As a high school teacher, I quickly learned how flawed traditional systems of grading could be.

From failing special education students who had worked extremely hard but scored poorly against standardized evaluation criteria; to absentee student athletes submitting a semester’s worth of work the day before the marking period ended with their coach monitoring in the hallway; to a principal calling me to adjust students’ grades based on my perception of their abilities instead of what they actually did in class to boost school-wide pass rates. Issues of grading problematically shifted conversations from processes of learning to standardization and compliance.

When I stepped into higher ed, I wanted to collaboratively build teacher education spaces that reimagined the status quo, modeling moving away from the structures I hated as a teacher. I couldn’t imagine doing this without reimagining what grading looked like too. Thus began my journey with gradelessness. 

Empire and its History with Gradelessness

I was fortunate enough to be hired at a school that was open to alternative systems of grading—SUNY Empire State College, now Empire State University. This public New York college was started in the 70s as “an alternative college for working adults, under-represented individuals…women seeking degrees to enter the workforce, others denied college opportunities for a whole host of reasons, as well as a response to disaffected youth clamoring for much more say in their education” (Bonnabeau, 2022, p. 2).

Designed to critique hierarchical teaching and learning structures, Empire was launched as an experimental institution with a critical core. Instead of using the word faculty, with its connotations of power hierarchies, “mentors” filled the role of advisor, professor, and instructor. Mentors worked with each student to take into account their past professional experiences and design individualized programs to meet their unique goals. Instead of typical classes, students enrolled in 1-to-1 independent studies (in person or “distance learning” by phone) that supported their particular interests. Even what we might traditionally call a “course” in higher education today (groups of students meeting together synchronously) was historically termed an “individual study with a group component,” as the word “course” was considered a divergence from Empire’s core values.

To support this intensive individualization, each study had learning contracts instead of syllabi, meant to be collaboratively authored by mentors and students and to detail general and specific purposes for learning in the study as well as criteria for evaluation. Of relevance to this post, each student completed their own self evaluation at the end of the study and, instead of traditional grades, received 1-page narrative evaluations from their mentors.

Empire’s system of narrative evaluations were designed to align with its constructivist values. For each students’ evaluation, mentors would summarize the purpose of learning in the study and describe key activities undertaken and student progress toward meeting those goals. These evaluations were intended to highlight processes of learning, as “grades didn’t attend to individuals’ strengths and limitations. Grades missed the nuances of learning”  (A. Mandell, personal communication, March 13, 2024). In other words, this type of narrative-based assessment helped to center student learning instead of teacher evaluation.

This model has experienced some pushback over time. For instance, the school experienced external tensions when interfacing with other institutions. When students wanted to transfer credits or apply for graduate schools, their transcript could be a 20+ page document of narratives from each mentor they had completed an individual study with. Though this transcript had the potential to tell a more compelling story of their learning development than traditional grades, it could be difficult for other admissions offices to process. There were also internal tensions as demands for larger class sizes made it more difficult to have that “sensitive insight into students’ learning” (A. Mandell, personal communication, March 13, 2024) that the narrative assessments required. Problems also emerged when mentors leaned into more standardized narratives to deal with workload issues.

Reclaiming Gradelessness

When I was hired, I was excited to try out Labor-based Grading Contracts in this new context (see A Q&A on Labor-based Grading by Asao Inuoe and Going Gradeless With Students Stuck in the Old System).

However, I was surprised to encounter some resistance from my colleagues, who warned me that the college had tried gradelessness but moved away from it based on the issues I described above. Though I took these colleagues’ warnings into account, I saw that the infrastructure for gradelessness was still there—the college still has an ethos supporting developmental learning and required learning contracts for each class. I made decisions building on these infrastructures to apply ungrading practices in (I hope) thoughtful ways that address tensions that the school had experienced in the past.

Below I share three gradeless practices that I have taken up in my context that I hope you might find useful for your class, department, or school community. 

1. Negotiating Learning Contracts Together

As a graduate school instructor in an accredited education program, I don’t teach individual 1-to-1 studies nor can I customize my learning contract for each student. However, I do try to keep the spirit alive through collaboratively negotiated learning contracts. Drawing from educational movements around collective annotation (see Annotate Your Syllabus 4.0 by Remi Kalir and his co-authored book Annotation), I give students in my gradeless courses the opportunity to annotate my learning contracts with their thoughts and questions before the semester begins. Then, during the first week of class, I offer a synchronous seminar providing opportunities for students to engage with the idea of and purposes for non-traditional grading structures as well as to discuss and propose revisions to the learning contract. Engaging in these conversations together can help students (who are pre- or in-service teachers) consider different perspectives on the effectiveness of different grading systems that they might not have considered otherwise.

2. Transparent and Rigorous Learning Processes with a High Priority on Feedback

To address perceived problems of transparency with gradeless systems, I make sure each assignment has clear evaluation criteria (this does not have to be a rubric, though it can be). When I can, I have students help to co-construct these evaluation criteria together. All of my gradeless classes incrementally build toward a final performance assessment (in my case, often literacy assessments, lesson, or unit plans). This means that for each part of the assignment, there are multiple opportunities for peer and instructor feedback as well as opportunities for revision and developmental progress before the final submission is due. Students receive full credit for submitting drafts and making revisions along the way in conversation with their peers and me as their instructor.

There are higher stakes for being late for these incremental checkpoints, as not having a draft in a timely way prevents them from participating in the developmental feedback process. By the time the semester ends, they have received feedback multiple times against the evaluation criteria. If students are still missing the mark on external department evaluation criteria linked with accreditation after multiple cycles of developmental feedback, I give them a final opportunity to revise and resubmit. 

I don’t leave them guessing around how their labor translates into final grades. At the halfway point, I message each student with a summary of the work they have completed so far juxtaposed against the labor-based contract (Table 1). This gives students an opportunity to reassess their own engagement with the course and to take steps to either ask for help or place a higher priority on submitting incremental assignments on time as needed. Students cannot skip collaborative course activities throughout the course and still turn in all missing work at the end of a semester. In alignment with Empire’s history of narrative assessments, students complete reflective assignments about their own learning at the end of each semester. 

3. Hacking the LMS 

When Empire was founded in the 70s, they weren’t imagining the prevalence of learning management softwares. As educators know, the set up of one’s LMS can end up providing de facto infrastructures for many schools’ and colleges’ course activities and grading policies. For instance, these infrastructures assume that students will receive a final grade calculated from grades they received on various assignments. 

Empire uses Brightspace, a LMS used by the SUNY system. It’s very easy to set up points-based grading systems on this platform. However, instead of letting structures for point-based systems define me, I worked with our instructional design team to brainstorm ways to “hack” the platform to make it support my grading system. When I can, I change my assignments to pass/fail. This doesn’t always work, as assignments with submission dropboxes in our Brightspace instance require some kind of final grade. If I need to use “100” and “0”s as placeholders to indicate “submitted” vs. “missing” or “revision requested,” I do (with that hack clearly detailed for students in the learning contract and comments).

In the learning contract, there is a table that lays out what grade students will receive based on their iterative labor of completing each of the assignments and engaging in the peer review process (Table 2). Though I can’t program that grid into Brightspace, the students and I know the expectations from the grading contract and we return back to the grid over the course of the semester.

Conclusions

Though it’s not perfect, I hope you can see ways that I try to find compromises to circumvent the problems that Empire experienced with gradelessness while hanging tight to the equity and developmental learning considerations that were the heart of its original systems. I’ve been encouraged to find colleagues who are interested in thinking about what gradelessness might look like “at scale,” as a structural feature instead of a “hack.”

Though the institution has changed some of its policies in light of modern demands and infrastructures, I’ve found space to resurface some of these more developmental and humanizing assessment practices. As we navigate what it looks like to support developmental learning in a modern higher education landscape that is often not only not set up for gradelessness but even hostile to it, I invite you to take, play with, or flex some of your own (un)grading practices as you figure out what it means to grow beyond grades together with your educational community.

Karis Jones, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts Education at Empire State University - SUNY. As a teacher educator, literacy consultant, public humanities scholar, and community activist, she studies issues of equitable literacies learning across disciplinary, fandom, and gaming spaces. Stay tuned for her forthcoming book with Dr. Scott Storm, Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning, coming soon from Myers Education Press!

References:

Bonnabeau, R. (2022). Timely Thoughts for a Divided World from Ernest L. Boyer (1928–1995). SUNY Empire State College at 50: Reflections on a Half Century of  Our Work. Empire State College.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Heather Bennett and Nichole Jakobs for supporting my thinking about ungrading at Empire and what it looks like to “hack” a Brightspace gradebook. Thanks to Karen LaBarge for her work helping me access records of Empire’s history and reflections on its 50th anniversary. And finally, many thanks to Alan Mandell for sharing his nuanced and thought-provoking perspectives on what the university has been and what it will be.