Ungrading is commonly portrayed as a critical educational practice. But is ungrading inclusive? To understand the answer—let alone the question itself—it is necessary to unpack some presumptions in portraying such an idea in the first place. This blog post asks some uncomfortable yet necessary questions about ungrading from the viewpoint of student diversity. How could removing grades contribute to the agenda of inclusion?

Setting the scene: How could assessment be inclusive?

First, let me clarify that for me, ‘inclusive practices’ are never only a matter of ‘teaching’ nor ‘pedagogy’ but very much a matter of politics and participation. My approach to inclusion always has a societal element. This means that to me, the question of how assessment—be it ungrading or any other assessment practice—could promote the inclusion of diverse students is a question about whether and how assessment could promote the societal participation of students who have historically been underrepresented in educational settings.

This is a tricky, almost unfair approach to inclusive teaching and assessment practices. As individual teachers, we can only do so much. There is also so much power in the critical praxis of teachers: teachers can quite literally change the life courses of students with their pedagogical practices. At the same time, any teaching or assessment practice is always limited in its own small context.

Take me as an example. At the moment, I teach at the University of Hong Kong, which is an elitist institution, as many higher education institutions are. However I choose to grade (or ungrade) in my courses may be inclusive for those present in the classroom. But what about those who can never reach higher education in the first place?

This takes us back to assessment. The primary role of assessment is societal selection, not learning. Our societies need grades for the purposes of sorting, selection, and division. This sets profound barriers to harnessing assessment as a tool for inclusion since these two ideas typically operate through entirely different paradigms. Chris Ydesen and colleagues have recently phrased this beautifully by noting that assessment instruments are essentially designed to operate via hierarchies and categorizations, whereas inclusive education aims to move beyond such hierarchies and categorizations.

Ungrading is not a panacea, nor an intervention

How does ungrading fit in this picture? Like many before me, I see ungrading as a powerful practice in paving the way for more just grading practices in assessment systems that are often designed for purposes other than ‘inclusion’ (or perhaps even ‘student learning’!). Jesse Stommel has powerfully addressed this in the book Undoing the Grade. While discussing whether ungrading is an equitable practice, Stommel makes the case that, yes, it is because grades do harm, and marginalized students are often harmed the most by grades. In this sense, ungrading could challenge the foundations of educational assessment that build on individualism, objectivity and categorizations—all widely criticized ideas.

Yet, even then, I see it as dangerous to portray ungrading as a ‘panacea’ or even as a ‘solution’ to the matters of inclusion. This, to me, seems to denote that ungrading is an intervention: a practice that necessarily aims to enhance some aspects of education. Instead, I see ungrading as a deeply contextual, relational practice. The very same practice of ungrading may have different outputs on student learning and inclusion in different contexts; it is surrounded by different assessment policies and societal values; and it affects different teachers and students in different ways. All this calls for a more complex, systemic view on ungrading, particularly since it comes to inclusion. Yes, ungrading can be more inclusive than more traditional forms of grading, but to me, the critical questions are: why, for whom, and under what circumstances?

So, context matters, and so do educational culture, policies, and actors. Now, I reckon many fellow ‘ungraders’ out there would strongly agree with this. Even then, there is a tendency, perhaps typical to our times, to suggest ungrading as a solution to the issues caused by assessment, be it student well-being, inclusion or learning.

Towards more inclusive ungrading practices

How, then, could ungrading be made more inclusive for the diversity of students? If my pondering has been rather abstract so far, I would like to provide some more practical tips by drawing on the important work as already written about in the ungrading community.

Suggestion 1: We should not romanticize ungrading 

First and foremost, we need to be careful about romanticizing ungrading as a preferable, ideal solution. Seen from the viewpoint of complexity, ungrading may always have unintended consequences for students and teachers alike. Some of these consequences may further burden those students who are already disadvantaged. Consider, for example, the importance of extrinsic motivators—such as indeed grades—for neurodiverse learners. Or, consider the decades and decades of work on bias-free assessment, anti-racist assessment, and culturally relevant assessment. Simply removing grades does not mean that implicit biases disappear.

Some unintended consequences may stem from the fact that in most parts of the world, grades characterize students’ histories and experiences of assessment. Research has shown that ungrading may cause a loss of identity for students. Who am I if not a number? How this idea operates in different contexts and in different student populations warrants further investigation.

Ultimately, ungrading might even end up increasing equity gaps. I really enjoyed Sherri Craig’s text Your Contract Grading Ain't It, which critically evaluates contract grading—one form of ungrading—from the viewpoint of a young, pre-tenured, Black faculty member.

The good and the bad news? Good news first: by considering ungrading as a systemically and contextually bounded critical praxis, we can aim to design out the discriminatory elements that may hinder its desired outcomes. Unfortunately, the bad news is that no matter how warm-hearted and well-crafted our intentions and actions, ungrading may still end up excluding rather than including. 

Finally, let me just note that despite all the criticism, grades can and do provide students with life opportunities no other practice can provide. High grades open up opportunities in further education and life for historically underrepresented students around the world. As long as numbers have the power in our societies, as they currently do, ‘ungrading’ cannot always provide the most powerful ways to lift up students.

Criticality aside, what kinds of opportunities might ungrading provide for the diversity of students? Let me introduce a few key ideas from my recent publication on ‘Assessment for Inclusion.’

Suggestion 2: Ungrading as a way to celebrate human diversity

In its most prevalent conceptualization, assessment relies on the idea of comparability. This stems from the idea that, in order to be fair, assessment must be uniform. Ungrading challenges these fundamental ideas by removing (or at least rendering less meaningful) grades that, by definition, dehumanize students by providing predetermined ways of knowing our students. If we do not know our students as numbers, how could we know them then?

To me, the answer lies in diverse assessment and feedback practices that replace grades as numerical, summative practices. This is as much of a cultural change as it is a practical one. I see diverse and multimodal assessment practices as crucial for ungrading, as they provide students with various ways of demonstrating their knowledge. We have trained our students to know themselves as educational subjects with and through numbers; yet in ungraded environments, students need to rebuild their understanding of themselves as learners.

Many forms of marginalized knowledge systems, such as disabled knowledges and Indigenous knowledges, might then play a role in assessment. This could be the case in traditionally graded assessment systems, of course, but in those, marginalized knowledge is eventually overdriven by ‘objective,’ numerical forms of data: grades.

I keep on returning to the study by Hazel Denhart, who examined the diverse ways of knowing of disabled students: “James spoke of composing music ‘with his hands’ rather than with his thoughts, while Lea spoke of creating simple stories to grasp complex mathematical theories of economics.”

Suggestion 3: Ungrading as a way to promote interdependence and partnership

One of the most fundamental ideas in assessment is that it addresses the learning of individuals. No matter how communal and collaborative we want assessment to be, the structures of assessment force us to return back to the individual. Grades are, of course, the most prominent example of this. After all, we must grade students, not groups or communities.

However, no inclusive practices can build on individualism; these ideas are simply incompatible. Removing the most prominent feature of individualism, grades, might then pave the way for more inclusive assessment systems. But this is easier said than done!

Ideally, ungrading could promote critical spaces for dialogue and wonder. When grades are not the focal point of education, as they often come to be, the relationship between students and teachers is transactional. After all, grades are the currency of education. Removing such a currency might, at least in theory, allow students and teachers to develop relationships beyond the transactional one.

The very act of discussing the goals and practices of ungrading together with students (rather than imposing them to ungrading without fully explaining why—guilty!) might already foster interdependence over individualism. 

This could be taken further by co-designing ungrading practices together with students. The questions of why and how assessment is designed and implemented are, of course, the teacher’s responsibility, yet students still have an ethical right to be heard in the matters of assessment. Such partnerships should ensure that diverse voices are heard in the process rather than only the ‘usual suspects.’

Conclusion

Ungrading provides a lot of potential for promoting inclusion. At the same time, we need to be careful not to portray ungrading as a panacea to the questions of equity and diversity. 

At the moment, there is an impetus towards work on both ‘inclusive practices’ and ‘ungrading.’ Both of these ideas have been rightfully called ‘buzzwords’ in educational forums. While this word often has a negative connotation, it also denotes that something is worth ‘buzzing’ about. The critical questions for the ungrading communities then are:

• In the complex ecosystems of assessment and grading, what is the promise of ungrading for inclusion?

• How could we best make use of the ‘buzz’ and make sure to spread the agenda of more inclusive grading practices?

• How could we integrate grading and equity more closer, rather than keeping these as separate silos in our discourse?

Dr. Juuso Nieminen is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, and a Banting Fellow at Ontario Tech University. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Deakin University, Australia. His main research interest is to unpack the social, cultural and political aspects of educational assessment. Dr. Nieminen has particularly focused on understanding the social effects of assessment on students’ learning, inclusion, belonging and identities. Dr. Nieminen’s research has been published in multiple leading journals in the fields of assessment, higher education and mathematics education, such as Studies in Higher Education, Teaching in Higher Education and Educational Studies in Mathematics.