Exploring Ungrading – Laurie Michaud

“Can we imagine assessment mechanisms that encourage discovery, ones not designed for assessing learning but designed for learning through assessment?”

Jesse Stommel

– Grades are not a good incentive

– Grades are not good feedback

– Grades are not good markers of learning

– Grades don’t reflect the idiosyncratic, subjective, often emotional character of Learning.

– Grades encourage competitiveness over collaboration.

– Grades aren’t fair. They will never be fair.

– Jesse Stommel

This month I am focusing my learning on assessment and ungrading. Over my past 14 years as a post-secondary educator, I’ve thought a lot about grades, grading, assessment, alignment of assessment, and feedback. What I never considered, until I was introduced to the topic last year, was the ideas of “ungrading”. While on an intuitive and personal level, I understood the stress and anxiety that grading caused for students, I did not fully recognize the extent of the research which showed that grades are one of the poorest forms of feedback that you can get. As a faculty member, there is a lot of pressure to use grades and as a student, I likely would have said that I was motivated to learn because of grades, which for me were generally on the higher end of the spectrum. I equated my high grades with learning, but I’ve come to understand that this is not always the case. It is very possible for students to receive a high grade in a course but actually engage in very little learning that is going to stay with them for the long term. What I have come to discover in my research is that receiving a low grade is not motivating at students, it has nothing to do with learning and it is generally seen as punitive by the student.

I had the wonderful opportunity of attending the Digital Pedagogy Lab in Toronto last March and since then I have been intrigued and inspired by Jesse Stommel’s work around ungrading. Jesse talks about how in higher education we’ve normalized absurd amounts of grading, tests, and standardized assessment. Questions that Jesse’s work has prompted me to consider is why do I grade? How can I either work within the existing college structure to promote ungrading and if that’s not possible, how do I change the structures? As a student how did I feel about being graded and did it contribute to my learning? What if the focus in post-secondary was on learning rather than on grades?

Jesse talks about the fact that he has given up grading on individual assignments for years. He relies on qualitative feedback, peer review, and self-assessment. There is a strong focus on metacognition in his courses as well. The self-assessment of the students and the feedback that he provides becomes a space for dialogue, not only about the particular assignment or course but also about what they are learning about how they learn.

The strategy that Jesse uses to work within the policies of his institution is to provide a final grade for students at the end of the course. However, it is the students who grade themselves. Jesse’s preference would be not to have to provide any grades at all, but until the time that higher education policies catch up with the research around grades, this may be one strategy for working within our existing structures while still striving for ungrading.

One fascinating perspectives that Jesse presents is around the question of “what happens when a student doesn’t grade themselves accurately?”. Jesse’s response is “It isn’t really my problem”. His belief system is that if he is going to give the responsibility of grading to his students then he also has been prepared to accept some discrepancy and inaccuracy in the process. He says when these types of situations arise he uses them as opportunities to engage in dialogue with the students. There are also some interesting observations that Jesse has made over his years of ungrading and he has identified a clear gender imbalance in that women tend to under-grade themselves much more frequently than men.

One of my favorite quotes was “Can we imagine assessment mechanisms that encourage discovery, ones not designed for assessing learning but designed for learning through assessment?”

I anticipate that one of the most common questions that faculty will ask about ungrading is the process piece around “how” they should be doing it.

Some examples that I have found and want to explore more this month include:

Reference:

https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/