Empire State University is no longer the gradeless institution it was at its founding in the 70s. But as teacher education professor, Karis Jones discovered, the infrastructure for gradelessness was still there. Despite encountering some resistance, Jones shares way she has built on these infrastructures to apply ungrading practices in thoughtful ways that address tensions that the school had experienced in the past.

Exploring alternatives to grading often means experimenting within one’s own classroom, while translating the outcomes to comply with the larger institution’s reporting requirements. It is rarer to encounter explorations of alternative grading at the level of a program, school, or institution. However, thinking systemically is crucial for creating change that lives beyond the efforts of single heroic instructors.

Lisa Wennerth interviews Mike Flanagan, CEO of the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC), a growing group of high schools creating a digital high school transcript that opens up opportunity for each and every student—from all backgrounds, locations, and types of schools—to have their unique strengths, abilities, interests, and histories fostered, understood, and celebrated.

As a graduate of the famously grade-free Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Nate Bowling received narrative evaluations rather than grades. “My transcript,” Nate writes, “shows who I was as a student far better than any series of letter grades or GPA could dream of.”

Grading systems are remarkably resistant to rethinking given the vast infrastructure built up around our commonly-accepted approaches to grading. Barry Fishman recounts some of his encounters with both the institutional infrastructure, explaining how systemic inertia makes it difficult to give up the current system.

Gameful learning is designing for learning. Barry Fishman asks us to consider how games might inspire our thinking about learning, reminding us that good games don’t work because they are fun; they work because they are challenging and engaging.

Arthur Chiaravalli interviews Barry Fishman, professor of Learning Technologies in the University of Michigan School of Information and School of Education. Barry pens the new introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Wad-Ja-Get, one of the earliest critical examinations of the effects of grading on student attitudes toward learning.

Although most gradeless teachers engage in “subtraction,” removing traditional grading from our classrooms, we also need “addition” in the form of new infrastructure that connects our individual efforts to the larger systems students must navigate.