What the heck is “ungrading?”

a short FAQ

A few weeks ago, an academic with high visibility posted, “Just saw a syllabus for a course that lets students assign their own final grades and ... what are we doing here, people?”

He went on to say something like, “Well, you do you, but this ain’t for me.” Insofar as he hasn’t had not had previous exposure to the “ungrading” movement, I think he has a lot of company. Because I’m a fan of ungrading, and hope that more of you will be curious and pick up some of this approach in your own courses, here’s a bit more to get you curious.

What is ungrading?

Ungrading is a teaching approach that emphasizes student engagement and ownership of the process of inquiry, student self-evaluation of progress, which deemphasizes the negative effects of high-stakes testing and competition for grades. There are many potential features of an “ungrading” course, and everybody who does it does it differently. You may well be teaching with some elements of an ungrading approach right now.

Do ungrading students get grades? Do they get to decide what those grades are?

Students in an ungrading course are assigned grades like all other courses at the institution. (I suppose students could sign up for credit/no-credit but usually there are institutional restrictions.) Some instructors who run an ungrading model have students assign their own grade (as long as it’s consistent with the guidelines they established), though if and how this happens varies a lot. A key feature of ungrading is that students are aware of how they are doing and how much they are learning, because the course is designed to provide this agency and make it a central part of the course.

How is learning assessed in an ungrading course? If grades aren’t calculated based on scores earned from tests and assignments, where do they come from?

Ungrading is not one thing, and there are many ways to go about it. I encourage you to find a variety of blog posts, syllabi, articles, and such, that provide lots of specifics. In general, classroom and out-of-class activities are designed to support inquiry and students will know rote memorization and formulaic studying are not the pathway to a good grade. Assignments may involve making sure that students do creative thought and work, as the evidence of intellectual struggle is itself the positive outcome. You can use short quizzes, presentations, written reflections, problem sets, traditional tests with less traditional grading models, projects, case studies, or whatever floats your boat. Under no circumstances should a student be assigned a grade that you think is unearned! It’s up to you to decide the terms under which they are assigned. Some instructors have students present a portfolio featuring the work that they’ve performed, and with a well-grounded rubric.

What’s the motivation for running an ungrading model?

I can’t speak for everyone but I think that folks generally adopt this approach they want to help all students learn better, and to address equity gaps as well. While the extrinsic motivator of grades can be useful in convincing students to try to meet expectations on exams and assignments, grades are less helpful for helping students actually learn. Grades aren’t really a measure of learning, so much as they are a measure of academic savvy. (These arguments and more, surely in a more sophisticated and extended package, are to be found in this new book, Failing our Future by Joshua Eyler. And the hardback is less than 30 bucks?!)

Can ungrading work in science courses? Even in lower-division courses with expected learning outcomes that don’t allow for much flexibility?

Yes, and yes. I know folks who are doing this and are really happy with how it’s going (and their colleagues in their departments are also happy, too.) I think the only real barriers are those who are getting pushback from those who don’t want this to happen, presumably because they don’t like this way of assigning grades. Maybe if you don’t call it “ungrading” then nobody will care how you go about it?

Is there any peer-reviewed research about the effectiveness of ungrading?

There sure is! Note that you’ll find a lot more in the literature if you don’t use the term “ungrading,” because this is a new term for set of practices that have been in use for a long time. There’s a deep Scholarship of Teaching and Learning literature to draw from. If you want to read a book, recommend starting out with the edited volume “Ungrading,” though this book is now 4 years old and also only has one chapter about a science course.

But really, does it work?

Yes, it works in the sense that a shift to an ungrading teaching model can increase in student performance on standardized learning outcomes assessments, most notably with identity-based equity gaps shrinking. Folks do this because it works. Nobody is doing this out of nefariousness or ideology, it’s just about meeting the needs of students and doing our jobs in teaching our course material, simple as that.

What about academic standards, fairness, and rigor?

It’s not like students in an ungrading course are gifted with higher grades, and students who do not meaningfully invest their minds into the course won’t be poised to earn high grades in an appropriately designed ungrading scheme. Anyhow, have you considered that traditional grading systems are embedded with a huge amount of unfairness, and maybe this is more fair? “Objective” performance standards get in the way of learning. Aren’t we concerned about how much students engage with the content and how much they learn, and if we can do something about it, we should? If you design your ungrading course to have a final grade to estimate how well a student engages with the material and experiences intellectual growth in the process, then that’s a good thing, right?

Is this an educational fad that will just fade away?

No and yes. No, in the sense that ungrading itself is nothing inherently new other than the term itself, and if more people pick up ungrading practices as a part of their educational bag of tricks and teaching philosophies, then they’ll continue to stick around. Yes, I suppose it will fade away to the extent that while people are talking about it a lot now, they will be talking about it less in the future as new ideas and new data emerge.

But then again, if the current movement is successful at growing a de-emphasis on high-stakes testing and increasing an emphasis on engagement and inquiry to the point that it helps people learn more, maybe it’ll stick with us for good? I mean, “outcomes assessment” as we knew it emerged as a thing in the 1990s, and now it’s well entrenched. This might be the case with ungrading? I mean, I’ve never been a fan of “grading” students anyway, which is the same thing that we do to sides of beef. If this movement gets us to explore more deeply how and why we have and use grades, the better off everybody is.