Ungrading

Recap: Getting Started with Alternative Grading Approaches

· Nov 6, 2023 ·

by Emily Donahoe, associate director for instructional support

Last week, Josh Eyler and I facilitated a reprise of our workshop on “Getting Started with Alternative Grading Approaches,” a topic we’re both pretty passionate about. You can review our slides here. What follows are some highlights from this workshop.

We’ve defined “alternative grading,” in contrast to “traditional grading,” as a set of practices designed to center student growth through some combination of revision, multiple attempts, significant feedback, student reflection, and mastery of skills and dispositions. These models strive to decenter the grade itself and instead prioritize learning.

Because grading touches so many areas of our practice as teachers, and because implementing new models requires a significant time investment, we thought it was important to consider three things before deciding what kind of alternative grading approach might work best for you:

Your beliefs about learning: How do people learn best? What conditions are most conducive to learning? What student and instructor actions best promote learning? What roles do student agency, failure, metacognition, etc. play in learning?
Your desired outcomes for student learning: What competencies or dispositions do you most want students to develop? Agency and autonomy? Metacognition? Self-motivation? Love of learning? The possibilities are endless.
Your teaching contexts: What are the expectations of your colleagues? What are your social identities? At what career stage are you? What are your typical class sizes? What time do you have to devote to new teaching methods?

Answering questions like these can provide a strong foundation for making decisions about your grading system.

We also introduced some common features of alternative grading models, as delineated by Robert Talbert and David Clark, authors of the new book Grading for Growth. Talbert and Clark suggest that grading for growth is based on four pillars:

Clearly defined standards
Helpful feedback
Marks that indicate progress
Reattempts without penalty

You can read more about these pillars in Talbert and Clark’s book or on their Substack.

Finally, Josh and I introduced four different alternative grading approaches:

- Labor-based contract grading: A system in which student grades are based on the amount of labor they undertake in the course rather than evaluations of the quality of individual assignments, with expectations laid out at the beginning of the semester through a grade contract.
- Specifications/Mastery/Standards-based grading: Three closely related systems in which student grades are determined by demonstrations of competency on specific outcomes, through multiple attempts and continuous feedback across the semester.
- Ungrading (or collaborative grading): In which students engage in supported self-assessment and determine their final course grade collaboratively with the instructor, often by presenting evidence of their learning in an individual conference.
- Portfolio grading: In which students continuously revise and improve their work across the semester for inclusion in a final portfolio, the overall quality of which determines their final grade.

These approaches aren’t necessarily “plug and play”: instructors should feel free to take the elements of each practice that work for them and leave the rest. And if you’re not ready to jump feet first into a new grading system, there are plenty of things you can do to start minimizing grades in your courses: assign work that receives feedback but no grade, for example; build in opportunities for self-assessment; or allow revisions and re-takes when possible.

To help instructors learn more about these practices, we also put together an alternative grading bibliography with lots of great resources. You can also read about these practices in our workshop slides. If you’d like additional support in developing a new approach to grading in your course, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at cetl@olemiss.edu to schedule a consultation!

CETL in the News – September 2023 Roundup

· Oct 1, 2023 ·

In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog post, John Warner writes that teaching is a wicked problem, that is, a situation where the nature of the problem and the tools for solving it are constantly changing. (This is “wicked” in the sense of tricky, not evil!) Warner argues that tackling this wicked problem requires a different kind of educational research than what is typically valued in higher ed: qualitative research. “In short,” Warner writes, “we gotta go qualitative over quantitative in a big way. As a wicked problem, creating valid quantitative studies related to instruction often requires either ignoring or sanding away many of the complexities that inevitably exist in teaching.”

As an example of the kind of qualitative research he’s calling for, John Warner cites Unmaking the Grade, the newsletter written by Emily Donahoe, CETL associate director of instructional support. Emily has been using this platform to chronicle her experiments with ungrading in her courses. Warner appreciates the nuance Emily brings to her newsletter: “Read entry to entry, the experiment takes on a narrative form, which not only makes for more compelling reading but also provides a lens for Donahoe to reflect on what’s happening in her class. We see the layers of complexity at play in the teaching experiment.”

If you haven’t been reading Emily’s newsletter, you can read all of her posts at Unmaking the Grade.

Meanwhile, CETL visiting associate director Derek Bruff continues to make the rounds on podcasts talking about generative AI and its impact on teaching and learning this fall. His latest appearance is on the Limed: Teaching with a Twist podcast from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. Host Matt Wittstein interviewed Elon strategic communications professor Jessica Gisclair about her goals for teaching with and about AI this fall, then talked with a panel of students and faculty, including Derek, about possible approaches for meeting those goals. You can listen to the entire conversation here, or search for “Limed: Teaching with a Twist” in your favorite podcast app.

CETL’s Donahoe featured in the Chronicle’s Teaching newsletter

· Jul 26, 2023 ·

by Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support

In late June, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s newsletter on teaching featured Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at CETL, and her experiments with alternative assessment.

In her spring first-year writing course, taught in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, Emily kept a weekly journal to reflect on her ungrading experiments. She writes that she was inspired to do so by Robert Talbert’s December 2022 blog post challenging other faculty members exploring ungrading methods to do just this.

Talbert argued that so much of the work of retooling assessment practices happens in the dark, which prevents the larger faculty community from benefitting from the quotidian details that the work of teaching and assessing requires. “You have more than enough material for a weekly update. Keep it short, unpolished, relatively unfiltered, and real. That’s what the rest of the world is all waiting for,” Talbert wrote.

To this challenge, Emily said, “I’m in!”

Each week this spring, Emily wrote a journal entry about her course and how she and her students were experiencing her ungrading practices. Emily shared with her students that she would be blogging about the course. To allay any concerns they might have around real-time blog posts about their class meetings, though, she thought it was important to embargo her thoughts until the class ended.

That means the rest of us are watching a semester-long course unfold four months delayed on Emily’s Substack, Unmaking the Grade. By no means, though, does this diminish the gripping nature of Emily’s students’ experiences.

What’s perhaps most refreshing—and most unusual in academia—is Emily’s willingness to be transparent about her own odyssey of reactions and emotions throughout the process. For example, in week four the students co-created assessment rubrics for the two options she’d given them for their first writing assignment. The iterative class dialogue yielded two rubrics that Emily distilled from class discussions. Emily confesses: “I’m going to be totally, completely honest with y’all right out here on Al Gore’s internet: I hate these things.” She explains that it’s not the idea of a rubric that bothers her:

So, really, we’re back to the tension that gives rise to my ambivalence about rubrics: how can we create clear, specific, and measurable assessment criteria without hampering student creativity, independence, and learning? Still haven’t hit on an approach to this problem that satisfies me.

As I write this, Emily’s series is hitting its midterm stride. Her July 14 post reflects on her experiences so far while her students enjoy their spring breaks. Many of us who have experimented with alternative assessment will find her poignant reflection resonant:

The first is simply a realization about how ungrading is benefiting my students beyond their actual learning. I was thinking about the kinds of grading policies I used in previous writing courses and how my current students would have fared in those courses. It struck me that several of my students, who I know to be capable of doing good work, would have already flunked out of the courses I taught pre-pandemic—some because of absences or late work and some due to the fact that they didn’t fully understand the major assignment guidelines on their first attempt.

…

The notion that struggling students now have a better chance of passing my class is, in many ways, heartening. But it also really bums me out to think about all the students who have lost points, letter grades, or entire semesters of their lives to absences, late work, and a failure to understand assignment requirements. Students who are, in many cases, average or even strong writers! Who can do the work! But who missed an opportunity because of a failure to comply with one course policy or another.

Emily’s reflections are gaining traction in the ungrading community—thanks, in part, to the Chronicle’s newsletter. For instance, her blog got an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague at the College of DuPage on the Ungrading Hub, a Discord community of alternative assessment-curious faculty hosted by David Buck, professor of English at Howard Community College in Maryland.

Emily credits the strong and supportive teaching culture in the Writing & Rhetoric department for the work she did during the spring semester. Several instructors in the department have used different assessment methods beyond traditional grading systems. The department’s openness to innovation is what Emily says gave her the runway to experiment with, and publicly speak about, alternative grading practices in her own classroom.

For those interested in exploring alternative assessments or other innovations in their UM classes, we invite you to reach out to us to discover how CETL can support your work.