The (Un)grading Spectrum
As I enter the 13th year of my teaching career, energized with plans of doing something better for my students, I reflect on the journey that brought me here.
When I started my career, I wanted students to be ready for post-secondary and to know that anyone could get to where they wanted to be if they worked hard. I focused on making sure that students had good, clear explanations, lots of practice, and we used a cumulative approach to always keep material fresh. I did this for the better part of a decade, but the problem is those approaches don’t really work. My explanations, no matter how clear or how many different perspectives I came from, really only helped maybe half the class (three-quarters on a good day). The ones that often did all of the extra practice weren’t the ones that needed it. And those that needed to go back and work with problems from previous chapters never got to those questions. Even worse, the ones that needed more clarification but never asked for it, would then reinforce misconceptions as they practiced at home.
In hindsight, the problems were two-fold. First, if we back students against the wall by grading everything they do and never giving them a chance to hit those targets again, then many of them will only learn how to play the game of school and not learn what we actually want them to. We run into the same problem if we don’t grade as much, but the only opportunity we give them is on a quiz or test. The presence of grades takes psychological safety away from students, putting them into states of anxiety or apathy, neither of which allow for learning. By removing grades as much as possible, or at least making it known that they are in a constant state of flux, we free students up to take risks, learn from their mistakes, reflect on their learning, and move forward.
Retrieved from the article Psychological Safety ≠ “Anything Goes” by Amy Edmonson
Secondly, there’s an issue with what we define learning as. I feel there’s a big problem when we define learning as the ability to retain knowledge. That means the focus is on how to get students to better memorize content. So we have students doing retrieval practice, spaced practice, and just tons of practice, which is great for memorizing, but it doesn’t mean that students actually learned anything. I found that when I focused on this approach, the students that did the work were then prepared for my knowledge-based test or a standardized exam, but they didn’t really know what they were doing. In my math classes, all I had accomplished was getting them to memorize rules and procedures that they could mimic if only the numbers changed. Almost none of them learned anything about actually doing math!
For me, learning has always been about understanding, an ability to think about ideas and concepts, and the ability to problem solve. Somewhere along the way I confused memorization, and the resulting good grades, with understanding and problem-solving. This focus on memorization also sent a very unintended message to the students that had severe test anxiety or that didn’t have the greatest memory. It told them that they weren’t capable of being successful in these courses and didn’t belong in them.
A few years into my career, I made my first dive into something different, knowing that what I had been doing wasn’t working the way I’d hoped. Enter gamification. I came across The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon and was immediately captivated by this idea. Maybe it was all of the hours playing Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and Chrono Trigger when I was younger or maybe it was my background in computer science, but I started designing my courses using the same video game psychology that makes most games so addictive.
Nothing is more defeating than watching a grade start high, drop a bit, go up a bit, drop a lot, and bounce up and down for seemingly no reason at all. This is usually the first aspect of grading that loses so many students, leaving them defeated and apathetic. So why not take a cue from video games and enter all of my assessments into my gradebook with a 0? As each assessment is completed, students’ grades can only increase encouraging growth. I then added levels to act as milestone targets for students to hit. Who doesn’t want to become a Level 16 Wizard Mathematician?! I planned on giving them attribute points that they would put towards certain skills, indicating that those were the aspects they had worked on the most during that level. While doing all of this, students also had avatars that they could customize, putting distance between themselves and the mistakes they were meant to learn from. Tests became boss battles and there were even guilds and raids.
However, I had a few “top” students that didn’t like the idea of their grades starting at 0, and, being so early in my career, I lacked the confidence to follow it through. After a summer of planning and getting approval from my administration, I gave up and went back to a traditional system within a month. Three years later, at graduation, I had a handful of students in that class come up and tell me that was perhaps the most enjoyable month of school they’d ever had and wished that we’d stuck with it. To this day, not following through with it is still one of my biggest regrets.
This experiment proved a point though, the amount of influence that grading has on the engagement of students in our classrooms. As I continued with my traditional grading for the next few years, it continued to eat away at me. When COVID hit, developing a more evolved gamification model for my physics classes became my solution. I allowed students the freedom to pursue what interested them and demonstrate their understanding in different ways. All they had to do was accumulate points, starting at 0, complete tasks, and reflect on their learning along the way.
Students that had struggled in my class up to that point were able to show me what they were truly capable of. We had one-on-one conferences to talk about how they were progressing and ideas they had for projects and experiments. Talking with a student that had 60%, he was able to have remarkable conversations about physics and tie together complex ideas. I knew that for him to only be at a 60% meant that the traditional system was deeply flawed. Even worse, I had a student with 95% that demonstrated a complete lack of understanding when we had these conversations. He even stated that he preferred tests because he was good at memorizing and didn’t need to actually figure anything out.
Retrieved from the World Economic Forum
Again, I spent the summer planning and found inspiration from Scott Brunner at the AAPT High School Teacher Summer Camp. His approach to skills-based grading made me rethink my approach. What I really believed learning to be is being able to think critically and problem solve. This means that content is really only a means of developing these skills. As such, shouldn’t the skills be what I’m actually assessing students on? Who cares if my students remember Newton’s Laws twenty years from now?! What I want is students that know how to think through a problem and can develop a strategy to attack it. If they don’t yet know something, then I want them to be resourceful enough to figure out what they need to know. Looking at the Top 10 Skills of 2025 from the World Economic Forum we can see that developing problem-solving, self-management, and collaboration skills are what students need most for their futures.
That fall semester was rough. Fumbling my way through introducing skills-based grading during a pandemic at a time when we were working with cohorts and the rules were changing almost daily. But there was only one student, and their parents, that were very much against what I was doing. The rest of my classes saw the benefit and were excited about this drastic change and, to this day, I’ve been fortunate enough to still have only encountered resistance from that one student and their family. I knew that I was reaching more students than I ever had before and that they were truly getting something from the class. However, between personal issues, the additional stresses at school, and missed time I eventually went on leave.
When I returned, I wanted to take the easy way out and just go back to what I was doing with a traditional classroom, but my administration told me that I was on to something and needed to continue. I know this isn’t what everyone has and so I know how incredibly fortunate I am to work for an administration that has supported me like this.
While on leave, I came across the idea of ungrading, or going gradeless. With the support of my administration, I decided to push things a little bit farther. This is when I discovered an article from Ashley McCarl-Palmer on the OAPT Newsletter and found my next level of inspiration. I reached out to Ashley and we have developed an amazing collaboration over the last couple years. She’s helped me grow by miles and helped me take my next step, collaborative grading.
At this point, I had a classroom that was focused on skills, as opposed to content. Most people find this a bit counter-intuitive, but I’ve seen a focus on skills result in far greater understanding of the content. I’m able to ask students far deeper and more complex problems than ever before and see nearly all of my students find success. I focused on providing meaningful, actionable feedback and now there’s this idea of empowering my students further by putting the grade itself in their hands.
In Manitoba, I have to provide grades for students at midterm and final report cards, as most teachers do, but now was the opportunity to have it actually mean something. I met with students one-on-one for a portfolio interview. They had a self-reflection to work through and they would then decide on a grade. They would bring their portfolio in and use it to justify their grade, much like advocating for oneself in a job interview. A couple of students left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth as they asked for 90+% grades, thinking the whole process was a joke, but most were either in-line or underestimating themselves. To bring added clarity, we co-constructed a “What Does a Grade Look Like?” sheet for our classes. This gave students input into what grades should look like and a clear roadmap of how to get to where they wanted to be.
For me, this has gotten my classroom to a place that I’m happy with and, more importantly, that students are engaged and empowered by. The refinement will never truly end and things will always continue to evolve, but I feel like I’m finally doing what I always should have been doing in the classroom: giving students an opportunity to take risks, find success, explore their interests, and learn how to work with those around them. Through this, they develop those critical thinking and problem-solving skills they need to be successful in life.
My journey is my own and everyone finds different paths to get to something that leaves them feeling fulfilled. Jesse Stommel states that “‘ungrading’ means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply ‘not grading.’ The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices.” Reading articles from this site or similar ungrading websites and you’ll see that no two ungrading stories are alike and no two ungrading classrooms are alike either. Ungrading is more of a philosophy than a single model that says “do this and your students will learn.” This has led me to see ungrading as a spectrum of possibilities that moves us away from that harmful traditional events-based grading that most of us grew up with.
Different people are going to find different points along this spectrum that resonate with their beliefs about education or that become roadblocks within the system they work. People will combine different aspects of any number of assessment approaches that move away from the traditional system. My journey led me through skills-based grading to collaborative grading, with ventures into gamification and standards-based grading. My current model sees collaborative grading as the focus, but we base the grade on skills when we must produce one. I struggle with my own comfort level to try to move to student-determined grades and the system I work in prevents me from making my courses all pass/fail. I think that everyone who embarks on this journey is trying to do better for their students and find ways to be more compassionate and human and where students can enjoy learning again.
A note of caution for those entering this journey. If all you do is remove grades, but keep knowledge-based tests and the like, then it won’t be successful. For this journey to be successful, you need to look at your entire practice with a critical eye. For me, I now have weekly check-ins instead of tests that ask students a deeper question that they’ve never seen before and allow me to give feedback so they can tackle something even more challenging the following week. There’s a lot of self-reflection for students and they learn to take risks in a safe environment. I’ve brought in much of Peter Liljedahl’s toolkits from Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning as well as approaches from Randall Knight’s Five Easy Lessons: Strategies for Successful Physics Teaching and I’m now looking at incorporating a number of ideas from Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets: Unleashing Students’ Potential Through Creative Mathematics, Inspiring Messages and Innovative Teaching. I want my students to see that I want to keep learning and take risks trying new things, as that’s the biggest lesson that I want to teach my students.
Christopher Sarkonak is a high school physics and mathematics teacher at Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. He is currently the Perimeter Institute’s Regional Coordinator for the province of Manitoba. Follow him on Twitter at @CSarkonak.