcomes are measured as single letter grade and summed as an average, it's hard to focus on anything except that single mark.

In my roles as learner, teacher, and parent I’ve observed an acceleration of the cycle shaped by the current infrastructure of GPAs, transcripts, and standardized tests. When I was a student in the early 1980s, high school was viewed as preparation for college-level courses. Today, high school might more appropriately be characterized as preparation for applying to college, not applying oneself in college.

When I began teaching in the mid-1990s, I was able to give my students open-ended writing assignments, encouraging them to explore their own interests in light of the goals of the course. Over time, students began requesting more guidance and specification: “Can you give us a rubric?” “How many pages?” “Is that single-spaced or double-spaced?” And so on. My colleagues have come to recognize that our “best” students, the ones we label “Honors,” are often those who have never received a poor grade or test score, and therefore may never have actually been challenged. These learners are risk-avoidant, and their real talent is in following the rules extremely well.

As a parent, I observed (and, I admit, participated in) arguments at the breakfast table because PowerSchool (a system designed to create grade transparency between school and home) indicated that my daughter was failing a course, even though what was really going on was that the teacher had not yet entered a grade for an assignment, and PowerSchool (and similar systems) are unforgiving about calculating that average out of 100%. Parents, out of the desire to have their students succeed, create a lot of pressure on teachers and schools to maintain the status quo.

The college admissions process operates on top of, and in response to, deeply embedded infrastructure. College admissions officers have come to rely on standardized test and GPA data both because they present a veneer of objectivity and make it possible to process thousands or tens of thousands of applications through sorting and filtering. We understand that scores and GPAs have tremendous biases built into them. And who wants to be “processed” anyway? But the system persists in a self-reinforcing way, putting pressure on both teachers and students to conform and comply, or else be left out or left behind. With so many aspects of this system out of an individual’s control, it’s no wonder students and parents cling to what they think they think can be controlled: grades and test scores. My own university has a long-running undergraduate college-within-the-college that was founded without grades, only narrative evaluations. But over time the students themselves pushed for the addition of letter grades, out of concern that without them they were at a disadvantage in applying to graduate school or competing for jobs. There is good evidence that this was not and is still not true. And college admissions officers are open to thinking about this in new ways. But the existing infrastructure creates strong pressures to conform in order to compete, and to create a mirage of excellence and meritocracy. If we want new practices and new mindsets—for ourselves and for our students—we need to create new infrastructures to support and encourage them. 

Every teacher who has gone gradeless but still needs to submit a grade to their department or school has faced the challenge of infrastructure, which requires that you find workarounds and other ways to determine how to translate what students learn in your classroom into the single letter or number that “the system” demands. Standard gradebooks aren’t much use, either, often consisting of simple spreadsheets that add up columns of numbers. Instructors are encouraged to designate “how much out of 100%” each assignment or assignment category is “worth.”

To replace these deformative tools, gradeless teachers employ myriad approaches, including portfolios, Google Forms to document learning journeys, labor-based contracts, and feedback conferences. These worthy inventions and examples are a kind of small-scale infrastructure for the classroom, but in using them we end up fighting two battles. One is with our own students, who may view our classroom as an aberration from the majority of their experience. Because we are just one teacher with just one course, we are like a speed bump in our students’ overall experience. The other battle is with the larger systems we must deal with in our institutions, most notably the LMS or learning management system and the standard GPA and transcript.

The LMS is a particularly cruel and rigid piece of the grading infrastructure. Even the name (“management”) speaks to bureaucracy and maintaining order over supporting learning. These systems are designed by engineers and business majors to replicate their own educational experience. Literally. On my own campus, I was invited to discussions around the adoption of a new LMS. We met with the president and founder of a prominent LMS provider. I asked a question I often ask edtech corporate leaders, “Can you tell me about the learning and teaching experts who work for your company, or how you apply what we know about how best to support learning?” He didn’t understand the question. Current LMSs are built to feed the larger infrastructure around grading. Could we create something better? Certainly. But it will be hard to build something truly transformative without the infrastructure to support it. 

My favorite example of transformative infrastructure is the Mastery Transcript Consortium (note that I serve on their advisory board, which I joined because I love the idea). The premise of MTC is to create a new kind of transcript that represents learners in all their richness and individuality, as opposed to just a list of courses and a GPA. The Mastery Transcript allows each school to define their own areas of mastery, and provides space for students to express their interests and accomplishments through a linked portfolio that is verified by the school. But the real genius of MTC is their recognition that these new and richer representations of learning will only be seen as valuable to students, parents, and teachers if they can be used successfully in the college admissions process. And so they have worked extensively with college admissions personnel to design representations that can be read quickly (key when evaluating thousands of applicants), understood in the appropriate context, and are seen as valid. MTC’s goal is to establish the Mastery Transcript as a new standard—as infrastructure—and make it available to everyone. When I last checked, nearly 400 schools had joined the MTC, including 120 public schools. In the 2020-21 academic year, students using the Mastery Transcript were offered admission to more than 150 colleges and universities, including my own. And that was just during a limited pilot! The MTC is off to a great start. They are building new infrastructure, and they understand how important such work is. 

At the start of this post, I tipped my hat to the long history of thinking about going gradeless, and pointed to the 50th(!) anniversary edition of the classic book Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education. When I was first introduced to this book, I was stunned that the conversation about grades and what to do about them has been unchanged for so long. To me, this indicates that the effort to go gradeless isn’t hampered by a lack of good ideas. We are hampered by a lack of infrastructure for those ideas to feed into and be supported by.

Infrastructure cannot be built by individuals, even if your efforts are heroic. Infrastructure is built through collaboration and consortium building. Infrastructure is created through negotiation. I want to emphasize that word “build.” As a community, we need to view ourselves as builders. (Tip of the hat to David Buck and the Ungrading Virtual Book Club for helping to catalyze my thinking about this.) It is easy to feel like a pioneer or an evangelist when promoting the important work of undoing our current system of grades, GPAs, and transcripts. Evangelism can be important work.

But ultimately, developing a new and better approach to learning requires building new infrastructure, so that students, parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers can clearly see how approaches to learning that reject grading enable their full participation and success in society. Let’s engage collectively in the crucial work of infrastructuring, to ensure that the next fifty years see progress towards the creation of new and better systems to support and communicate learning.

Barry Fishman is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Learning Sciences in the School of Information and School of Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His research includes a focus on successful games as models for engaging learning environments and the creation of transformative and sustainable approaches to learning and teaching using technology.