The Ungrading Umbrella
When I sought contributors to my Ungrading collection in 2018, I found just a few possible writers. It's hard to believe, from the vantage of 2022, how few people were really practicing "going gradeless" or "throwing out grades" or "de-grading" or "ungrading." (I now know more places I should have looked, including here!) I wanted a set of practitioners from both K12 and higher education, and from as many different fields (STEM, humanities, social sciences) as possible, and all willing to write a few thousand accessible words. I sought diverse contributors, though only some types of diversity (mostly gender and seniority and types of institution) resulted.
I think I hit the jackpot, in the fifteen contributors to the Ungrading collection, but since then I've been blown away by the speed at which people have taken up the invitation to reconsider conventional grading practices. There are book clubs and podcasts and workshops, keynotes and study groups and dissertations.
And, as it always goes, there is sometimes a little grumbling.
Some people have wanted to differentiate the different forms of nonconventional feedback-and-assessment that live under what I've taken to calling the "ungrading umbrella." Some have gotten a bit, shall we say, warm in their challenges. Some have urged us to jettison the term ungrading as too vague, too fashionable, too imprecise.
But I like it. For me it goes with "un-schooling," "un-essay." Taking on the ordinary and undoing it.
Besides, I've been welcoming everyone who wants to join in.
Really, it's just a temperamental difference: some like to differentiate, and others like to combine. It's not like there are natural kinds out there. We make these categories, and we decide what to call these related practices.
In the study of human speciation, and other fields, there's a well-known difference between "lumpers" and "splitters." Is it important, for various reasons, to join together subspecies that might share certain elements, or is it important to keep them apart?
In the ungrading world, I'm a lumper.
I figure we need strength in numbers to challenge the near-century of the hegemony of conventional grading. Sure, some want to do "contract grading" and others "labor-based grading." Some focus on "specifications grading" and others on "mastery-based grading," and "standards-based grading." There are notable differences among them. I have some reservations about certain of them, but I respect them all.
In my own classes I do "no-grading-until-the-end-of-the-semester-when-we-do-joint-holistic-assessment-of-the-learning." That is to say, I never talk about grades. I talk about learning. All the time. Students reflect constantly on what they're learning, how they're meeting their own goals, and what they might do differently. I respond to their reflections. I want my students to take ownership of their learning, and to learn to generate and internalize standards that are meaningful for them. I want to have them practice reflecting on what helps them learn, and to take pride in the evidence they can show of their learning. Mid-semester and at the end, I have very short meetings with my students to ask, "If you were to give yourself a grade [up to now], what would it be, and why?" Since I don't believe grades could ever been "objective" or consistent—and a century of research has shown how arbitrary and variable are all grading scales, whether "tiered" grading (High Pass, Pass, Low Pass) or letter grade (A-F) or number (0-4, 0-100)—I don't really worry that much about getting a perfect result.
For reasons of scale and discipline or because of a sequential curriculum, for reasons of student expectations and faculty precarity and departmental ethos, many faculty find my version too vague. "Students need more structure." "Some students won't have the confidence to assess themselves." It's true that some advantaged students tend to rate themselves more highly than students with less privilege—and I address this, as it also exists in things like job applications, salary requests, and performance reviews.
But if the conventional practices are harmful and uninformative, then we should do all in our power to challenge them.
Some alternatives to my holistic, collaborative approach include contract- and labor-based grading, where students essentially contract to complete a certain quantity of work, sometimes at a certain level. It's mechanical and equitable in the sense that the same applies to everyone. Some of the best-known practitioners are Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis and Asao Inoue. (Ellen Carillo challenges labor-based grading from a disability perspective: not everyone, she says, needs the same amount of labor, and not everyone is able to commit to the same amount.) Specifications grading, as proposed by Linda Nilson, determines what students must know to receive a certain grade. Students can revise as much as they like until they arrive there. The only thing that matters is what the students know and can do by the end, no matter how they get there. In this sense it's like professional assessments in medicine, law, and engineering. Mistakes and imperfection along the way are never factored in. Robert Talbert has modified it to include what he calls “engagement.”
Other pedagogues have yet more nuances, more variations. Danielle Allen, David Kidd, and Ariana Zetlin propose a badging system. The Mastery Transcript Consortium aims to increase the information conveyed by a transcript as it conveys information beyond secondary schools.
But what we all share is a set of well-founded critiques of the conventional system, which conflates behavior and learning; reinforces existing inequities; is inconsistent and uninformative; substitutes coercive incentives for genuine curiosity and positive motivation. We all argue that the current system needs to change, and we all recognize that it is intertwined with many other dimensions of pedagogy as well as with the structures of institutional educational systems. There’s variation in exactly how each of us tries to shelter from the storms of conventional grading, but as those waters gush down, and we create a dry spot under our umbrella, more and more are squeezing in.
Come on in. There’s room. The umbrella, which is, after all, only metaphoric, can grow infinitely large. Or maybe the rains will clear, and we'll just emerge and scatter under sunny skies.
Susan D. Blum is a cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist specializing in the study of China and the United States at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author or editor of nine books and dozens of articles. Her latest book, titled Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) was published in December 2020 by the West Virginia University Press. You can follow her on Twitter @SusanDebraBlum.