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Why grading sucks, and what to do about it
Modified ungrading can help both professors and students
Most professors would rather wash walls than grade a pile of blue books (or an inbox with 39 papers). Students worry about grades when they turn in assignments, and react with feeling when they receive them. Grading is fraught with emotion on both sides and seems to have little to do with learning. Are grades necessary? Does marking student work with a D or an F do harm, creating a toxic environment? And if it does, what should we do?
Grades, it can be argued, are necessary. They rank performance against a standard, they inform students of their level of success, and they show the need for improvement. To “grade” means to place on a scale of elevation, to judge whose work is lower and whose is higher. A high grade indicates expertise: do you want to drive across a bridge built by someone who got a C in engineering?
What about ungrading?
And yet there is general agreement that grading sucks. Grading on the A-F scale perpetuates unfair social hierarchies, encourages a focus on marks rather than learning, and can be discouraging to the student. One popular answer is not to grade, to engage in “ungrading”. This may mean commenting without marks or contracting for completion of work instead of a letter grade. The emphasis, say proponents, should always been on feedback to the student, not the marks.
Ungrading sounds like an excellent method. It’s more personal and seems less judgemental. Unfortunately, it may not be possible. Most professors at smaller and community colleges teach large groups of students, often without teaching assistants. In this environment, tutorial-style feedback and individualized learning for each student isn’t realistic. And most colleges, of course, require a final grade for a student’s work in a particular class, regardless of the methods used to get there.
The judicious use of auto-grading
But there is a middle way, a modified ungrading method that provides instantaneous marks and encourages learning, while still assigning a final grade. The approach is possible because in most learning management systems, when a student submits something, a certain number of points (a grade) can be…
