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Education

'I No Longer Grade My Students' Work -- And I Wish I Had Stopped Sooner' (theconversation.com) 346

Posted by BeauHD from the replacing-systemic-practices dept.
"I've been teaching college English for more than 30 years," writes Elisabeth Gruner, a professor of English at the University of Richmond. "Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students' learning. My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner."

The practice she's adopted is called "ungrading," where students are given formative rather than summative feedback. "At the end of the semester they submit a portfolio of revised work, along with an essay reflecting on and evaluating their learning," writes Gruner. "Like most people who ungrade, I reserve the right to change the grade that students assign themselves in that evaluation. But I rarely do, and when I do, I raise grades almost as often as I lower them." Here's here reasoning (via The Conversation): I stopped putting grades on written work for three related reasons -- all of which other professors have also cited as concerns. First, I wanted my students to focus on the feedback I provided on their writing. I had a sense, since backed up by research, that when I put a grade on a piece of writing, students focused solely on that. Removing the grade forced students to pay attention to my comments.

Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

Third, and I admit this is selfish: I hate grading. I love teaching, though, and giving students feedback is teaching. I am happy to do it. Freed from the tyranny of determining a grade, I wrote meaningful comments, suggested improvements, asked questions and entered into a dialogue with my students that felt more productive -- that felt, in short, more like an extension of the classroom.
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'I No Longer Grade My Students' Work -- And I Wish I Had Stopped Sooner' More

'I No Longer Grade My Students' Work -- And I Wish I Had Stopped Sooner'

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  • Do you want the Evergreen State College? Because this is how you get the Evergreen State College.

    • Yes, I agree with where you are coming from. However, even Benjamin Boyce said he was very happy with their English program... So the idea can be applied well if the intentions are focused towards optimising the real technical skills of the student and not other factors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaeun ( 1867894 )

      Do you want the Evergreen State College? Because this is how you get the Evergreen State College.

      Except you do not get grades at evergreen, you get an evaluation of the professor of everything you did right, but more frequently what you did wrong.

      In my experience (both at evergreen and elsewhere) grades are kinder. One person I know has "Got through by sheer dumb luck" on their transcript.

      https://www.evergreen.edu/ [evergreen.edu]

  • What a waste of time (Score:3)

    by NaCh0 ( 6124 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @06:58PM (#62400873) Homepage

    I'm not here to entertain some lazy college professor who doesn't feel like grading.

    I do my best work the first time. Constantly being told to revise something that isn't wrong is a fucking waste of time.

    In real life once you hit send on the email it is sent. School should prepare you in the same way.

    • Are you kidding?

      Very few things in real life cannot be revised. What are you even talking about?

      • > > In real life once you hit send on the email it is sent.

        > Are you kidding?
        > Very few things in real life cannot be revised. What are you even talking about?

        Okay, go ahead and revise that. Make it say something similar, with different wording. I'll wait.

        Today I've written probably a hundred things.
        Emails, Discord messages, Teams messages, mms texts.
        Of all the things I've written today, I can come back a few weeks later and change it before anyone reads it for zero percent of those. Nothing I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gimric ( 110667 )

          That's nice you. Doesn't apply to everyone though.
          The rest of us are able to improve our writing by revision, to make it clearer and more concise. You probably could too, if you cared to.

    • Because I think you'd have better critical thinking skills and you would understand that this kind of grading is the exact opposite of what you're describing.

      In a humanities course when you have hard and fast grades your job is a student is to figure out the right words to get the highest grade out of your teacher. You are literally there for the sole purpose of pleasing them. There's no point in you understanding anything or thinking about anything except how you can get your teacher to read your pape
    • Hey genius, if you feel your work stands up and you disagree with the feedback, which you'd get regardless of the grade on the writing, you can submit as-is and you name the grade yourself.
    • She reads and critiques the papers. That is much more valuable than a grade.
    • The professor did not say that they do not /read/ the work. If you read TFA, you would see the bits about her leaving feedback for the authors.

  • This lazy, selfish teacher is using the current woke blather to justify doing less work and avoiding the stress of telling students that they aren't making it. Equity in education? Give me a break. Everybody deserves the same opportunities, but they definitely do not deserve the same outcomes. Inclusive pedagogy? "Ungrading"? Some education PhD was scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with this stuff.

  • Students rarely realize the importance & value of education. For them it is something they are being forced to do. Testing should be used to evaluate teaching methodologies not students.

  • Objective grading out the window? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Weekend Triathlete ( 6446590 ) on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @07:11PM (#62400931)

    Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

    My expectation for a college class is that the grades the professor assigns students at the end of the class are an objective reflection of their mastery of the material in that class. If the students are well-prepared and don't need to learn much from the class, fantastic, they can easily get A or B grades on their papers. If the students aren't well-prepared and don't even have the foundation to learn the material, _they should not be in the class to begin with_. Ideally a professor works with their counselor to guide them to a foundational class, but I expect that in most larger universities it rarely works out that way.

    It almost sounds like this professor is starting to assign grades to students lacking foundational material based on how much they learn rather than objective criteria. That does a disservice to the student and the university that employs that professor - the student appears (on paper) to be able to perform in the workplace, but actually cannot, and the university's reputation is damaged when prospective employers interview that student and discover that they weren't educated to the expected level.

    We all get it. There children that have huge advantages and children that have huge disadvantages. Trying to fix it at the college level is like trying to fix a crumbling Egyptian pyramid when you have three bricks left to place. Fixing it properly requires a lot of time, money, and societal investment _at the birth date of the child_ in order to ensure everyone has the same opportunities. While I would personally prefer to see many more social programs supporting children (the Finnish model in particular seems to work well) I think there are too many narrowly-focused people with too much apathy toward forming a health society to actually _vote_ for something like that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      It almost sounds like this professor is starting to assign grades to students lacking foundational material based on how much they learn rather than objective criteria.

      Where are you getting that? As far as I can tell you just made that part up.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymice ( 1400397 )

        It almost sounds like this professor is starting to assign grades to students lacking foundational material based on how much they learn rather than objective criteria.

        Where are you getting that? As far as I can tell you just made that part up.

        The fact that she states that her new method of "grading" tries to address the "equity" of her lesser privileged students' educational deficit...

        I stopped putting grades on written work for three related reasons -- [...]
        The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

        Nothing can make up for years of inadequate education other than additional years of adequate education.

        And if she has a method of teaching inadequately educated students more quickly, then adequately educated students could also benefit, so it still doesn't solve the historical equity problem. And the unfortunate answer is that it's a problem that can't be solved

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by skam240 ( 789197 )

          The fact that she states that her new method of "grading" tries to address the "equity" of her lesser privileged students' educational deficit...

          Sure and she does this as the summary says, by allowing them to continue to revise their papers until the end of the semester thus giving them time to catch up.

          Nothing can make up for years of inadequate education other than additional years of adequate education.

          How long it takes for a student to catch up has to do with how far behind a student is and that will be different for every student but if they made it into college they cant be that far behind. Furthermore, if they are actually that far behind there's nothing here that indicates that the teacher passes them. As far as I've read that's something you'

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

        >>It almost sounds like this professor is starting to assign grades to students lacking foundational material based on how much they learn rather than objective criteria.

        >Where are you getting that? As far as I can tell you just made that part up.Maybe here:

        "Second, I was concerned with equity... Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent

    • She basically says they're good by the end of the class ... because they had a chance to learn and develop...
      As for my interest in equity, I found that students who were less well prepared did indeed develop their skills; their growth was substantial, and both they and I recognized it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thanjee ( 263266 )

        It doesn't follow that she then gave them an A. What she did was remove the stigma of low grades at every essay, so they could focus more on the material and the feedback, and learn from it. They may well have been more engaged and able to write better essays by the end, and earned the C they assigned themselves and she verified.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

        >She basically says they're good by the end of the class ... because they had a chance to learn and develop...

        No, no she doesn't. From her own statements:

        "The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed".

        So where are you getting your assertion again?

    • It almost sounds like this professor is starting to assign grades to students lacking foundational material based on how much they learn rather than objective criteria. That does a disservice to the student and the university that employs that professor - the student appears (on paper) to be able to perform in the workplace, but actually cannot, and the university's reputation is damaged when prospective employers interview that student and discover that they weren't educated to the expected level.

      I think you may have misread the article, he's assigning grades based upon a "Final revised portfolio" the fact he is making the students jump through a hoop of grading themselves and him approving it doesn't change this fact. The benefit to this style grading is that if a student lakes the "foundational material" they can incorporate it into their final portfolio rather than making mistakes in the early assignments and having affect their final grade. So what is happening is throughout the semester student

    • Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

      My expectation for a college class is that the grades the professor assigns students at the end of the class are an objective reflection of their mastery of the material in that class.

      My expectation is that the students learn and develop as much as possible, and if this approach succeeds in that I'd like to find a way to make it work.

      If the students are well-prepared and don't need to learn much from the class, fantastic, they can easily get A or B grades on their papers.

      That sounds like a terrible idea. You're just wasting a bunch of time for both the student and teacher.

      Wouldn't it be better to structure the class so both the under prepared and well prepared students learn as much as they can?

      I do think that's a real problem where a student comes in with the ability to write an 'A' paper and it becomes very difficult for t

  • Even at a liberal arts university she gets a pre-selection of relatively high aptitude, high discipline students.

    Non comprehensive education is easy mode, comprehensive is nightmare mode.

  • There are no right or wrong answers with the humanities. The point of the humanities is to teach critical thinking to people for whom critical thinking does not come naturally. This is why the super rich go to schools where you can get a "gentleman c". They are not there for grades they're there because their parents want them to learn enough critical thinking for sure so that they're not completely taken advantage of when they get out into the real world.

    If you're here on /. You want this too for every

    • Yeah...I think the horse has left the barn with regards to tens of millions of people not being able to think their way out of a paper bag. I mean, seriously, Trump got elected. I rest my case.

    • This isn't an approach designed to teach critical thinking. It's an approach calculated to give every student a trophy, regardless of how poor their work was. Applying it in college, probably the students' last step before entering the workforce, is the epitome of the "no child gets ahead" strategy. To prevent any student from getting any advantage against their peers, regardless of their relative levels of effort, you simply deny prospective employers any useful basis on which to evaluate them.
      • And address the points in it? This has nothing to do with giving people trophies. You're just bringing that out so you can hang off of my post. This is just punishing students who don't give out the correct answers that the teacher was looking for. How the hell is that supposed to teach anyone anything?

        And on the subject of everyone gets a trophy, the concept is a well understood and extremely valuable education tool that you and your ignorance do not understand because you are not a trained educator.

    • There are no right or wrong answers with the humanities.

      True, but there are objective writing standards, and correct spelling is purely objective. "The humanities" is an extremely broad category, but at the foundation of it all is the written word, and that can be graded and corrected and improved. The refusal to assign a letter grade is the loss of one piece of feedback in a discipline that benefits more than most from having as much feedback as possible.

      In truth, the lack of a letter grade isn't what matters most here. It's the ability to submit revisions,

      • The refusal to assign a letter grade is the loss of one piece of feedback in a discipline that benefits more than most from having as much feedback as possible.

        In truth, the lack of a letter grade isn't what matters most here. It's the ability to submit revisions, something that I remember being able to do in high school, and something which should figure much more prominently in writing instruction.

        Nailed it.

        My first college english class had a professor who was an extremely tough and pedantic grader, but who would allow us as many revisions to our papers as we wanted (limited by how fast she could turn the re-graded papers around of course). If you went the zero effort route, you could generally turn in a paper and go up a letter grade just by retyping it with the red marks (red! the horror!) fixed. And if you actually read the feedback, thought about it for 5 minutes, and then maybe asked some qu

        • Who is already a hard enough worker and focused enough that they can submit multiple revisions. If you have someone who's that focused and motivated then their revisions are probably going to be pretty good to begin with.

          I think the one of the big problems we have is that if someone isn't putting in 110% effort we want them to just go fuck off and die. It's that puritanical obsession with work where you're only value as a human being is how hard you're willing to work. They changed the name of the hust
      • You seem to have given up on the future of the country and everything associated with it. Why bother posting here at all in that case? Is it really that much fun to wallow in Hate and anger? Because that's the impression you give when you say stuff like it's too late to teach critical thinking because we let some kids get through the system without learning it.

        More importantly to address your first point if the teacher has a student who can't do basic spelling and grammar do you think failing that stude

    • Watch what the super wealthy do with their kids. They make damn sure their kids can think critically.

      How do you know so much about what super wealthy do with their kids?

  • Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

    So, she decided to just pass them all like every teacher in their lives before her did, regardless of whether they learned anything or really could write a proper paper or not. This, instead of pointing out the s

    • That's not how I took it. She dropped the letter grades, but a page full of red ink detailing what exactly you did wrong is still a page full of red ink. The next draft will be better.

      By the end of class the quality of the first drafts should be markedly better.

      • Basically yes. But if the improvement doesn't happen I guess so shouldn't the improved marks. Starting with the premise that some students come into university ready to write A papers and some don't ... so what? I mean sure it sucks there's bad schools out there, that some kids have to work to help support their families or english as a second language or many other possible reasons. But at the end of the day: can the kid write an A paper?

        Fine if she pushes off the evaluation to the final just I hope she is

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gimric ( 110667 )

          Editing an email doesn't take a week. Even a few minutes will help improve your writing.

          If you are drafting contract clauses I sure hope you review them carefully!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

            A lifetime of learning doesn't get replaced by a few minutes of editing. I doesn't matter how carefully you review if you haven't picked up the skills.

        • Basically yes. But if the improvement doesn't happen I guess so shouldn't the improved marks. Starting with the premise that some students come into university ready to write A papers and some don't ... so what? I mean sure it sucks there's bad schools out there, that some kids have to work to help support their families or english as a second language or many other possible reasons. But at the end of the day: can the kid write an A paper?

          Who cares if they can write an A paper?

          It's not math or science with a clear right or wrong answer. There's a sliding scale of quality starting with Trump and ending with Shakespeare.

          English 101, 201, .. 501 it's all just arbitrary bounds on that sliding scale. That 'A paper' from High School is a B or C in 101 and a meeting with the prof in 401.

          The problem with grading is if you're remotely objective the under-prepared student comes in and feels helpless due to everything they're missing, and the over-prep

    • I attended high school in the UK until 1975. At my school, we got a grade like this B2

      The B referred to the quality of the work, and the 2 to the level of effort put in. (A is best, 1 is most effort)

      (I always aspired to an A3, but only ever managed an A2 once, in physics, but I digress).

  • In sane fields like say electronics, programming, or even medicine when you test something and it fails, you figure out what when wrong, attempt to fix it, and test or examine the patient again.

    In academia, when you test someone and they fail, you...mark them as failed and move on.

    It's so bizarre. Once you see it, you can't unsee the insanity of it.

    • you figure out what when wrong, attempt to fix it, and test or examine the patient again.

      In some cases, you can't fix it. Or the patient dies. Either way, that thing failed irrevocably.

      In academia, when you test someone and they fail, you...mark them as failed and move on.

      The professor's goal - improvement - is laudable. And in an English composition class that is ill defined, that's fine.

      But if the class has specific goals, you test to those goals. And if the person (part, patient) fails those goals, they fail. If they pass the goals, they succeed. If you instead pass them based on 'improvement', you have voided the purposes of testing at all.

      The only way you could rescue t

  • Second, I was concerned with equity. For almost 10 years I have been studying inclusive pedagogy, which focuses on ensuring that all students have the resources they need to learn. My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed.

    Students who lack the educational background to write A and B papers shouldn't be in your class in the first place, and Elisabeth Gruner tacitly admits it right there. "The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years [prior]." Yeah, no kidding.

    American colleges and universities have been obsessed with taking it upon themselves to try to fix education when it's far too late by the time students are arriving at their door. The problem happened a decade before they ever got the undereduc

    • That won't ever happen, despite it being a good idea. Pool all money for education and redistribute it.

      Of course, if you did that, you would probably see even more people leave public schooling for private, further accelerating the demise of our failed public school system.

      We had a good thing going for a long time but when you increasingly turn school into indoctrination and equal outcomes, anyone that doesn't get out and find some real education is going to struggle in life. I guess that fits the narrative

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • My understanding, and I'm not an expert, is that the correlation between dollars spent per student and student outcome is extremely weak. Am I incorrect in that?

    • Purely local funding for local schools based on local property values is working as designed. It's past time to do a redesign.

      In California we fixed that like half a century ago.

      Note that it doesn't solve every problem, because not many people want to work in an inner city school if they have a choice.

  • In wokespeak, equity and equality mean very specific things. [google.com] Equality is equality of opportunity, equity is equal outcomes.

  • With this action, Dr. Bruner is pushing some of the flaws in our current system in the spotlight. Inequality. Students worried about grades over learning. Etc. Good for the professor. Apply what you have learned as an educator...

    But she's undermining society-wide standards (and the tools that measure them) with her grading change.

    What matters more? Making a student more educated, or measuring the student's abilities against a standard (and other students)? The professor thinks it's the former, but most of s

  • Enjoy your ideocracy.

  • > "My studies confirmed my sense that sometimes what I was really grading was a student's background. Students with educational privilege came into my classroom already prepared to write A or B papers, while others often had not had the instruction that would enable them to do so. The 14 weeks they spent in my class could not make up for the years of educational privilege their peers had enjoyed."

    I think we need to hold everyone to the same standard. It is unfortunate that not everyone has the same privi

  • I used to teach just one class in the winter semester related to my day job, and I too hated grading. The students complained about their workloads as well, so we reached a compromise: There would still be two written papers and a final project, and the rest of the final grade was earned by participating in class. I would ask questions randomly, enough for everyone to answer some, and I would also have workshops with tasks designed specifically to be finished in class. This had good effects, although freein

    • I had a teacher who had questions on a test that started with, "What do you think..." He reviewed the test beforehand and gave his opinion on those questions.

      The first time I got the test, I said what I thought, and got marked wrong. I hated that class.

  • I think I'll start "ungrading" my engineering classes. Everyone gets an "A" just for improving (by their own evaluation). Who cares if the answer they get is right, or even remotely close to right? As long as they feel good about themselves. Objectively correct solutions are overrated.

    As to the people who may be killed or injured using the products designed by my "ungraded" students ... not my responsibility.

    Ah, Brave New World!

  • Education these days is a strange world. Two paradoxes of education: A) As this story indicates, students are often no more evaluated because the teachers refuse to do so. But teachers are evaluated detailed with grades which are sometimes even publicly displayed. "look this professor has a 3.6 on ``rate your professor". b) Homework and classes have to be fun and game and entertaining and non-competitive. ``Free time" like sports or music or dance on the other hand have become highly competitive with pr
  • But a participation trophy just doesn't cut it for engineers, rocket science, and doctors.

  • Seriously, I teach CS and I am considering ungrading my assignments. I'll still have exams which will be graded.

    But really, the assignments are there to help the student learn the content. Having a grade get the students to focus on the grade and submit work for the purpose of the grade. I'd rather they submit assignments to get feedback and pay attention to the feedback.

  • Does she really let people grade themselves?

    I would not want to grade myself. My 20 something year old self would have spent way too much time agonizing over that. My older self would automatically and always submit grades of 'A' for everything. The teacher can change it if she wants. It is kind of like being asked in an annual review, what are some of your weaknesses or things you are not good at? Well, I think I am perfect. If you disagree it is on YOU to say so.

    Also, I dislike the implications of "
  • They gave the applicant the required FBI background check application. And come to find out the applicant had no ability to write at all. May sound all well and good for equity and all. But humans often perform to the lowest standard required, not higher. lower standards = lower quality result

  • Here's a happiness lab podcast on the subject of how grades were introduced by Ezra Styles in 1785, and the science of how people both learn better and are happier in an environment without grades: https://www.happinesslab.fm/se... [happinesslab.fm] (the episode page has links to related publications).

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