Teachers are often concerned about going gradeless in an AP classroom because the classroom context is tied more to content than to learning skills. My experience says otherwise. I propose that an AP classroom can be organized to provide feedback to students around some essential skills. I will provide some background on my transition to a gradeless classroom. From there, I will share how we adopted the gradeless concepts into our AP curriculum, and the outcomes we experienced along the way.  

Background

To better understand my classroom experience, I would like to provide a little bit of background to provide context. I teach an Advanced Placement (AP) science course in a large high school. The AP course content is determined by the College Board, and in my opinion, there is quite a bit of it. A large amount of content needing to be covered was a major hurdle for me. I struggled with how I was going to go gradeless while still preparing students to perform well on a cumulative AP exam at the end of the year. My students meet five days a week for about 50 minutes a day. 

My school is also organized as a professional learning community (PLC). A hallmark trait of a PLC is having dedicated time for teachers to meet with one another on curricular teams. I meet once a week with one other teacher who also teaches the same course. The fact that our curricular team was smaller and that he and I were already willing to give "going gradeless" a try was a huge help. I have found his insights and advice invaluable as I transitioned my course. My first piece of advice is to not go it alone, if possible. Having another person to bounce ideas off of helps with troubleshooting the transition to a gradeless system.  

Adoption

Our first hurdle was an internal barrier: we needed to get over the assumption that a content-heavy course like the one we taught had to be rooted in a traditional grading system. We set aside time in our weekly meeting to discuss the purpose of grading, and what grading would look like. We determined that grading existed to provide feedback to students about their mastery of the content. We also determined that a letter grade on an assessment did not necessarily accomplish that. What does a C+ mean? We took a cross-section of assessments and read through them together. We were able to recognize patterns and trends from what we saw. Students who earned an “A” still had content and skills they struggled with, and students with a “C” still had content and skills they mastered. The letter grade was not communicating student mastery effectively and we needed to find a better way.  

Our next challenge was to identify what the outcomes of the AP course were for the students. My curricular team member and I combed through course outlines and past AP exams. Although there were eight different content units in our course, we recognized that every unit expected students to perform the same three science and engineering practices: 1) create, read, and interpret graphs, 2) use data and mathematics to identify patterns and trends and make predictions of phenomena, and 3) verbally explain science phenomena. Overall, we saw that we didn’t need to grade every single piece of content as if it was a different piece of science; instead, we recognized we needed to provide feedback on the students' general science skills across different content. 

We worked over the summer to redesign our assessments to reflect these three standards, making sure we were adequately assessing students within the content of each unit. For example, in a thermodynamics unit, we provided students with a graph and asked them to interpret it, requiring them to find its slope or area. The students would then use an equation or proportional reasoning to answer an additional question. Finally, we would ask them to describe a physical situation that could produce the graph provided. This question would address all three science and engineering standards individually. We were able to determine if a student mastered all three or needed some additional practice. 

Students were provided a score of 3, 2, or 1 for a quick, at-a-glance understanding of their level of mastery. A 3 indicated mastery, a 2 indicated they were close to mastery, and a 1 indicated remediation was needed. Beyond these three scores, we were sure to provide students with specific feedback regarding their performance. Students were challenged with the task of demonstrating mastery in all three standards, which is why the 3s, 2s, and 1s were still provided to students. These scores could have easily been replaced with a verbal indicator of mastery/non-mastery as that is how the numerical values were treated. An example of a scoring rubric we use for one of our standards is included below. 

Every new content unit we started, students started over with their level of demonstrated mastery, and the challenge began all over again. My curricular teammate and I wanted to ensure our students mastered all three of the standards within all content expected by the College Board. In doing so, we felt confident students would be fully prepared to perform well on the AP Exam at the end of the year. 

Outcome

So how did it go? We found we had to be very deliberate in explaining not only what we were doing and how it might be different from what they have experienced in the past, but also why we were making the change. We walked students through recording their level of mastery on provided tracking sheets and directed them to remediation opportunities when mastery was not achieved. After the very first unit, students were getting it. We noticed almost an immediate shift in those student-teacher conversations away from “How many points do I need to get my A?” to “How can I better demonstrate my mastery of graphing of thermodynamic cycles?”

We also found that we stopped grading everything the students turned in. We started providing feedback to students in areas they struggled in. For areas they mastered, we continued to monitor but supplied the assistance where students struggled the most. This approach turned out to be unique for each student, but it took no longer than grading everything for every student. At first, students who were mastering the skills within the content would simply get a “Good job” for feedback. I quickly realized this was not meeting the needs of my students, and I worked to provide quality feedback even in areas of success. I started to identify what students said or did that provided a strong piece of evidence of their understanding. I started to use informal feedback a lot more when students were working in a group. When students demonstrated mastery in what they said or showed me, I let them know that what was shared was great evidence and they should make a note of it. I started using a greater variety of assessments like lab presentations, video recordings, and paragraph-long responses to measure student understanding. 

This represented a big shift from my past practice of averaging scores on quizzes and tests. I have provided self-assessments to students for many years, but after making this transition to focusing on mastery and providing feedback instead of grades, students started to take self-assessment more seriously. Now I provided each group an answer key, and a lively conversation would ensue between group members explaining the solution, what they wrote, and what they should have included to make their evidence of mastery clearer. To keep communication open with parents, I sent positive emails home describing students’ progress toward mastery. This email was appreciated by parents and students alike. 

In full disclosure, our community and administration were still interested communicating student course performance as a letter grade at the end of the semester. Providing the letter grade allowed the school to calculate GPA and communicate student understanding to parents in a familiar way. This hybrid approach to going gradeless allowed us to reap the benefits of a gradeless classroom and still have the support from the community in our efforts. An explanation of semester grade determination is provided below, but a greater emphasis is placed on student growth and the demonstration of mastery.

During the semester, there were many conversations with parents regarding how students were doing in the class. They wanted to hear if their son or daughter was getting an A or B, but I would discuss with them the skills they were mastering or not mastering. At the end of the semester, I was able to sit down with students and look over their portfolio of work and see how many times they were able to master the standards for each unit.

Students were not left with simply a single grade; rather, they were able to see why they earned the grade, where their strengths lie, and what areas they could still work on before the AP exam.

After the first year of going gradeless, we have experienced tremendous changes to our curriculum, instruction, and reporting. We look forward to continuing to provide a greater variety of assessments for students to demonstrate their mastery and to increase our level of communication with parents.